By the Sea

TreasureArtTrends Yahoo group has a monthly swap for 4" x 4" chunky book pages. Each month has a theme. The theme for September is 'By the Sea'. Pages are due to the group owner by the end of the month.

When the theme was announced, I immediately thought of some old family photos I had scanned in on my hard drive. There were some of my parents on the beach on Lake Erie in Erie, Pennsylvania that were taken in 1938 before they were married (in 1939).

The guy on the left is my dad and the woman in front of him is my mom. His best friend, Pugie, is next to him. My mother can't recall who the middle couple are. The man who is next worked for my father's father. The couple on the right, Bud and Rose, eventually married and continued to be friends with my parents.

The photo on the back was taken the same day, I think, and shows a playfulness that I rarely saw in my parents who were always busy around the house, raising four children. We always went to Lake Erie on our summer vacations, though, and it always seemed like they were happiest and most carefree on the beach there. By the time we were old enough to help carry the stuff from the car to the beach, we all had our favorite beaches on Presque Isle in Presque Isle State Park.

The pages were laid out in CorelDraw X3 for printing on 12" x 12" scrapbook paper after I decided how to use the photo on the front. I've been admiring how scrapbook artists use layers of colored papers to frame their photos, so I chose some that I thought exemplified a sense of the beach and summer vacation for this photo from an 8" square pad of 7 Gypsies papers from their Hudson Valley collection. I loved the look of the striped paper but how to stick it on there? Photo corners? Have you looked for these lately? Maybe I need to go to another store because all they had at Michael's were tacky, shiny, cheap-looking things that aren't touching any of my artwork! Even in the Martha Stewart section, all they had was satin. Satin! Puh-lease, Martha! Satin??? So I decided to stack them up with more papers and to use brads to hold the photos in place.

I imported the photo of just my folks that I'd already cut out and masked it in CorelPhotoPaint X3 so that I could place the text properly for printing. Then when it was time to print, I just deleted the photo. So this one was a combination of digital and manual work.

Usually, when I print pages to be folded, I put the fold on the outside edge. But I wanted to put the twill tape of the trim between the pages because the beads were sewn on loosely and I didn't want the thread to show. I decided to use a layer of Forever tape on each side to hold the heavy beaded trim securely. It worked great, I think and while they aren't as arty as they could be, I like them. I hope the others do too.

As a side note, Bud and Rose had four children who died when I (and they) were little. One night when the family was asleep, there was a car accident right outside their house. Bud and Rose ran outside to see what they could do. The car had hit a gas line outside the house and cracked it, causing a gas leak. I don't know the absolute details, but somehow the car's engine set the leaking gas on fire. Their house exploded and their children were killed. I remember how sad everyone was and how horrible it seemed. But I don't remember their children. When I see their names now on photos, I always think of their children and how sad it all was. They eventually had another child, but I don't think we ever met.

Memory is strange, isn't it?