Photo Friday - French Farmhouse

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.