Fake Flower Friday

These "arrangements" using tissue flowers are used in mourning the dead in China.

Tiananmen Square and below, somewhere over Siberia

Tomorrow, I’m scrappin’ with the ladies! A friend of mine is a teacher at the Tennessee School for the Deaf and once a month we try to get together to work on our scrapbooks in the dining hall at the school. We bring snacks and create a snack table. This is most important. :) Then we spread out all our "stuff" and get to work. Last time, my friend Ginger opted to work on handmade cards instead and created nearly 50 by day’s end. Another friend worked on her daughter’s album, who passed away from cerebral palsy. One lady worked on her "anniversary" album. She creates a beautiful 2-page spread for each year that she and her husband have been married. We have the radio going in the background (usually oldies) and it’s just a nice, pleasant, comfortable day. We borrow each other’s tools and put out requests for a certain color paper or a certain "punch" and sometimes a request for help in designing a page. Some of us are whiz bang scrappers. Their pages take much longer than mine but are constructed in a very "professional" way. As for me, I prefer a little more of a "slaphappy" look. It’s my style and I would prefer my pages be more unique to me than have a designer look. I love, however, looking at and admiring the more "designed" pages. Currently, I’m working on scrapping the photos from the cruise my son and I took a couple of years ago. I just finished a few nice pages of photos of Bridge Day, 1998. Bridge Day is held every October in Fayette County (where my father grew up), West Virginia, at the New River Gorge Bridge. It’s the only day of the year that folks can actually strap a big wad of nylon to their backs and jump off the bridge. It’s all about B.A.S.E. jumpers who are, in my opinion, some of the more extreme adrenaline junkies. This past October there was a death. A parachute wasn't opened or didn’t open in time for it to fully deploy and the jumper (a 66 year old man) was too close to the bottom. The bridge is 876 feet high above the New River. You only have about 3 seconds of free fall before you must open your chute.
It’s an interesting event to witness. Maybe I'll post some pics of my pages next week. I'm really looking forward to this weekend. I'm reading a wonderful non-fiction book called "A Street in Marrakech" which will be discussed next Wednesday at the meeting of the Int'l Literary Colloquy. This semester our reading is by authors from Morocco. Wonderful!