Saturday 15 December 2012

Merry Christmas



If you are a card maker like me, then there is no better time to be making cards than Christmas. The custom of sending Christmas cards started in the UK in 1843 by Sir Henry Cole and to this day people around the world are still sending cards, despite the onslaught of technology. I still love the sentimentality of hearing the sound of mail landing on my door and to have an envelope in my hand - it is still a joy and shall, in my opinion, always be irreplaceable. I have in my loft box after box of cards that friends and family have given to me over the years.  I just cannot find myself to throw them away.  I think the oldest card I have dates back to 1979?  Having said all that, until a couple of days ago, I hadn’t made a single card!  Only when it finally dawned on me – the time for sending cards is drawing nye and I need to make something simple and quick, well quickish. It took a while to try to find the right fonts, the right sizes and the right words to fit all neatly together and resembling something like a Christmas tree. To make matter worse...the first 20 or so cards were all discarded, thanks to a bad typo! Even with word processing, mistakes still occur.  I can probably type between 70-90 words per minute, may be more when I was working...thanks to learning to touch type all those years ago and not a "hunt and peck" typist (two-fingered typing), which to me looks really funny.


I learnt to type when I was in my third/fourth year of secondary school on a typewriter. Yes, a typewriter! Not an electric one but a manual one. Remember those?  Big chunky metal things, where you have to strike the keys briskly and firmly, and pushing the "carriage return" lever when you hear that unmistakable sound: "ding"?  It was so noisy, even an electric one that I had on one or two occasions, typed under a blanket just to dampen the noise while trying to finish off a report in the early hours of the morning. Sweet. Nowadays, there is no more "ding", no more correction tape, no more wasting of paper and certainly no more typing under a blanket...not that it made any difference to the 20 odd cards I had to throw away - arrgh!   

BTW I am still knitting squares! :)