Scraps Of Mind

Mini Album for Bec’s 18th

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My niece Bec celebrated her eighteenth birthday on the weekend and I made this mini-album for her to commemorate the last eighteen years. I am really pleased with how it turned out so I thought I’d share it with you.

Bec has more handbags (purses) than anyone I know, so I felt it would be fitting to do the mini album in the shape of a handbag. I was going to design my own template but then Wendy from Doodelicious offered a really cute template for a purse shaped card on her blog, so I modified that and turned it into a mini-album.

I made the album on Bazzil textured cardstock and used papers from Thao Cosgrove’s Bella Collection from Scrap Girls and Mesoke’s Vanille Fraise on the front. The beads on the left are a flamboyant key ring to match her bubbly personality.

Click on the thumbnails to open the graphic files if you want to get a better look at the pages

I designed the pages digitally so there would be no elements to catch on each other. And all the papers and elements are from Thao Cosgrove’s Art Journal Collection plus some sparkles from Rina’s Sparkles kit on the last page.The handle is from an old charm bracelet I butchered and the eyelets hold the top flap in place so that stops the bag from falling open.

Bec loved it. Hope you enjoy it too.

Want to get into digital scrapbooking so you too can make cool projects like this?

Then click over to Step by Step Digital Scrapbook where you’ll find everything you need to know to get yourself started.

Have you backed up your blog?

It occurred to me that I have invested many many hours into this blog over the last fourteen months. And it contains a lot of material that I don’t hold anywhere else. I suspect many of you are in the same boat. I don’t have copies of the posts I’ve written and many of the photos, such as those for my collections, I haven’t kept anywhere else.

Now one of the reasons that I moved my blog to Wordpress is that it has a very reliable reputation. But what if the server did fry it’s brains? What if Wordpress couldn’t recover my precious words and pictures and links? They’d be able to recover my blog, but I don’t believe they back-up all the individual data. So how would I feel if I lost it all.

In a word: DEVASTATED!

How about you? Can you live with the possibility of losing all the history you have built into your blog?

Fortunately on Wordpress backing up your data is supremely simple and quick and I urge all you Wordpress bloggers to do it immediately you have finished reading this.

Just go into your Dashboard and select Manage from the menu bar across the top. Then click on Export in the sub-menu bar. You will get a screen containing a button labelled Download Export File. Click and it will create a XML file containing all your blog data which you save to your computer. In the event of technical disaster, just repeat the above steps, selecting Import instead of Export and your backed-up data will be restored to blogland. And this just takes 2 seconds. No hanging around whilst files transfer. Instant.

I don’t know how (or if) this works on other blog engines. I tried to find out how to do it on Blogger and I couldn’t find any directions for backing up. If any of you Blogger people know how they facilitate back-ups please leave a comment for other Blogger folk in case they don’t know.

But for all you Wordpress people…Do it!

Do it now!!!

It’s all about me

Sorry folks, this is another ‘more information than you really wanted to know about Karen’ post.

Heather from over at Just my Life has tagged me. So here we go:

Four Jobs I Have Had:
1. IT Manager
2. Quality Manager
3. Credit Controller
4. Bookkeeper (trivia: this is the only word in the English language that features 3 double letters consecutively)

Four Movies I Have Watched Over And Over:
1. The Princess Bride
2. Pride & Predjudice
3. The Last Starfighter
4. Pirates of the Carribean

Four Places I Have Lived:
1. England (mostly in Lincolnshire)
2. Cyprus (Limassol and Famagusta)
3. Ireland (Kildare)
4. Australia (Melbourne)

Four TV Shows I Like(d) To Watch:
- I don’t watch a lot of TV these days, but I have had my favourites
1. Spicks & Specks (groovy and fun music quiz with the emphasis on laughs not winning)
2. Dr Who ( loved the old ones but find them hard to watch now. Love the new series)
3. Midsomer Murders (I want to find out where this place is)
4. Jonathon Creek (gotta love a mystery show about a guy who lives in a windmill and builds illusions for a magician for a living)

Four Places I Have Been on Vacation:
1. UK and Ireland (all over the place)
2. France (Loire, Dordogne, Provence…Paris too, but something bad usually happens to me there)
3. Italy (Rome and Northern Italy. Venice is one of my favourite places on Earth)
4. Malta (It’s where I was born and although, after the first three months, I never acually lived there it was good to have a couple of trips there to check things out)

Four Of My Favorite Foods:
1. Potatoes (especially mashed, roasted or baked). Maybe they call to the Irish in me.
2. Chocolate - one of the staples for living
3. Home made trifle - loved the ones my Mum used to make
4. Mushrooms

Four Places I Would Rather Be Right Now (am writing this at work so the overall answer is really ‘pretty much anywhere’):
1. At home in my craft room or garden, maybe with a box of chocolates and a glass of port.
2. In Europe (especially Venice)
3. In Sydney visiting Seona and Phil
4. Visiting friends and family in Ireland

Four People I Will Tag:
Wendy from Doodelicious
Sylvie from Coonie and Plume
Denise from Scrapbooking with Wit
Elizabeth from QE2’s Space

Words to Live By

The best part of beauty

is that

which no picture can express.
Francis Bacon

The Beauty of Belleek Porcelain

Time for another visit to my collections and this time a look at Belleek porcelain.

In 1858 Belleek was a small village owned by the Bloomfield family of Castle Caldwell in County Fermanagh, Ireland. John Caldwell Bloomfield had recently inherited the estate from his father and he was anxious about providing work for his tennants to protect them against disasters such as the Great Potato Famine that had devastated Ireland a few years previously; causing a million people to starve to death and forcing another million to flee the country seeking work in America, Canada and Australia.

Bloomfield noticed the unusual lustre of the limestone finish that his tennants applied to the walls of their cottages and, having an interest in ceramics and minerology, he decided to try to establish a pottery industry utilising the local clay and mineral feldspar which were present on his property. The two key things he was lacking were capital and know-how.

So he pitched his idea to Dublin businessman David McBirney and London architect Robert Williams Armstrong. McBirney financed the project and Armstrong used his interest in ceramics and his architectural skills to design and build the pottery, also becoming the pottery’s first manager.

So Belleek Pottery was born; providing security for local tennants who no longer had to rely soley on agriculture to sustain their community. The original output was earthenware, utilitarian pieces. But McBirney and Armstrong were keen to get into porcelain and began experimenting in this field, finally achieving some success in 1863. They brought skilled artisans such as Willam Bromley and William Gallimore over from Stoke-on-Trent to head up the Parian and modelling departments and to teach the local people the skills needed to make finer products.

Belleek’s original porcelain manufacture was fine Parian baskets with delicate woven bases and flowing floral decorations, and by the beginning of the 20th century this side of the pottery had pretty much taken over from the original utilitarian works. This Parian ware is a fine white porcelain having the appearance of marble. It is delicate and translucent with the light readily shining through the sides of the pieces. The glaze used by Belleek is one of the most beautiful you will ever come across. In 1857 Belleek secured the patent for a nacreous glaze that is extremely smooth surfaced, is unaffected by hairline cracking and is dust resistant (and yes, it really is). It is a beautiful creamy glaze and older Belleek pieces are typicaly a buttery yellow colour inside.

Belleek have made it easy to date their porcelain by changing the backstamp with which they mark their wares about 9 times since 1863. Each change has been documented so it’s easy to tell which period a piece comes from by the differences in the back stamp.

The cup, saucer and plate trio on the left are my favourite and oldest pieces. They carry the second black mark which dates them between 1891 and 1926. I just love the beautiful lustre of these pieces and their translucent quality. The green shamrock trio bears the fourth mark (1st green mark) and is from 1946-1955. and the little jug in the front carries the sixth mark and is from 1965-1980. Although the later pieces are beautiful delicate items by most other pottery’s standards, you can tell the difference in the fineness and translucency of the porcelain in the older pieces compared to the later ones.

Other related posts:
H&K Tunstall - The Delicious Dozen
On the Scent - Vintage Perfume Bottles
Confessions of a Collectaholic