DIY: The Elusive Charm

There's no recap today. Last night I got sidetracked looking through more photographs of our wedding. Photographs of our wedding leave me speechless. This post and my reply to our friend took awhile to compose.

There are a few things evident in all of the photos taken that day:

• There was joy.
• There was love.
• We were in the moment.

Capturing joy and love in photographs is not as easy as you think. Documenting through images, observing while not altering events, is extremely difficult. A photographer brings with them numerous tools: art, technical skills, story telling, observation, and psychology.

This year, like last year, we get the last week of December off. I have two tasks lined up: wedding favors and gifts for our parents. The challenge for both projects is to capture the joy, the love, and the moment from shared meals and from our wedding day. That's a tall order. I'm not expecting flawless grammar and perfect spelling. While that's a goal with any physical project, it's hard when you've poured out words and then stared at them for hours in an attempt to tame the flow and navigate the currents. Harder yet is editing. Choosing words and images with impact. Too much and whole will not be greater than the sum of the parts.

Today's Etsy Tuesday post actually appears on our food blog and has more 1950s cookbooks that are influencing the design. Along with finalizing the design of our cookbooklets (and our wedding books), we'll be choosing prep photographs for recipes, editing steps, and adding tips.

A forward from a 1950 cookbook captured what I hope to convey in both of my December projects.

Image courtesy of MrsOtter06 (Etsy)

Ruth Berolzheimer writes:

The Personality of a Cookbook is as apparent as it is important. It is composed of known and stable ingredients with unknown and elusive ones to make a mixture as familiar, friendly and exhilarating as a pine woods early on a summer morn.

The Stable Ingredients are compounded of a sound knowledge of what the homemaker needs for herself and her family; an easy handling of all fundamental facts on preparing and serving foods ... and on the presentation of those facts in a simple, concise, explicit, well organized, specific, easy-to-follow, step-by-step procedure that gives a comforting feeling of confidence in the final product.

The Elusive Charm of this personality stems from clear overtones: a light touch -- a sense of humor -- a flair for the clever idea in cooking and serving that results in something called style, but above all a feeling for the kind of beauty that women want about them in their work-a-day world.