Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Just remember the starfish

As I was moaning (what me moan? never!) to a friend at how hard I find it to settle down to WRITE my MA essay (1,800 words so far and counting - so that's 4,200 to go. Hmm), she - being wise as well as wonderful - reminded me of the story of the starfish from Benjamin Zander’s “Art of Possibility” that goes something like this...

A man is walks along a beach and looking down sees a girl doing some sort of strange dance. He gets closer to investigate. It transpires that the beach is covered in starfish, and what she is doing is bending down an throwing them into the sea, one at a time.

“What are you doing?” he says, “There are thousands, you can’t possibly make a difference”.

She looks at him with a starfish in her hand, and as she throws it she says, “I’ve made a difference to this one.

So every word I do just chips off the old 6,000 I suppose. And it is better than a verbal presentation (which is why I will never do a PhD). Anyway I have just stopped momentarily in order to get my Sketchy Thursdays layout in before the deadline this week. It is a lovely simple sketch which I have turned into a double layout. Because the album my holiday pages goes into is ring bound my double layouts have to be ones that can still work with a big gap between them. Which suits me as they can just mirror rather that working all the way across which is much harder!

Of course it makes the photo tiny - but if you click you can get it larger. And here is a page at a time.

K and Co Urban Rhapsody and Hannah papers

Papermania Stickers and brads

Little sequins, mesh, paper flowers and buttons from stash

Rangers stickles in diamond and green

Olive and pearl glimmer mist. My olive one is leaking but it means I get nice cool splodges as well as spray.

The ribbon is from Sarah's Cards. All of it was white but I gave half the glimmer mist treatment.

The photos are from a quarry scuplture park on Portland. I'm not sure if it was really open or not and for a while we thought we would be stuck in there as there were no maps or signs and the path disappeared. The falling man one (top left, shaped like a foot) is by Anthony Gormley. Only took us about 45 minutes to find it.

Right, back to work - wheeeee, kersplosh! there goes another one

1 comment:

Julie Tucker-Wolek said...

Sooooooooooooooooooo GORGEOUS!!! I love love love that ribbon, the colors...the paint...the photos!!! WOW oh WOW! Thanks sooooooooooooooooo much for playing along with Sketchy Thursdays! :):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):)