Ode to a car...

I was delighted to discover that my post Add Some Music to Your Day actually inspired a wonderful art journaling post by Julie at Copy+Paste. It's great when you manage to inspire someone who inspires you. Then I discovered that through her post about my post, Carmen was also inspired, and then also through Julie's post, SarahLP was inspired to create a wonderful page managing to combine Kirsty's tilt-shift post and Julie's post that was inspired by my post... confused? Well, the point I'm getting at, is how wonderful it feels to be a pebble. Yes, I am the pebble in the pond creating ripples. And isn't that one of the great things about blogging and this strange world of online communities - how people just keep dropping pebbles into a huge cyber pond and the ripples spread and spread and spread.

Well, before I stretch that metaphor too far, I thought it probably time I stepped up to my own challenge and created an art journal or scrap book page featuring song lyrics. My problem was... which lyrics to begin. At first I thought of Blur's Tender: Love is the greatest thing, we have. But I may use that for a different project... and then I considered countless other lyrics all with hidden meanings and twists. But in the end, I went for a straight forward, simple approach: Madness. I like driving in my car... it's not quite a jaguar. 

The reason this lyric won out is because I've been meaning to scrapbook a page for ages now about a most beloved car. My Creature Car, Jason. Yes, that's right, I named my car Jason. He was known as the Creature Car because he was also used as the business car to ferry Jennifer and myself between workshops (and our business is called Creative Creatures). He was beautiful:

I loved Creature Car not only because he looked magical, but because he was the first car me and my boyfriend bought together. He also represented a new stage in my life - freelancing and running workshops. And he had character.

Creature Car drove off to the car park in the sky in May this year. His head gasket having blown for the second time and being, sadly, too expensive to fix. It was like losing a pet. In fact, I quite often consider my cars as pets.

Having a car for me is Freedom. It is independence. It is wonderful. Driving along an empty road with the music loud and any destination before you - utterly brilliant. And I know that cars will come, and cars will go, but for now, please, take a moment to remember magical, faithful, wonderful Jason, Creature Car extraordinaire...

 I wanted my scrapbook page to be about freedom (so the castle in the background kind of suggesting adventures and possibilities). I also wanted the page to be about fun, which is why I included the saucy-lady air freshener. This was our actual air freshener, and I liked it because it was unexpected and it made people laugh. 

The tyre tracks were done by cutting up some ribbon and pasting glossy side down.

 

I wanted the key to look like it had just been thrown down on top of the page because I am notorious for leaving my keys lying haphazardly on tables and shelves and never being able to find them, and the tax disc brought a different colour and shape element in. I also tried cutting up an old MOT certificate to use as background, but the page just became drowned out with stuff, so I left it off.

Finally, I've taken a couple of liberties with the song lyrics. The first being that I changed 'like' to 'love' and then made it past tense. Because, of course, I can no longer drive this particular car.

So, that was fun. What next?

Rb X