Riikka Kovasin - Paperiliitin: Journaling with Senses

Heippati! It's Fri-yay of the third week of the month and that means third and final post for the new series of posts for the Seth Apter Creative Team. You can find Seth Apter's site here (link) and more about the Creative team here (link). I've included a list of products to the end of the post with links to Seth's own store.

This time I had two sources of inspiration or jumping off points to my projects - senses and Finland. In the course of the three posts I'm creating a piece inspired by a visual, an aural and an olfactory source. And as I'm hoping to keep a Facebook live this coming Sunday where I take you to a small tour around Helsinki, the other source for the pages is pieces connected to Finland. Hoping because of the weather - if it's raining cats and dogs, I'll postpone. If everything goes swell, the live will be on Sunday February 21st at 9 am EST / 3 pm CET on Seth Apter Creative Community (link). Please, follow my Instagram for updates!

This post is the odd one of the three in a couple of ways. First of all about the sense I'm using. As you have probably used quite a lot of visual inspiration before and maybe aural as well, but I'm pretty sure that something olfactory isn't among the most used. But in fact, that's a powerful sense. People remember scents and smells better than photographs, for instance, and scents have the power to provoke memories if you suffer from dementia. Also, declining sense of smell is an early tell to dementia.

I'm sure you all have had a situation where you have had a memory pop into your head because of a smell. And I'm also equally sure that you associate certain scents with certain places or people. As my goal was to use Finnish sources I chose a scent that first came to my mind when thinking about a scent to Finland. It was coniferous forest and spruce. Like I say in the video, maybe I should have gone with juniper as Finnish people are referred as "katajainen kansa" - folk of the juniper quality / out of juniper, meaning the resilience and sisu that we are connected to. Maybe one of the reasons for spruce was the Christmas tree we still had in the living room when I recorded the videos in the beginning of January.

About 75 per cent of Finland's total land area is forest. The forests are present even in the big cities, well, our big cities, which aren't that big. But even here in the capital area you can get to an actual forest in just about 20 minutes bus ride from the city center. Keskuspuisto - the Central Park is a big forest area in the heart of Helsinki. Even though it's name in English refers to a groomed park, most of the parts I connect with Keskuspuisto are natural spruce and pine forest. There's some wider routes running through the area but also a myriad of smaller paths you can roam around. Sipoonkorpi National Park (18 km2) is just about 30 minutes drive away from the city center and bigger Nuuksio National Park (53 km2) on the other hand is less than an hour away. More about Keskuspuisto here in myHelsinki (link) and more about Finnish forests here in Visit Finland (link) and here in Metsähallitus (link). I thought one of the differences would be lack of links as well, but I ended up adding some.

Another way this page differs from the previous two is the paper doll. As you have noticed, and I've said in the videos, I used a Tim Holtz paper doll as my focal point for each one. I carefully chose a doll to represent that theme. Where in the previous two the character has been a little girl, in this page I wanted "a lumberjack". The character echos, like I say in the video, my grandfather who was a carpenter. Also one of his sons, my father, is a carpenter by trade, so cutting trees and chopping them to planks is something I've seen since childhood. I can still remember when my husband and I were helping to move some logs from the tractor trailer and where him and me were useless to move one bigger one, my grandfather, then around 90 and with rheumatism, lifted the other end of the log with tricks and strength, so we could then got the lumber moved. I consider us really lucky as we have some wooden ladles and spatulas he has made still in use.

Enough about the differences! One of the things that all of the three projects have in common as well is the stamp set. In a series like this, I like that there's something that binds the individual projects together. On top of the previously mentioned doll, tape and such I used PaperArtsy's Eclectica3 18 cling rubber stamp set in all of the makes. In the first one most of the markings are hidden underneath the paint layers, in the second one they are mixed among the blooms and in this one they are the most visible. That's got to do with the color combo that the scent brought to my head - green and black. It's something I might haven't otherwise used! I also chose the stamp patterns and stencils inspired by the scent.

The journaling in the page is loosely translated: "Her temporary husband - As a human being he was really fine character, peaceful and amicable. Weeks go by and summer turns slowly into autumn. The moment of truth is at hand." As you might have noted, there's different fonts in the text as I had a couple of different books I cut the phrases from. The title - "her (or his, as again, Finnish doesn't have a gender) temporary husband" - caught my eye on a theater history book. It was a play from the 1930s, translated by Eero Boman, which is a funny coincidence. Boman was my great grandfather's surname before he changed it!

Thank you so much for stopping by today! I hope you have enjoyed the series and picked up some inspiration! Please let me know if you have any questions! Stay safe and have a great weekend! Hopefully see you on Sunday!