It has made me think about how important memories are and what an important role capturing and recording our memories is. While I do not solely create to preserve our memories and stories for future generations, I think it is important that such stories are preserved for future prosperity. Oh how I would have loved my grandmother and mother to have experienced PL and captured their lives in such a form for me to enjoy and experience!! To see life through their eyes and experience the things they experienced in different times to mine would be simply awesome. We recently had a family friend pass away at the age of 101, and while sitting in her memorial service, I just longed to hear and witness her adventures over those 101 years and to hear about all the amazing things she had seen and witnessed during a century of huge change. I started to imagine what things would have filled her PL albums had she had the opportunity to create them. Life is constantly changing and our scrapbooks, journals, diaries and PL albums capture our lives, memories and stories so as to pass this knowledge (and sometimes wisdom) onto our children and hopefully their children. And I think it is important that our albums include all the stories - the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly - only then do we tell our whole story. I know I would choose the good along with the bad, and the beautiful alongside the ugly, as how else would we appreciate both. To live a comfortable life without love, colour, and music is simply not worth it.....
Anyway, I will stop my philosophical ramblings and ponderings now and get down to why you are here... well hopefully you are here by choice and not accident and are here to see Week 23 of my Project Life journey... It was a nice week, a week of stopping and smelling the roses, taking time out from the busyness of life to rest and catch up. Sadly it was also the week a colleague lost her husband - again a time of reflection. It was also a week of family fun at the Vivid Sydney - a very amazing and colourful experience. It was this sense of colour that found me looking to the 'Hello' monthly digital collections by Miss Mint of Peppermint Creative. Her sense of colour is just divine and each monthly collection is designed to work with previous collections beautifully. And due to the darkness of the Vivid photos that dominate the second page of the week, the colour in such collections was perfect for lightening up the layout and providing a sense of cohesion and balance.
As mentioned above, the beginning of the week saw me enjoy a week off from teaching and working. The beginning half of the term had been tough and very draining - both physically and emotionally - at times, so it was nice to spend some time at home catching up on my PL, going for a walk, and just enjoying time to myself. The left hand side of the layout definitely reflects this....
The other half of the layout is totally dominated by the awesomeness that is Vivid Sydney 2014!! I have wanted to check out the Vivid in previous years but always seemed to find out about it after the fact. This year - thanks to Facebook - I was ready and fully organised ahead of time!! It was on the calendar and we were going no matter what... Well I was!! And thanks to the wonder of the iPhone 5, I was able to get some awesome photos, and those that I was not able to capture were included thanks to all the wonderful images shared on Facebook......
Until then.....