The demo was good. Even if I do say so myself. There were 30 people there and only two had seen me talk about scrapbooking before. They knew what I would be doing so they sat at the back.
Several others had that go-on-entertain-me expression on their faces. Well, you would wouldn't you if you have gone to the AGM of the family history society you expect a speaker who talks about parish registers or census indexes or stuff like that. You don't expect the person who you have just re-elected to the chairman's job to spread out a pile of paper and card and strange looking gadgets and start talking about your precious old photographs of your ancestors.
It took me two minutes (I kept one eye on the clock) and I had the first genuine laugh. After that they were leaning forward to see more clearly what I was doing. I had prepared two pages, one with two pictures of my Dad for the album I am making about him and a more modern one of me with some special friends.
I did the page for Dad first, I explained the reason I was doing the album and why it is still incomplete even though Dad died in 2003. Then I showed them the pictures and explained my reason for choosing them. I talked about storage of old photographs and gave them a few things to think about regarding old photographs. I hope I also gave them the tools to take ownership of their photographs.
I told them what I was going to do, then told them what I was doing, and then held up the result and showed them what I had done - that's teaching that is.
I then suggested that they might have questions and the first one was "can you do another page?" so I brought out the bag with the other page saying, "here's one I prepared earlier" and did the other one. Then we had to stop because the time was running out and we had to be out of the hall. I think that I might be asked to speak at some of the society branches - so I am really pleased that it went well.
This kind of gives me confidence to organise a crop in the hall across the road. I wouldn't want to "teach" but I know I can stand up in front of a room of people and demonstrate how to achieve a simple page. I am sure that once the first crop has happened we would be able to organise more.
The reason I say in the title that the car park was hard is because as we were leaving the hall I caught my shoe on a tiny kerb around a little fowler bed and spread my not inconsiderable bulk across the tarmac. I was carrying a plastic box with all my alphas in separate containers under my arm, quite a large box. and that hit the ground first forcing my arm and shoulder to go into shapes they were never designed to attain. The result was pain. head-swimming, eyeball twisting gutwrenching pain. It didn't last long and there was no serious damage to my physical health. My ego however took a terrible beating. Can you imagine the embarrasment of falling over in front of so many people?
I'm just glad the camera was in the other box and Mr M didn't think to get it out and use it.
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