warning *rant below* warning
nup. not everyone will agree with me on this, and i may not agree with me on this in 6 months time, but since i have decos on the brain at the moment, and i'm pissed off with some of the things i've been reading on the net. before you get angry and send me an email, make sure that you read the disclaimer (of sorts) first.
here we go...
background info
i have been involved in penpalling for many years, starting from when i was 8 and continuing on more regularly when i was 13. i discovered the world of swapping quite accidentally in early 2000 (i was 19) and haven't looked back since. while i love to swap the lot, i especially adore decos as they enable us all to be as creative as we can be without spending a fortune on supplies. unfortunately they can also turn out to be absolutely terrible specimens of art. this is what really saddens me, as this was not their original intention. i am not trying to be righteous by saying that people aren't being creative or neat enough, what i am saying is that people should respect the fact that a deco is a deco and not an fb or advert.
i have always loved crafty things and recently i have become more involved in them as i can finally afford to buy decent tools and supplies. current interests include scrapbooking and papercrafts, ooak dolls and customised my little ponies and sewing/cross stitch amongst many.
the problem
so how extited was i when i discovered that both my interests have been combined and there are really arty decos around the place? very much so! until i discovered that these decos are swapped within exclusive groups and have been labelled art decos or creative decos while the original decos are now just regular old decos. a sad discovery indeed. why have they been separated? i guess because there are some elitists around the place who have taken the idea from the penpalling world, adjusted it to suit their own needs and then bagged the originals because they're not 'creative' or 'arty' enough! wtf?!? how dare they do this! yes we use glitter and magazine clippings and staples and sticky tape but who cares? there's a good reason for this: not everyone can afford ridiculously expensive supplies plus pay overinflated amounts of postage to send heavy cardstock over several borders. the whole point of a deco is for it to be decorated, whether this is done to the nth degree with pretty papers and embossing or inexpensively should not matter. everyone has their own creative license that no one else can take away from them. why magazine clippings and pics from junk mail etc? - i've explained that one above. why staples? they're sturdy (when used correctly) and can take multiple postings from country to country. they're also inexpensive. the same goes for sticky tape or contact. i use it because i don't want my label or any embellishments to fall off while the deco is in transit. not everyone packs their swaps correctly but that's a story for another day... it is not the materials that matter, it's what we do with those materials that counts!
my solution
don't steal our decos! if you want to circulate books in a small group, then this is not in the spirit of swapping where you make something and then send it out into the big wide world where you have no control over how it will be decorated. call them mini altered books or something, just not decos!
disclaimer
the above rant is a response to what i have read on a few select websites. please do not assume that everyone involved in the art/craft community pisses me off this much. having had my little rant above, i would absolutely love the chance to become involved with one of these arty groups, if someone would give me an invite or email me a link... i am currently working on a gallery of my work, both decos and papercraft amongst other things. take a look around and let me know what you think :)