Ramble alert!

Hi everyone, I'm here with a page for the start of Tracey's theme for December at Art Journal Journey  which is entitled 'The Meaning Of..'

Reading Tracey's introduction my mind went racing around with all sorts of ideas and this page wasn't one of them!

I have already alerted you in the post title that I may will ramble a bit. Today is a day of memories for me!

It is the first page I made in this black journal. If I say it was made years ago and then tell you that it was 2008 and that it was around the time my Mum passed away on 1st December, and also the day my dad passed away in 2004. I won't go into details but I had a feeling that Mum had passed about an hour before my brother rang me to tell me!

This is the original page

I had always crafted with my Mum as a child, we used to sew and knit but also things like basket making, painting, homemade cards each Christmas(the colour in type on sale then), rug making, glass painting and more!

My original idea was to make pages about my Mum and just couldn't do it then but looking through old photos I decided to use a black paged book to make some pages.

The image is the view from the front gate of the cottage where I grew up. The trees across the road are mainly Horse Chestnut trees and you can imagine many years of collecting conkers for me and my brother.

They were in a field belonging to a farmer and just out of sight is the entrance to the farm, a Horse Chestnut lined avenue leading up to the Farm. To the right of where I was standing was one of the entrances to the nursery where my dad worked. My brother and I used to spend a lot of time at the farm, on the nursery and also at the farm right of where I was standing.

I did a little bit of hidden journaling behind some patterned vellum. 

Of course, the start of my recent crafting journey began here and I am grateful for the reason for starting being down to my Mum!

I have a couple more pages already made but just yesterday I looked at this page and changed my mind and altered the original page a little! I think the photo shows up more now and I hope I'm not breaking any rules here.

We hope to see what your pages mean to you this month, I suspect that a lot of won't be having such a busy Christmas this year!

Thanks for looking, Chris