Forgetting To Remember

My mother passed away last Christmas and since then I´ve thought of her practically every day and felt sad. I say “practically” because just recently there have been happy days when I´ve been so busy or so preoccupied that I´ve forgotten to remember her and then afterwards felt grief-stricken and guilty. Of course I know in my heart that I´ll never forget her. I´m sure that this occasional “forgetting to remember” is just a normal part of the grieving process. 

Then just yesterday I remembered this poem by Christina Rossetti which has comforted me because I know for sure that the last two lines express exactly what my mother would have wished for me. Here it is in its entirety. 

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann'd:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad. 

So I´ve been keeping these 2 lines in mind and trying to leave the sadness behind by starting to create a new scrapbook kit in her memory and the first photo I´ve been building it around is the one I restored recently and showed in my last blog post...with one tiny difference which may be obvious only to me.

This project may take some time. It always takes me ages before I´m happy with any part of a kit, or with anything for that matter, though I´m trying hard not to be so ridiculously self-critical. I wish I had someone who´d slap my wrist occasionally and tell me to "leave well alone”. That was always one of my mother´s – many - favourite sayings when I was growing up which I´ll try to take to heart in future. Sometimes less is more and very often things are fine just the way they are.

(Maybe I should have heeded that before I messed with the photo....)

Missing Photos, Finding Relatives

There are two photos of my father which I treasure simply because they are the only ones I have of him as a young man. In the first one he´s 16 and in the second one, which isn´t dated, I think he´s probably about 18. I know that both were taken in Ireland where he sometimes spent the summer with relatives who had a farm there. Judging by the Border Collie in that photo I can only assume that they were sheep farmers though I can´t be sure about that. There are a lot of things about my father that are a mystery to me. In the first photo he´s carrying a camera and yet none of the photos he took have survived. Also, there isn´t a single photo of him as a baby. However, the greatest mystery has always been his mother, Helen Campbell, for whom I was named. My father himself knew only that she died very young and that on her deathbed she pleaded with her mother-in-law to look after her child and made her promise not give him up to her own mother. I find this horrifying as it would appear that my paternal great grandmother, must have been unpleasant to say the very least if her own daughter couldn´t entrust her child to her. Until very recently these were the only facts I knew about Helen Campbell until Linda, a cousin of our mutual cousin, Neville, did some research into my father´s antecedents. I now know that poor Helen was only 23 when she died and my father only 4 which explains why he had no recollection of her. Linda has traced Helen´s family tree back to my great great grandparents who came from Reay in Caithness. I wish my late father had known this because sometime during the 1960s he went north to work at the nuclear power station in Dounreay near the town of Thurso and only returned when he found it impossible to find a suitable house there for the family.

As the name Dounreay suggests, it´s very close to where his maternal great grandparents, Robert Campbell and Betsey Isabella MacDonald came from. Of course, considering how small a country Scotland is, this is no great coincidence but if he had known this he may have been able to find relatives still living there. However, one thing I find particularly interesting about Robert and Betsey is that they, perhaps unwittingly, joined two warring clans together. Throughout Scotland´s turbulent history the Highlanders didn´t just wage war on the English but also on each other and the clans MacDonald and Campbell have a particularly bloody history. I won´t go into that in detail but I have to say that I find it comforting that now that I can lay claim to both clans in my family tree I no longer have to defend my middle name to any of my countrymen named MacDonald! Yes, clan memories die hard in Scotland and the massacre of MacDonalds at Glencoe in 1692 has - unfairly - gone down in history as proof of the bloodthirsty nature of the clan Campbell. I say "unfairly" because, according to what I´ve read about this ancient family feud, the MacDonalds weren´t averse to slaughtering the Campbells either!

With all this recent knowledge I created this page in memory of my dear dad who passed away in 1995.

The tartan on the left is the clan Campbell, on the right the clan MacDonald and in the middle the clan Armstrong to which our family belongs. Thank you, Linda, for making this possible.

Getting Started Again

It´s been a while since I designed a new kit, so long in fact that I was beginning to think that Nostalgic Scrapbook was my swansong. Being in constant pain isn´t exactly conducive to creativity and the sudden death of a family member lowered my spirits even further. However, just recently I´ve been having osteopathic treatment, mostly for the persistent headaches I´ve suffered for over a year and I´m feeling a lot more optimistic. The headaches haven´t gone completely but at least they´re not as frequent as they were and I´m not constantly reaching for painkillers.

Getting started on a new project wasn´t really a conscious decision. As you may have noticed, I´ve restored several old photos over the past year. I thought it was about time that I gave them a suitable setting and that´s really what started me off again.

You may remember this photo of my grandmother and my aunt. It´s a particular favourite of mine and I thought it deserved a layout all its own so instead of using an existing kit I started to design something around it.

 

In a way it´s strange that I´ve gone back to shades of brown again. You probably know I really don´t like brown, mostly because it´s a colour I absolutely can´t wear, but I do like teal a lot and I can´t think of any other colour which brings out the beauty of my favourite colour better than brown. What do you think?

Defaced

It´s been ages since I tried my hand at photo restoration. In fact the last time was about 18 months ago when I tackled a very badly damaged photo of my mother as a baby. That was one of the most frustrating tasks ever and took me a long time and a lot of trial and error. It´s one thing to remove creases from clothes but quite another to remove them from faces, especially from faces which won´t have their own natural creases for about half a century!

If you´ve never restored a photo there are three pieces of advice I can offer you before you tackle a very badly damaged one. First of all, don´t be too ambitious. Try something easy like a landscape or if it simply must be a person then choose a photo in which the face has been spared the ravages of time. Faces are quite incredibly difficult to restore. Secondly, keep practising until you´ve learned what the various tools can do and you feel comfortable using them. Thirdly, when you feel confident enough to try your hand at a precious old family photo choose one you particularly love. This will give you the impetus and the determination to succeed.

Having said that, the following photo of my grandmother and my aunt is a good example of what not to choose if you´re a complete beginner.

For a start it´s almost monochrome when it really ought to be sepia but that´s fairly easy to alter. Ditto the splotches in the background. It´s the white crease across the eye which makes it so difficult. At least the eyes in the photo of my mother had been spared even if the rest of the face was like a plastic surgeon´s nightmare.

First of all I did the easy bits. I completely removed the border and increased the contrast.

After that I removed most of the blotches from the background, also from the baby´s christening robe and started on the face and hair using a combination of the patch and clone tools. I also used these tools to repair the white strips which were caused by the removal of the uneven border.

Then I lightened the shadows around the hands and the collar of the blouse.

I still wasn´t happy about the work I´d done on the eye so I slightly darkened the inside corner. Then I touched up a few more tiny faults, after which I had to stop before I went too far and destroyed the natural look of the photo. I think knowing when to stop is really important. I tend to get obsessed over little flaws so I have to restrain myself from doing too much. At this point I went off and brewed some strong coffee so that I could look at my final result later with fresh eyes.

Well, not quite my final result. I still had to change it to sepia. For absolute beginners I intend to write a little tutorial sometime on how to do this. It really isn´t difficult though. Basically, if you´ve saved your photo as a jpg. you´ll have to change your background to a layer so that you can add a colour overlay. 

I felt at this point that it was as good as I could get it but, as I´ve said before, I can never leave well alone and I thought it needed just a little more contrast. When I use it in a layout I can decide which version I prefer.

And all it needed now was a border. (I´ve already written an easy tutorial on how to do that but then, all my tutorials are easy. I don´t pretend to be an expert.) I thought that a stark white border wouldn´t be appropriate so I sampled a beige tone from the photo itself for the border.

One down, at least one more to go but I´m saving the worst for last!