Cutting and sticking

How to keep entertained on these long winter nights?  You could write long Norse sagas – and with “Beowulf” in the cinema, your time could have come here – or go for a little low-level entertainment with some cutting and sticking.

Now lots of options for what you cut and stick. I’m not advising that you have to go full scrapbook mode.  I got teased at home while growing up for constantly cutting things out of magazines – recipes in particular, but other things that were of interest.

Probably back to the journalism side of being keen on lots of different things.  This, coupled with a good old fashioned “this could come in useful” attitude, resulted in a lot of piles of newsprint, which finally made their way into scrapbooks.

So, card making, collage, papier mache…you name it.  Cutting and sticking allows you to re-read your magazines or newspapers, end up with a larger pile of paper to recycle (for high inner smugness values), stick a few of them in a scrapbook, or bung them in a useful folder, and hopefully look at them again.

Trouble with cutting and sticking: are you really going to re-read the things you keep?  This was the trouble before.  How many of those recipes did I use?  How many articles on nice white painted houses do you need for inspiration?

You can of course do the smaller version, which is editing what you’ve already got stashed away.  Less cutting, more freeing up existing scrapbook pages, or the equivalent.  But I probably shouldn’t be admitting to this degree of introversion.

Perhaps the really good side is the rediscovery.  Kate Muir’s ode to the food van at the top of the Rest and Be Thankful.  A particular recipe that you’ve done, loved, forgotten, and your heart leaps to see it again.

We are happy to reread a book.  To listen to a song, time and time again.  To put on a piece of clothing that makes you smile.  Why not reread an article?  Partly because there are so many of them, so many angles, so many tiny snippets to consider revisiting.

Anyway, come and retrieve me when you hear the scissors hit the floor.

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