Standby for some honesty..

shocking bad photography, possibly proving the sentiment..

The walls of my workroom are lovingly, haphazardly and beautifully decorated with the odd postcard that's caught my eye, handmade cards that I've been sent and some fabulous artworks from WOYWWers that mark anniversaries and generally make me feel hugely important and good about myself.  And because I really like them.  As you can discover very easily by scrolling back a little, most recently I've been admiring my received handmade Christmas cards.

                 You may not want to read on if you're a bit squeamish.  

Once the cards have been displayed and thoroughly enjoyed by many, I keep them in a pile in my workroom and leaf through them, often. To make me smile, to look for inspiration, to admire a particular image, to examine and try to identify a technique.  They are a source of great pleasure to me for some time after their display date.  And then, when they aren't...I recycle them.  

                 Now, if your paper bag is allowing you to breathe more evenly......
As a genuine and prime example of my birth sign, (Cancer) I have enough guilt to fill the seven seas.  This means too that I have enough sentiment to fill the heavens.  But apart from that, I'm a normal English housewife who lives in a three bed semi somewhere relatively rural. We  do not have room.  And I have learned this the long and the hard way.  After the battle of putting stuff in boxes and 'saving' the boxes into the attic, we then find we need to convert the attic to living space.  The boxes have to go and I simply cannot find a logical case for keeping lots of them.  For I have not opened them, some for years, since they were consigned to be 'saved'.  Ridiculous. I do not have the ability to sort the 'best' from the others and just keep the ones that 'mean something to me'; they all mean something to me.  So I give myself (and poor Mr Dunnit) a break and just enjoy them for as long as they are enjoyable.  

This is the spirit with which I make cards.  I once had a stamp by Judikins that was to be stamped on the card back and read something along the lines of  'this is a handmade card and you better appreciate all the work that I did to make it and keep it forever'.  It was far wittier than that.  But I didn't use it often, because it's like passing on the guilt!  See, when I make a card for someone, all I put into it is equalled by the pleasure I get from doing it.  Assuming the recipient enjoys the attempted greeting or felicitation, that's good enough.  What they do with my erm 'art' after its display date is not only of no concern to me, but frankly, of no interest. Because I've had my fun with it...I'm moving on to the next one.

Now I know that this post will probably come as close to a confession as I'm ever likely to make (in public). But even if you think I'm a heretic, you also kind of get it, don't you?