Hello again and welcome to the
very first in what I hope will become an ongoing series on my blog – ‘Photo
Friday’.
Just to ring the changes, Photo
Friday probably won’t have anything at all to do with making cards. Every Friday I’ll be showing photos that have,
for one reason or another, struck a chord with me – sometimes it will be photos
that I or my family and friends have taken, sometimes it will be photos I’ve
stumbled across while surfing the net.
I hope you like it…
These first two were taken
a couple of years ago by me, when I and my family were lucky enough to stay for
a few days in a large French house. It used to
be a farmhouse but it was converted into something a bit more modern, a bit
more comfortable. It is situated out in the French countryside well away from
lots of other houses. Surrounded by
fields that gave way to woodland, it’s a fantastic beautiful place.
I loved it, even though my hubby
and my son discovered a family of mice lived under the large sofa in the living
room! They knew how I would react, so
they didn’t tell me until the holiday was over!
The thing that always strikes me
whenever I look at these two photos is probably something that only we crafters
– people like you and I – would think about.
And it’s this: we try our best to create and make beautiful things, but
often it’s not just the thing that we’re creating that matters, but the
surroundings our creation will find itself in.
Let me explain…
Take a look at this clock. It’s beautifully made and crafted, and what a
whimsical design. As such it looks
absolutely lovely sitting on the wall of a French farmhouse, where the pace of
life is so much slower than busy Britain and the time of day somehow isn’t really
important. It’s a lovely thing in a
lovely setting.
But if I were to take that clock
and put it on my own kitchen wall it would drive me mad! Like most of us I have a very busy schedule;
I have places to go and things to do, and I need a timepiece in my house that
tells me the exact time, quickly. Look
at the hands and the face of the clock… I’d have no chance of being able to
tell what time it is, and it would only be a matter of time (no pun intended)
before I changed that beautiful whimsical clock for something practical and
decidedly less chic. It would still be a
lovely thing, but in the completely wrong setting, and as such, it just wouldn’t
work.
Next, take a look at these pieces
of wood that hang on the wall of the French farmhouse. If you haven’t guessed
already, they are the ends of the wooden boxes that some French wine is
delivered in. All that’s been done here
is that someone has taken a hammer to the boxes and gently tapped away until
the decorative end of the box has come away cleanly, then they’re hung on the
wall in a kind of haphazard arrangement.
I think these work very well because the setting is very well suited to
the idea – the farmhouse is in the middle of a vast wine growing region and the
people who own it also own huge quantities of wine. And not many people who holiday in a French wine
growing region deny themselves the pleasure of exploring a bottle or two!
But again, if I were to take
these wooden box ends and put them on a wall in my house, they just wouldn’t be
the same. The impact of them would be
lost because there would be no connection between them and the house or the
environment like there is in France. If
anything I daresay my friends might take one look at them and decide I have
a drinking problem!!
So there we have it… I feel that sometimes,
not always, to enable us to get the maximum effect from the thing we are
creating we have to consider the setting it will eventually inhabit.
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