I was just thinking of something which has been a tradition in my life for years. On each New Year's Day, I watch the Rose Parade from Pasadena, CA. In recent years I've found that HGTV does an amazing job of focusing on the types of flowers, seeds, and other organic raw materials used in making the textures and colors of the Rose Parade floats. The right substance can make a piece of Styrofoam covered with plant materials look like water, a living animal, human skin, animal fur, etc.
Then, I realized that this is the same type of thing that happens at the workshops on Bali in Indonesia, where organic photo albums are made by hand from things like bamboo, seeds, leaves and flowers. Bamboo, for instance, can be a tube, half a tube, flat pieces, stripped down to something akin to corn silk, can be any color or texture, depending upon whether it was old or young when harvested, and numerous other factors someone like me from the USA couldn't begin to imagine. Then, there are the other ingredients also found in these eco-friendly photo albums--seeds, for example. If they're fairly large seeds, they produce a totally different look and feel than if they're the size of sesame seeds or smaller. The possibilities are just as endless when using pressed flowers and pressed leaves.
It's truly amazing what can be done by a skilled crafts-person when he or she is supplied with such varied raw materials in their natural condition. Textural illusions which boggle the mind can be created.
Jim Green lives in Rockford, IL, and owns forestcityphotoalbums.com, which offers eco-friendly photo albums in more than 80 different designs broken down into over 20 categories.
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