Inspired By...50th post

It's again the 10th of the month and time for the "Inspired by" creation! But what is Inspired by? Every month awesome Marsha and I choose a subject to be inspired by. It can be for example an idea (link), a product (link), a person (link) or a book (link). Or anything! Then we make something inspired by that theme or a piece of art and share it with you and each other on the 10th of the month. You can browse the past "Inspired By" posts from here (link).

(source)

As you can see from the title already, this time the Inspired By was a bit different. Normally we have the source of the inspiration written in there and you'll know what to expect. Well, now you now to expect a 50th post in the series but nothing about the topic. As it is actually the 50th post in the Inspired By series (can you believe that?!) we decided it's a time to celebrate and look back. We've done this exercise for a time now and to me it feels that the Inspired By has grown and developed. At least it's done that for me. It's great to look back and see where we started (link) both in ways of the theme but also how my style has evolved since then.

But what we did for this post was to go to random and pick three of the posts out of the 50. Then re-visit one of these themes or posts. Why three? Well, because we had some choice of what to tackle. To me that was a really good thing as the first number I drew was 49 and I really didn't want to use the same source as the last post (link) so close to the first one. Even though there's material for a dozen Inspired By in the movie.

Somehow the 9 was a theme in my randomly chosen posts as the other numbers were 29 and 19. Where as I was able to know the theme of the 49 immediately, I had no idea which posts were 29 or 19. So I had to check. As I found out for our 19th post we chose to go for a book and I created a really dimensional project using that as inspiration source (link) and for the 29th it was all about "shooting the past" as we used a miniseries of that title as the source (link).

As the post 49 was out of the question immediately, I had two posts to choose from. The choice was quite easy as I had had such a strong vision about the book and what to do that I didn't feel it needed re-visiting but instead felt strongly that I needed to honor one of my favorite mini series with another project.

I really like the theme my last take on the subject but felt that the source has so much more to give. Again, if you haven't seen the mini series and love old photos and good stories, I urge you to get your hands on this one. The photos shown during the course of the episodes are by themselves enough a reason, but it's also a really good story with twist and turns. Oh and while you're at it, check out another mini series by Stephen Poliakoff, done two years after the "Shooting the Past" called "Perfect Strangers". It didn't hit me as hard as the first one, but still a captivating, beautiful story and lovely black and white photos. Read more about the "Shooting the Past" here in Wikipedia (link) or in IMDB (link) and about "Perfect Strangers" in IMDB here (link). 

One of the themes in the "Shooting the Past" is development and change. The series start when a US property developer turns in to a photo library and is starting to turn it into a modern business school. One of the main characters of the series states something like "We all are hit by changing things" which to me is kind of the key element in the whole series. The stories the old photos show, the developments in the current time of the film and also in the past show how things change over time. Even though not all change is bad the director seems to be a fan of the chaos theory in a way and most of the arcs end in a state that's poorer than what they started with.

I mirrored that theme or idea in the present day. I try to be a realist or an optimist even and not to dwell in the horrors of the modern world. Not that I don't care but if I REALLY start to ponder and dwell in that misery, I won't get out. But the recent developments around the world are really alarming and made me think about the people living in the start of the last century, the so caled Golden Age. Did they know that something big was coming? Did they see the signs? Were there alarm bells going off in people's heads and making them stop to think about the news and what was happening around them?

So even if I don't normally choose this kinds of subjects, I really needed to do a project about my current thoughts. There's so much good in the world, but it seems that there's ever increasing amount of bad as well. I feel that in a way we stand in a crossroads. 

First I thought about using one photo from the series, a man riding a bull through a burning hoop (link) as I thought that was just the sort of photo that would go in the page. But I was afraid that I couldn't print it out in our printer nice enough so I chose to go with something I already had and used a photo from one of the photo packs of Finnabair's. In the background I used as many different languages I had then in my stash of old book papers and newspapers to mimic the world with them.

To further add to the crazy theme I added the latch and the twines there. They are supposed to mimic a straitjacket. One element which I still want to highlight is the tea bag peeking under the photo. I used tea as a colorant it the craft, too, but wanted to include a bag in there as well. Finnish normal bags are not suitable to be added as they are not pretty. But luckily there's a shop that sells these circular bags witch are nice enough to be added to a project! The reason I wanted tea there is naturally the series - the events are situated in Great Britain and tea is present in many of the scenes.

So there you are - my 50th Inspired By post! A bit darker than usual, but let's not dwell in that! Now I urge you to head to Marsha's (link) and see what subject she re-visited as I don't have a clue! 

Ta ta for now and see you again tomorrow!

Materials: Prima Marketing, Ranger