Weekly Obsession: Travel Shadow Boxes

Travel Shadow Boxes

When we moved to Moscow,  I packed like I was off to Girl Scout Camp. I am surprised I didn't find a box of thin mints and a green baret in my shipment. I don't know if I thought we were moving in to a tent, but I did not pack any of my wall decorations, or personalized decorations. Just the basics, you know like three closets worth of clothes and shoes, a lifetime supply of tampons, and 3 industrial sized jars of peanutbutter. No room for framed pictures, dishes, or plates, but sure lets have a mini cosco in our back room. Excellent work, ROBIN. So I have been insanely jealous of every home-y apartment I enter here in a quest since we moved in to get some personalized art on our walls so we can stop living in a bare walled white assylum while paying homage to a hideous striped couch.  I did manage to take some things to a frame shop last week, I should probably make that a post all by itself. I think I will, so moving on...I came across THIS:

while I was working sifting trough the web for some design ideas. Holy hell. New obsession. I need to make these immediately. Click here for more indepth pictures. Anyone who travels needs to do these. How amazing. I am slightly dissapointed because it would be much better going in to a trip with this idea so you can make sure to collect all of those little trinkets. I used to do that. However, in an effort to fight my lazy packrat nature, I have stopped filling my pockets with stuff because I thought to myself, really, why are you saving this hotel key, what are you going to do with it? Become a hoarder? Is that what you want to do? There are easier ways to get on TV. I do not want to end up living in a one bedroom apartment surrounded by 47 cats, a ferret, and fesces. I just will not have it. I won't allow this to happen to anyone I know, so you are welcome in advance. As long as I have a use for the stuff though, I will be more than happy to save boarding passes, keys, money, gum wrappers, used napkins and what not to make personalized art. My favorite thing about these frames is they give me justifaction for packrat tendancies I love so many of my photos when I come back from a trip, but it would be monotonous to frame and display 10+ photos from the same week/destination, and this project really offers a solution for that. What else are you going to do with all of those sunset pictures? Your friends do not care. They do not want to see them again. Trust me.

This is my best take at the project so far:

Don't be too jealous. I wasted a lot of time on this, because now I will have to scour my apartment (which we are in the process of packing up and moving) and any purse and the pockets of any pair of pants that went with me on the trip for memorabilia in order to bring my vision to life. Or I will have to find suitable stand ins because OH I AM MAKING THIS HAPPEN.

I used Photoshop CS5 to do the letter cut outs. It was quite easy, but tedious. Click Here for a great tutorial on how to do cut out letters. I used one picture per letter, saved each one as a separate JPG, and then placed them in Adobe inDesign CS5 to make the poster. My next steps (after the scouring and possible fraud) are to find some shallow shadow box frames here (you know because it's not like I live in Russia where it is impossible to find normal items), then depending on what size the frames are, I will resize my inDesign graphic, and assemble. It will only take me like a year month.

Will you be single-white(no disrespect)-female-ing this project? I am not worried, it's not like I actually thought of it.

I Don't Believe in Moderation: Weekly Obsession

It isn't that I don't believe in the existence of moderation. I know it exists. I have seen other people exercise an average amount of time on a regular basis, I have noticed people who eat normally, and you know, I even once new a girl who never listened to the same song 46 times in one day on her iPod. The problem is, that girl is not me. I live in the over/under doing it phase. I notice, become interested, become obsessed, proselytize, grow disillusioned, burn out, and retreat. To not interupt inertia, I chase and jump on another bandwagon. It is not that I am easily influenced. I am not. I do not jump on fads or trends, or even upcoming ones. Often, I become obsessed with very obscure things, get so excited my head explodes and in an effort to spread the wealth (and avoid having my head explode) I sell the obsession to my friends, family, coworkers, and strangers on the subway. Now, I am going to begin sharing my obsessions weekly with you. Fridays I will start posting what I am currently most obsessed with. At least I plan to, afterall that is a high expecation and the chances of me sticking with it and not growing bored are high, so go ahead, brace yourself to the obsession storm, and know that this too may very well pass.

Silent Treatment

Isn't the silent treatment the worst? It has always been the worst form of punishment in my book, the most torturous, inhumane form. The anxiety train that docks in my head revs up its' engine and excelerates to maximum speed when the silent treatment is administered to me. That is why I am especially ashamed at myself for administering this sort of treatment to my blog. There was no cause for this other than general apathy and major boredom on my own part. I have been bored, and yeah yeah yeah, only boring people get bored, but I did not want to inflict this level of boredom and lack of inspiration on my blog, so I have been hiding out on my couch and various other uninteresting places. But I will get back at it soon hopefully. In the mean time, anyone interested can celebrate my new level of lack of famousness by watching this video of a silly interview I did on Russia Today (scroll about 6 minutes in, the below mentioned Jeff is also featured).

Also this was sort of scripted hence my above-normal level of awkwardness and over enthusiasm.