From Time To Time

My most recent kit is called From Time To Time because, although it´s an art nouveau influenced kit and therefore suitable for vintage layouts, it also reflects the passing of time by including modern frames and elements along with the more traditional swirls and flourishes. Also, as the name suggests, there are many timepieces in a variety of styles including some unusual steampunk clocks. The colour scheme is mainly various shades of brown and sepia with copper and teal accents which makes it ideally suited for use in combination with Vintage Whimsy and/or Nostalgic Scrapbook which you will also find in the store. As is the case with all my kits, there are no recoloured duplicates included.

If you´d like to have the freebie QP which I created using From Time To Time, you´ll find it HERE.

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?

Knowing When To Start

I´ve often said that an important part of photo restoration is knowing when to stop because if you overwork a photo you can lose as much as you gain. By that I mean you can smooth it out, clean it up and eradicate all its major faults and in the process simply ensure that it takes on a completely artificial character.

With the following photo knowing when to stop was not a major concern. Well, not for many years because it was one of these projects I kept attempting and almost immediately gave up in frustration. I just knew that it wasn´t the right time to start.

 

See what I mean? For many years I just didn´t have the necessary expertise to tackle something so horrendous. For a start that deep diagonal crease was totally intimidating and the longer I looked at it the less confidence I had that I´d ever be able to remove it. I finally put the photo away and forgot about it. In the meantime I had enough old damaged photos to keep me occupied. Just recently I was looking through all my previous restoration work and realised that many of my old family photos had been just as badly treated and yet I´d somehow managed to restore them, if not to perfection at least to a reasonable condition so I dug it out again and had another look at it. First of all I desaturated it. I suppose that wasn´t really necessary but I find it far easier to repair faults in a black and white image. 

 

After that I straightened the edges and then used a combination of the clone tool and the healing brush tool to remove the crease. I know that this sounds easy but, believe me, it wasn´t! It took a lot of trial and error before I was happy with the result.

The next step was to conceal the black edges but that was easily done using the clone tool which I also used on the missing part of the shoe. Next I restored the photo to its original sepia. Well, not quite its original which looked rather too yellow to me. (See Tutorials) I also altered the shadows and the highlights. 

After that I cleaned up that messy looking sock using the clone tool. The photo still looked rather flat so I also deepened the contrast.

In my final version I decided to use a darker brown overlay. I then increased the contrast using Curves which brought out the detail. This also had the effect of increasing the visibility of the scratches. 

 

Did I just say that was my final version? Well, it may be but I couldn´t resist trying out an even darker overlay to give it more depth.

 

As you can see from the above, it took a lot of trial and error to restore this old photo. I´m still not entirely happy with it but at least it looks a lot better than the original. I suppose I could remove those scratches but, as I said before, you have to know not only when it´s time to start but also when to stop!

Heart Of Gold

I have the small diary which my mother bought shortly before she passed away. The only entries in it are the 24^th of December, my sister Carole´s birthday, and the 13^th of January, my own. As these are two dates which no mother could possibly forget or need to be reminded of, I think this says a lot about her and what was important to her. Since she was, and always will be, important to me too I feel it fitting that on my birthday I should pay tribute to her with this page in her memory. It´s also appropriate and no coincidence that I should have used one of my favourite kits, Heart Of Gold. 

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

For years Dora´s little dachshund friend, Tessa, has been trying to learn Dora´s 3-ball trick but so far the best she can do is to pick up 2 and practically choke herself by holding one behind the other. At least in her Christmas costume she´s outdone her best friend.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Strange Pet Presents

This version of The Twelve Days Of Christmas “sung” by various pets made me laugh. I doubt very much that any of these things would be high up on most pets´ Christmas wish list – the guinea pig certainly doesn´t look too sure about his gift - but I think you´ll agree that they all deserve a visit from Santa next week...if he can squeeze down the chimney with all that stuff in his sack!

Pets´ Christmas Wish List

I think that, if Dora could write, high on her wish list would be a sandpit to dig her ball in and out of, a pair of thumbs so that she could catch more than one ball at a time and a mouth big enough to hold four balls instead of "just" three. Unlike the pets in this video I don´t think she´d include either a can opener or a pogo stick.

Pets´ Christmas Auditions....woof, meow!

This video which I found at YouTube is so cute and funny I simply had to download it and share it with you.

If you enjoyed this - and you´d have to be Scrooge if you didn´t - come back again soon to see the finalists.

Christmas Stars Freebie

Here´s a little early Christmas present.

If you´d like these festive jewelled accents, you´ll find them HERE all zipped up and ready to go.