Cut and Paste

Pacman returned to the office, today, and immediately expressed his satisfaction at how I'd been running our current project. He then left me to continue running the project, while he and Scooter deal with some tricky questions and needy contractors who are bidding a church addition. Let's hear it for earning more Intern Development Program hours for Contract Administration! Woohoo!

I decided to celebrate by... treating myself to a shower caddy. And a little plastic organizer thingy for my medicine cabinet so my tubes of face cream and tweezers don't rain down on my head when I open it to pull out my toothbrush in the morning. I threw in a new cutting board as a prize, too.

Once my shower caddy was installed, and my tubes and tweezers and extractors were all safe and sound in their cubbies, I cleaned my makeup brushes, and decided I'd indulged in enough obsessive behavior for one evening.

Let me rephrase that: enough non-creative obsessive behavior.

Shall I explain?

I'm a scrapbooker. Now, before you decide Ms. Strainedconsciousness has turned into a suburban mother of twelve, I should clarify that it is a highly curated design scrapbook, encompassing multiple facets of design: interiors, architecture (the two are inextricably linked, in my not-so-humble-opinion), fashion, and product design.

My "scrapbooks" are Moleskine A3 sketchbooks and/or watercolor books. They can fit a full 9x12 magazine page, or a multitude of tiny pictures. Recently, I've been arranging - carefully, methodically - the latter.

The pages containing multiple images and are arranged similarly to the salon walls of 18th and 19th century manor houses, with one central painting/image surrounded by smaller ones that are more or less related. I tend to related things by color. For that reason, this lady:

(okay, dame) is surrounded by interior images, all of which have a decidedly orange or red tinge, like so:

And an image of Iris Apfel - who wears the world's most amazing jewelry and spectacles - is accompanied by images of a marine hue. As long as that marine area is not Galveston.

Are you catching what I'm throwing, here? It's a wonderful exercise in the study of interiors and architecture and how they relate to individuals' tastes. In addition to Great Personalities, I also collect images off The Sartorialist website (http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com/), firstly to help me in expanding my personal wardrobe horizons and in targeting my wardrobe goals, but also because the way people design themselves can have an impact on the way I design interiors and architectural spaces. The following images are all from the above website.

And I'm in good company, it seems. A collection of Cecil Beaton's scrapbooks is slated to be published in the near future - November, if memory serves. He created his scrapbooks from magazines, movie posters, and snapshots to help him in his studies of lighting photography shoots and how to pose people, and to study how they interacted with their surroundings.

Ms. Strainedconsciousness and Cecil Beaton. Whodathunkit?