Taking and printing lots of photos was fun. Still is. But I found that I had a lot of trial photos that it seemed a shame to throw out. So I began keeping them in a drawer and then every once in a while I would pull out some and make some collages. I had more fragments of paper for I love handmade papers of all kinds and I have collected a good stash and use them for frames or backgrounds for photos but off cuts are also kept.

This was in fact a habit I picked up when I was a grade school teacher. I loved displaying my students work on a bulletin board and I always did a lot of theme elaboration and when I cut out something I also kept,what I now know to call,the negative space left from the cut out. I used them too sometimes so amassing bits I guess has always been a way to increase the usefulness and reduce the amount of paper I had to use over all.

Once I have some interesting bits on my table I let my hands take over and let new pictures materialize. I started small, mostly with book marks, which I often left in library books as they were returned for I was usually done with them at that point. I would also make bookmarks for my Bookclub members instead,of sending Christmas cards to them. I would take a number of bookmarks to a meeting and let them choose the ones they wanted.it was always fun to try and make them for specific members and see if those were the ones they chose. I think the results were about 50/50.

You can see a few I made a while ago in my paper photos.

I wanted to make fabric collages too but found it harder to start but now I seem to be able to combine paper and fabric more easily and of course that is because I kept playing and fiddling and letting my hands,scissors and mind work with no plans or expectations in place.

As it is often stated, it is in the doing that art and intuition and authenticity find each other.