so recently I've started making my own little gift tags/luggage tags and note cards, and I thought I'd share how I do it.
All you need is:
1. gift tag template (below)
2. something to decorate it with (I use a little atlas)
3. a hole punch (I use a little heart shaped one, but whatever you have will do)
4. some double sided sticky tape (or really strong glue, but the tape works best)
5. some card
6. some ribbon
this is the little atlas I use.
The pages of the atlas are really easy to rip out so it means I have no jagged edges for when I'm sticking it down.
First thing to do is cover the back of the card with double sided sticky tape (or strong glue, whatever you have)
it should be covered, like this:
take a sheet of whatever you're decorating it with and place it on top of the sticky tape, so it looks like this
make sure you cut away the sides, so its just the design left.
cut out a luggage tag from another bit of card
if you're making luggage tags/gift tags, place them on the card and draw around it, on mine I can only get two in, if you're making a note card, cover the other side of the card with the same design, look at where you want your luggage tag to go.
if you're making luggage/gift tags, cut them out now.
hole punch the top of them (with my little heart shaped ones, I often add the cut-out heart to the bottom.
if you've made a note-card, just attach your luggage tag onto your card, tie a bit of ribbon on the top.
(I love east of india ribbon, it's expensive, but worth it.)
you should now have little luggage tags and note cards like this.
you can also use tags to attach to boxes you have just saying whats in them, or use them as decoration.
I adore Sophie Calle, and if you were to look into my AS photography book or the work I did for A2, you'd find it full of Calle-inspired works and full of artist research and artist appreciation pages for her.
I find I like Calles work so much as I can find so much of it in myself, the obsessive nature, the need for everything to fall in a certain collective way, the want of irrelevant knowledge and the satisfaction in organizing and re-organizing yourself. I fall in love with each and every moment captured, each and every photo set and all the ways she uses to describe herself with other things, the way she forces her own personality into her life, just in the way she lives.
The photograph below is from a "birthday cabinet", each year she invites the same amount of people as her age to a get together and one extra, who she doesn't know to show the uncertainty in the future, and how that should be valued, each present goes into one of these cabinets, to be used the following year, as a reminder of the things that have gone and the things that are to come.
The cabinets inspired my collecting of bus tickets, I have a box for all my personal ones (though I seem to never have as many going in as I did before..) and a box for discarded tickets I seem to acquire. I find this to be an interesting way to show my own personal love for traveling, even if it's to not very far away lands, sometimes even going into the city or into the town is a good enough adventure for one day, but it keeps on my dream to travel to as many places as physically possible in one lifetime, and eventually find somewhere to stay and to enjoy for the remainder of my years.
This collecting also inspired my first photography AS project, when I picked one thing of the street each day and dropped them all onto the top of the photocopier and photocopied them as they were, and due to the fact they were A2 print outs, they couldn't be scanned in well enough to be able to show them on my blog, but they were interesting, even if it was solely created out of peoples discarded items.
This photo is from "hotel rooms" which is, as it looks and sounds, photographs of hotel rooms, and, again, my love of travel and my love of the differences in people and personalities comes into this as it shows the difference of both places and people. I find the difference in placed things interesting in these and how neat or tidy people can be, the way people hang certain things but leave others in bags and what consists of importance in placing on desks.
Despite the fact it shows all these things most people cannot see the value in discovering things about people, be it friends, strangers or yourself, through little things like those shown in these sets.
Most people I know tend to lie their interests in Sophie with the phone booth. Calle decorated a phone booth with a chair, drinks, flowers, photographs....etc and used it as a means to try and brighten a persons day when they were to come across it, to make a simple day-to-day thing enjoyable, it gave an interesting point to how we value our lives, just as Stephen Gill did with "outside in" but with different contexts. Gill tried to show we don't always pick up on the little details of our lives, where as Calle was trying to show how little details of our lives should be valued.
I really do love the phone booth and how well executed it was, it picks up on the differences of peoples lives, but finding something they all do to join them together.
The photo below is the set "sleepers" when she invited her friends to sleep in her bed and recorded the way they slept, which highlighted difference in comfort and personal differences, and the sharing of an object used for the greatest satisfaction of sleep. The relationship between a person and their bed is incredibly strong, and unless you are used to sharing the bed, it's strange to have another person in it, it's even stranger to then sleep in it after wards, to have another person find comfort and joy in something so personal is like breaking the bonds you've built in the "relationship" you've built.
I love how in some shots, the intruder to the personal comfort zone just stares into the camera, aware of having their comfort documented, which in all respects should lead away from any comfort you have made or acquired.
The documentation of another person in your bed must be something strange to feel, as if you are now a stranger to a good friend you saw not moments ago, which I find very similar to the song Stranger by Noah and the Whale.
The lines "everything I love has gone away, oh the dark night is moving slower, oh but sleep wont rescue me" is very significant in the connection between this song and the art work, as it sums my opinion of losing the close relationship between a person and their bed, and not quite being able to feel the same level of comfort in it again.
These are my CD covers for graphics at college, the first picture being the front cover, the second the little insert in the middle and the last the back cover. Our brief was that a band named "the stuctures" has asked us all to create their cd covers, and we had to create this band from our imagination, give them names and so forth and create their genre.
Using my Leavesden Mental Hospital shoot from Photography AS, I gave the cd covers an 'alternative indie' feel, of sorts, and using photoshop, completely molded the images to what i needed them to do or to be.
I'm genuinely really happy with the result, I like how the insert is black and white, and gives focus on the front and back covers, and I like how everything fits together.
this is a scan in of my sketchbook, with a scan in of my personal maps and journeys book. I use my little notebook as a way to map all of the journeys I take, through my basic maps that actually have no relation to time, distance or actually where I go, it's made purely by closing my eyes and remembering the journey.
all of the little journeys I make and map out are then put into a large study of my journeys, I never do more than a week in a go, and they're not always beautiful looking, but it is indeed my life and all the journeys within it; as well as just looking at the journeys, i collect bus tickets, but tend to keep alot of them as a personal collection, but i do always intend to incorporate some into bits of art work.
Though this particular one is very plain, I really do love the way it looks, it's a true representation of myself, my journeys, my life and my mind, it incorporates my collections, my personal points of interest, and my idea of my life being too plain.
This is a scan in of a tea covered map with a photograph from my 35mm film on top, I think I'll make a few of them, and have a proper post about them
this is my black and white, 35mm, film used in my photography lessons.
Anyone that knows me well knows I adore film photography; rather than owning a series of pixels you picked out yourself, you are suddenly the creator of a true image, it's something real that you can feel and own, something almost magical. I was using film photography in last years AS classes, and this year I've had the fortune to continue to use it.
True 35mm film photography works by placing the film into a manual camera, preferably a manual SLR (like my Practika MTL5, in which this blog is named after), choosing your shot, setting the aperture and shutter speed so the light meter indicates that the shot will indeed come out, and pressing the shutter release. This series of events ensures that the light will settle on the film emulsion so when it is processed it will come out negatively, creating the negative.
different films have different ways of processing, so that you can use them in the darkroom, but as an avid fan of black and white film, I can tell you it's easy to process, takes around 15-16 minutes, and 20 minutes for the film to dry, after that, you can scan each photo onto a computer, or instead choose to work in the darkroom.
There will, of course, be scans of darkroom work uploaded, but at this point in time, I don't have access to a scanner, but I do already have the scan in's of each negative, so until then, here are my photos.
