Digi Dares: Dot and Little Maree

DOT AND LITTLE MAREE

digital collage 12ins x 12ins

view larger version here

This week's Digi Dare has been set by Valorie who has chosen the subject of gardening and asked us to create layouts that incorporate three colour photographs, some cardboard or craft paper and a "real'" nature element. Now, you might think that as a vegetable gardener, I'd have lots to scrap about but gardening is what I do to get me away from my computer screen and as I have yet to find a scrapbook kit featuring digital squashed slugs (my current obsession) the subject of gardens will probably remain neglected until later on in the season when I will (hopefully) have lots of veg that I will (probably) want to brag about. The dare did, however, inspire me to look through my family photographs for those that were taken in gardens. The one that I finally chose to work with depicts my wonderful Nan: Martha Neal (known all her life as Maree) and her "Auntie Dot" who was actually Nan's cousin, being the illegitimate daughter of her Aunt Dorothea, but brought up by Nan's paternal grandparents, as their daughter. If this sounds complicated, let me assure you, it's one of the more straightforward of my family stories. The Neal family lived in Fringford, Oxfordshire at the same time as Flora Thompson, who immortalised the village in her much-loved book Lark Rise to Candleford.
Nan's maternal family came from the village of Ilmington in Warwickshire but in her reminiscences, she often jumbled up the two sides of the family. One of Nan's Ilmington aunts was known as "Aunty Soil". This, I imagined, must have had something to do with the story that she had fainted at her mother's funeral, when the coffin accidentally slipped down the hole. Auntie Soil, I reasoned, must have slipped down into the earth on top of the coffin, and that's how she got her nick-name. Much, much later, I discovered that "Soil" was a variant of "Soilence", which is how a Black Country-born lady like my Nan pronounced "Silence": one of the many beautiful and rather exotic Romany names passed down through that family line as Nan's maternal grandmother was a Gypsy.

Getting back to the dare, you may recall that Valorie  has stipulated three photographs and there are indeed three in this image. The first is the earliest photograph that I have of my Nan. The other two are of Nan's funeral flowers and I have used them as overlays to gently bring together the span of my Nan's life in one image.

Credits: papers used as backgrounds and overlays are from The Measure of A Man by Birgit Kerr; Purity by Natalie Designs; Un Petit Coin De Verdure by Genedes; Recollections by Vera Lim and a CU overlay by Cindy Wetmiller at Wetfish Designs. Elements: dried rose is a CU item by Manuela Zimmerman; pink stamped card scrap from Garden Borders by Dianne Rigdon; cardboard scrap from She's So Trashy by Holliewood Designs; stitch holes and stitches from Grungy Stitched Circles by Annick Phillibert; ornate stamp from Framed With Love by Birgit Kerr; paper doily scrap from Paper Doilies by Annick Phillibert; green glass pebble from Un Petit Coin De Verdure by Genedes; pierced paper scrap from Raya by Linda Gil Billdal; ric-rac braid from Love In The Rain by Traci Murphy and Rachel Young. Font is Jane Austin.