Colour Collaborative: August
Photo Credit: Lizard Lighthouse and Bay - Richard Ellis
Butterflies, books, medals, various types of toys and more disturbingly, skulls, seem to be the 'top hits' on Google if you do an image search for 'collection'. I suppose those are fairly typical, along with comics, stamps and thimbles.
For a moment I was at a bit of a loss with this month's prompt. At first I didn't believe I ever collected anything in my life. Yarn and fabric these days are, I confess, building up but even they didn't seem to qualify. They are bought with the intention of being used on some or other project, for the most part at least and surely a collection is something different.
A collection is made purely for the sake of having the things all together in one place, to own them maybe, to seek out every different type or style or size or issue of a thing. I wouldn't go into a yarn shop and buy a ball of wool purely because I haven't yet got that particular shade of green in my stash for example, with no other intention to just add to the range of greens I already have on display at home.
Then I remembered the postcards.
When I was a little tot of appropriate age, I went, like many of you, to Brownies. One of the badges, I can't remember what it was called, 'collectors badge' probably, required you to take in a collection of some 'things' in to be viewed by the powers that were, in order to win the badge. Rubbers and pencils were popular I seem to remember. I didn't collect rubbers, or pencils, or anything else for that matter and postcards were suggested to me as a suitable type of thing to start collecting.
I don't recall being too enamored with the idea, but, no doubt with suitable parental nagging, I began to buy a postcard from everywhere we went. Holiday towns and villages, historic houses and castles, scenic gardens, beach fronts, museums etc. Wherever we went, I got a card. The two above were absolutely typical of many that I owned. In fact, I'm sure I had the Dorset one, it looks so familiar. Then every so often I would have to sit down and glue them into a large scrapbook and label each one to say where I had got it.
By the time I had a sufficient amount to present to the Brownies for my badge (one scrapbook full), I was hooked. Or at least, the habit had become so ingrained that it stayed with me throughout my childhood. I filled quite a few more scrapbooks and would always be on the look out for cards in a new or different style or unlike any I'd seen before. Poldark Mine was a novelty I remember because you could post the card to yourself using the underground postbox. I was most excited by that and had to use sellotape to stick that card in - you had to be able to flap it over and see the postmark of course!
Long after I stopped bothering with the scrapbooks I still bought the postcards, well into my twenties. In the college years I started collecting cards of artworks from galleries and these old style advertisements were hugely popular with me when I was studying graphic design. In fact I have some framed and on my walls now because I still love them. I suppose it is no surprise that they also create the palette of colours I like the best too.
I don't buy postcards any more, I don't know when I finally decided to stop, I suppose when I kept finding little paper bags filled with cards I hadn't looked at in years and started to wonder why I still bothered.
All these years later though, I do still have the urge to go the gift shop and check the cards.
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Don't forget to check out the other great 'Colour Collaborative' blogs
for more of today's great posts...
Annie at Annie Cholewa
Gillian at Tales From a Happy House
Jennifer at Thistlebear
Claire at Above the River
and our guest poster...
Caroline at Scraps of Us
our ideas will encourage us, and perhaps you, to think about colour in new ways.
S x
♥
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