~o:> what I really do with my time

This is the last one I finished.  Yep – got years to go.   I like the black cover.  I use a font I made out of G’s captured printing (Fontographer).  It’s a full sized, portrait oriented hard back book with linen over board covers.  Almost 400 pages.  Wonderful.

Inside the book.  The pages are just as they are in the old album – descriptions written in my own hand.  I have brought the old photos back to life – brought out the color, corrected flaws that bothered me when I’d gotten the prints back from the photo place in the beginning.  I even got to design blurbs for the book cover as you can kind of see off on the left.

This Book is the first one I did – a landscape orientation made up of the digital shots I’d taken during 2007.  These spreads showcase our yard.  Do you love the dirty trowel page holder?  I’m proud of the composition here, but you can’t really see it.  I love drop shadows SO MUCH.  When you start with digital, you can do way more than just scanning what’s already there.

When Max first started to read, Gin couldn’t find books that were quite right.  So I wrote him a beginning reader.  I’d always wanted to do something like this.  I decided on basic sound combinations, chose a set of words to start with, then built on them, using pictures of the family as illustrations.  It was really fun.

A page kind of far along in the book.  I used colored borders on each page incorporating the color word in a  slightly lighter colored tone as a design element .  And, of course, a trowel to hold it open.  Notice the puppy tooth marks on the orange end there?  Just a little more family history.

As my mom began to fade mentally, Dad started cleaning out the closets and cabinets and drawers, and in the process found all kinds of memorabilia and photographs and really old scrap books – stuff that had been in boxes for half a century.  Stuff I – the family genealogist – had never seen before.  So he gave it all to me, and suddenly, I had enough stuff to make a wonderful book about his life.  And him right there with me to re-tell the stories and correct the facts.

I’m kind of proud of the cover.  I used a leatherette photo portrait cover from one of the old photos for that frame.  The cover was small — so I duplicated the scanned image, turned it and stuck the two facing images together to frame this shot of Dad.

There was a wonderful scrap book my grandmother had made for her two kids.  I don’t know how my dad ended up with it – my aunt probably should have had it, being the girl and all.  But here it was, in my lap – pictures of a grandfather I never knew – and newspaper articles, and letters – wonderful stuff that my children and cousins will now have at their fingertips.

I loved this – my dad’s baby/childhood book.

And tons of genealogical pictures – including a civil war era photo album I’d never known what to do with.  In the course of doing the book, I sat down with this thing and worked through the pictures, tying together family groups by matching up photographer’s photo sets.  It was an amazing experience.

The fonts I used in the book were mostly my dad’s writing and my own.  I scanned the actual ancestral handwriting wherever I could find it and used it to label the pictures – you know, like if there was any writing on the back of the shots, I’d lift if, isolate it and then photoshop it onto the page, as if it had been written there yesterday.

I think maybe this book-making, along with the blogging I’m doing, is sort of taking the place of story writing.  Should I worry about that, I wonder?  But I have to do what I seem to have to do.  And I’m enjoying the process.  Funny – with quilting and other things, I don’t enjoy the process as much as just having the finished product.  But I get pleasure out of the actual work—the image manipulation, the color correction.  I think I may have made a great discovery about myself – finally.

Not that I’m that great at it.  But there you go.  I love having these books. Love it, love it, love it. I even get to scan little pieces from my quilts – tiny stars and raccoons and dogs and other applique and pieced designs, and drop them onto the pages.

If you ever decide to do a book, post me, and I’ll walk you through it.

Just for fun, before I sign off, I’ll tell you what other books I’ve done: one of Max’s visits to our house, one of Murphy’s high school years – like a personal year book, stuffed with his tours and dances and buddies,  one for Max and Gin of our trips to Disney World. I’m going to do one of all my quilts and projects.  And I’m going to scan all the old scraps of Christmas wrapping and put together a Christmas-through-the-years collection.  One book of horses.  One of dogs. The books can be any size – twenty four pages, one hundred pages, four hundred.

Too much fun.  I just have to get this project finished before I am, myself, finished.

Think I’ll make it?