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I like to think of myself as a strong person, I have strong opinions, I'm not easily wavered. I'd be wrong about this being a complete state of me, I can be extraordinarily influunced if taken by an idea. I first saw the movie Working Girl (Melanie Griffiths, Harrison Ford) in 1989 when it was released in Australia, at the movies on the big screen. I loved/still love this movie. I've worked in enough crappy clerical jobs to have a serious empathy happening with the Melanie Griffiths character. The thing that really struck me about the film, that just lit up a synapse in my brain, was her characters way of forming an idea. She'd be reading the paper, usually some crappy one step up from tabloid, and reading the different sections, the business, the entertainment, the social columns. The information from each section would just lodge their in a pool in her brain, percolating. Later on, she'd read something else and it'd float into that pool and then Fizz up like icecream in lemonade, this new idea made up on seemingly disparate parts. OK, so it's possibly not the newest idea in the world, but it just struck my fancy, and lodged itself. It's partially to blame for all the bits and pieces of newspapers and columns and notes on scraps and cutandpasted bits out of webpages that look like they've been put in order by a blender. Partially, because I am an innate packrat and was born without the tidy gene, so it's not the cause but a pretty hefty symptom. So, Working Girl is responsible for some of the mess in my life, but the thought process it kick started is also responsible for Slice.
Renee asked me how I got the idea for it. This is the email I sent to her: [my later annotations in brackets/parenthesis] "I started doing something similar ages ago, some time earlier this year, but it never got up. [Once this idea languished, I fully expected to relegate it to the slush heap, ideas that died a'borning. I mostly keep them, if only to look at them in 5 years time and work out what the hell my cryptic notes meant.] I found a quote I liked in an entry, and put it in this calendar thingie. The calendar thingie is an feature that comes with Dreamweaver, Jeff showed me how to use it, so the initial idea was just futzing around, playing with the Calendar and thinking of things I might put in it. [Thingie translated is a Dreamweaver extension. People write little extra bits of code that can be added to the original program, nifty little scripts and the like. This one does a calendar, I have a recently installed one that installs the javascript to break frames. People trying to frame my content, I don't *think* so..] The original idea had me just snagging a colour from people's sites, and making the cell with their quote in it that colour. Kind of like a patchwork quilt type thing, but it didn't really click, no it never made it up. [My mother made quilts, my mother-in-law makes quilts, I have the material to start making one, but it doesn't quite click for me yet. I read an entry from Cameron the other day, talked about trying to find real velvet, and I could just picture a jewel toned quilt, big chunky squares with a black border around each square and around the whole quilt, with each square with a small crazy quilt type thing happening in the middle. I need to start off small, this is not small. course, I also want to do a watercolour quilt, which is the equivalent of barely being into fingerpainting and wanting to win the Archibald Prize.]
Then recently, a couple of things happened. I've been keeping a bookmarks file of entries I like, to nominate for the Diarist Awards, and just entries I liked, and Quarter Four started at the beginning of October, so I already had some I liked. I also saw on Carrie's website, her wedding pictures, where rather than doing a thumbnail of a picture, she did a slice of the picture, where you got a teaser of the picture, which I just liked. And these entries are all Slices of life. And then Scott's entry had that killer quote about not getting a golden watch, but a jaded one. [Scott's entry was on the 28th of October, so I went and found other entries that had touched me and used those too, filled in the month. I now look for entries every day, and keep a note of journals that have potential to be linked to, even if they don't have an entry for me that day. I'm on at least 20 more notify lists because of all these journals I'm finding..] The colours came about cause they're autumnal, but also they're fruit like, and that ties in with the Slice theme. I asked him [him being Jeff, that I referred to way back before I started annotating like a Victorian novelist] to make me a graphic, and he said, what, like a slice of fruit? *Boom*, went looking through all the picture CD's he has, looking for images that say Slice. Orange & Citrus was on my mind anyway, cause of that fruit comment. With each new month, there's going to be a new header graphic, and using Photoshop, and the eyedropper tool, you can select a colour out of the image to use for the text header and the background, that's why they match so closely. For November, I'm doing a pomegranate sliced in two, with a purple sidebar, and December is a plate of sushi slices with a lilac side bar and text mimicking the colour of the flower on the decoration. All my ideas tend to be a blend of a whole bunch of things I've seen in the past. "
This quilting thing, I see references to it on a semi regular basis, the most frequent being when we visit Jeff's parents, and his Mum shows me the latest one she's working on. I also saw Jessie, months ago, talking about how she and Golden Boy made a quilt, and it sparked me a little again. Just waiting for the next catalyst I guess.
This is the graphic I used for a quote from Monique, for Octobers slice. It struck me, and the images on her front page also struck me as being very quilt like. Filing an idea away for later thought; a Journal Quilt.
Updated 29 November, 2000 |
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