Eniko's Playhouse

Scrapbooking a Heritage Album: Part 9

The Final Chapter

So we've come to the final chapter of my 9-part series: Scrapbooking a Heritage Album. As I was nearing the end of the scrapbook, I was thinking about how to finish it in a way that would have the kind of impact that a journey of this magnitude deserves. It was then that I recalled a letter to the editor of the Milford Cabinet that the eldest of the Farkas siblings once wrote about the Christmas we spent sleeping on army cots in Austria, after we risked our lives to cross the dangerous communist-guarded Hungarian border as my father led his family of six to freedom. I acquired the letter and added it to my layout. It describes the brave determination of my parents to give their children a magical Christmas in the direst of situations, and was the perfect touch to my scrapbook, which would be my Christmas present to the family.

After printing the letter onto parchment paper and aging the edges with a little ink, I added an image of the Traiskirchen refugee camp where the event took place. To the opposite side of the double-page layout , I added a montage of photos of many lavish Christmases we enjoyed in America in contrast to the poverty-stricken refugee camp Christmas. (I love the little journaling block: "Gratitude is the memory of the heart.")

 

I am including the contents of the letter here, for those that are interested. The story of Christmas 1956 as seen through the eyes of the ten-year-old "older" brother is quite moving.

Christmas 1956 ~by Attila Farkas

"Four small figures crunched through the frozen ruts on the empty dirt path running between the barracks of the abandoned U.S. military base on the outskirts of Traiskirchen, Austria. On that cold gray evening of December 24, 1956 the old base was used as a concentration camp for Hungarian refugees of the October 23rd uprising ~brutally crushed by Russian tanks.

The nine year-old boy on the right was tugging at the hand of his five year-old sister, who in turn, was dragging a two year-old with her other hand. Clutching the left hand of the tiny girl, a ten year-old boy shuffled…lost in thought. A year ago Christmas was different. A year ago, the infant was asleep in her warm crib, and the older kids were bursting through the door followed by their loving grand-parents, who conveniently had taken them for a long walk, leaving ample time for the angelic messenger from the Christ Child to deliver the Christmas tree and the gifts under it. The two boys understood that on that bleak day, they were fulfilling the task of the now distant grandparents. ~But why? Certainly they could not expect presents. After all, their parents had no money in this strange land. They fled their home in Budapest with only belongings that could be carried on their backs. The ten year-old knew that this year, in conformance to the last two hellish months, there was going to be no Christmas.

The whimpering of the two year-old jarred his memory to the recent past. A month ago, her cries nearly resulted in tragedy. With a group of strangers, they were crossing the notorious iron curtain under the cover of night. A local resident cautioned them to be absolutely quiet because during the previous day, tanks were seen patrolling the field that they were about to cross. The baby, sleeping in her father’s arms, woke with a start and screamed her displeasure to the bleak country-side. The other members of the desperate group demanded that the family be left behind, so as not to jeopardize the safety of the rest. The parents ordered the older children to continue with the strangers, while they stayed behind with the screaming baby. For a desperate hour, the three children were totally alone…no country, no home, no parents. Finally, perhaps the hundredth glance back revealed familiar shadows, closing from behind.

The boy clutched the tiny hand harder.

They turned under the bare light bulb over the faded door to the barrack and hurried up the unpainted steps. He needed to be reassured that their parents were still there. They scurried by the rows of army cots and pushed through the hanging blanket that separated their home from this room of a dozen families. There, on the table between the crowded cots, stood a Christmas tree.

It wasn’t much of a tree…perhaps a dozen fir boughs wired to a broken broom handle, decorated with beads made from balls rolled from foil, and a candle cut into small segments. They stood transfixed. The adults joined them. Haltingly at first, the ancient folk song rose from the little circle. The carols grew louder with each stanza as the revelation strengthened: There will always be Christmas."

 

The journaling block on the lower right of the montage page reads:

"Of course there would be many more Christmases for the Farkas family, and many more Christmas trees... But none would compete with the memory of that special little tree of hope from the Christmas of 1956."

The final page of the Heritage Album shows the family many years later, on the 50th Wedding Anniversary celebration of Edith and Peter Farkas...we see the four siblings, now all grown-up, and we meet the grandchildren. The life that began with the chance meeting of a farmboy-turned-engineer and a pretty city-girl from Budapest, a life that endured many painful decisions and multiple hardships, has a happy ending indeed.

From a scrapbooking layout point of you, please note thet the muted colors used in the previous scrapbook pages and the sepia tones of the old photographs now give way to a burst of color, symbolizing the joy that the family now experiences.The sentiment on the upper right-hand side of the page is so appropriate: "Live the life you have imagined."

And so the Farkas family heritage goes on...as the grandchildren grow up and start families of their own. At the writing of this post, sadly Edith Farkas has left us, but Peter celebrated his 89th birthday this past June, as handsome as ever and happy to share a kiss with his three-year-old great-grandson, Rigel.

I hope I've inspired you to capture your own family's history in a scrapbook or a family Heritage Album, and thank you for allowing me to share my story with you.

Sharing the love, Enikö

Scrapbooking a Heritage Album: Part 8

COMING TO AMERICA

There are many ways to tell a story. Musicians tell stories by evoking the emotions of an experience through the melodies they compose; painters tell tales with brushstrokes and juxtaposition of colors; writers take their readers on journeys with their masterful use of language.  Scrapbook designers capture snapshots of time and combine select photographs, papers, words and elements of design to artfully take the viewer across the rich landscape of their memory-keeping.

I could literally write a novel about my family's plight as refugees of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and our adventures of adjusting to a new life in America, but as a scrapbook designer, I don't have the luxury of using hundreds of words in my storytelling. I must find the right balance of multiple disciplines to tell my story in a concise, artistic and convincing way so that my viewers feel the essence of the experiences of my family's life as they view the little snippets of it.

In the double-page layout above, I illustrate the Farkas family's first two years in their newly adopted home...not an easy accomplishment in such a limited amount of space, but it is a great example of effective storytelling. The layout opens with a photo taken by my father of the Statue of Liberty...the universal symbol of American freedom. Although the photograph was actually taken many months after we arrived in the US (we landed on American soil by plane), the image of the boat approaching the magnificent icon -full of hopeful Hungarian transplants immediately sets the tone for the story. The words across it: "A Place to Belong...Refuge in a Storm...Cozy...Safe Haven...Retreat...Home" -tell it all.

As the eye moves down the left page, it scans an old post card of the Americus Hotel, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where we stayed until a more permanent home was found. The little tag sports a photo of Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, an old abandoned army barracks that was spruced up to receive and process the Hungarian refugees as they arrived in the states. The tag points to the refugee identification photos of the exhausted, anguished parents and their four confused children. -How different this family portrait is from the one on the previous page (see Scrapbooking a Heritage Album: Part 7).

The viewer is then taken on a visual journey of the family as it heals and finds solace in their new home. We see the family's duplex in Allentown, with Peter's first car, a classic Oldsmobile, and we see early family photos taken on Sundays after church. The quote in the center of the left-hand page reminds us of what is truly important: "The Best Thing to Hold onto in Life is Each Other".

These photos were taken frequently to assure relatives back in Hungary that we were doing just fine. The clothes on our backs may have been from the Salvation Army, but they were always clean and well-pressed. The blossoms of the flower -cut out of patterned paper (a recurring theme throughout the album) -points to the family's second home in Highland Park, New Jersey, where we moved two years after arriving in the States, as my dad acquired better employment (and as you can see in the driveway, a better car).

Scrapbooking ones heritage is very different from scrapbooking a vacation, or a special event, or even daily life. There is a sense of capturing years of life in a visual time capsule. There is a sense of responsibility in presenting moments of history truthfully, but with a personal point of view. There is also a sense of pride that we feel as scrapbookers -we are family historians preserving stories that may otherwise be forgotten, and telling them in a way that will make future generations want to remember. xo -Enikö

Scrapbooking a Heritage Album: Part 7

On the following pages of my Family Heritage Scrapbook, you see my complete family as we were in the 1950's. All four children are enjoying the benefits of loving grandparents, and life in Budapest. We lived on Vaci Utca, a very elegant neighborhood and had a very nice life. Behind the scenes, politically, there was a lot going on. The Hungarian youth, tired of the oppression of the oppressive communist regime and the unfair practices of the Secret Police, decided to organize a peaceful demonstration to voice thier desire for freedom of speech among other democratic freedoms. The Hungarian Revolution broke out on October 23, 1956, practically on our doorstep. A month later, after the deaths of hundreds of revolutionaries -many of them only in their teens,  the aftermath of the failed revolution became a serious threat to the Farkas family. Peter, the handsome and inventive engineer, fearing that the occupying Russian communists would ship him to Moscow for his knowledge, packed up his wife Edith and their four children and set out on foot in the middle of the night to walk his family to freedom.

Naturally, there is a lot more to the story, but often in a scrapbook layout, we wish to tell the essence of the events in a more personal and concise way. (Historical details or personal accounts of the story may be included by slipping the "secret journaling" in an envelope or some other format on the page).The layout above shows the happy family as it was before the Hungarian Revolution of '56, then brings the viewer's eye to the bottom of the right-hand page, where we see a newspaper clipping of the Russian tanks that lined the Budapest streets after the revolution failed.

You can view details of the left-page scrapbook layout here:

 

The title "Farewell Home" hints that something is about to disrupt the harmony of this family. The journaling in the circle on the left gives us more detail. The right-hand scrapbook page below illustrates the contrast between the happy family and the war that is erupting around them:

Next to the copy of the newspaper photo (always use a copy printed on acid-free paper rather than the original, which often contains chemical residues harmful to your photographs) the journaling describes the family's plight in more detail. If you're interested, and you're having trouble reading the journaling, you can enlarge it by double-clicking on the page.

It is important to include "the good, the bad, and the ugly" when scrapbooking a family's history. Future generations will be just as interested in the difficult times...perhaps even more so...as in the happy moments of a family's heritage.

This post is particularly poignant to me at this time with all that is happening currently with the protests in the Middle East. It is easy for those that have always lived in freedom to take it for granted, but to those that live in oppression, the possible attainment of freedom is worth many sacrifices...

In celebration of Freedom everywhere, Enikö

Scrapbooking a Heritage Album: Part 6

Last week I posted pages about the boys in the Farkas family...this week is all about the girls. The layout above illustrates how eight photos can be incorporated in a single-page design without feeling crowded. Also of note: I tried something new on these pages -computer printing on ink jet transparencies. The one I used was by Avery and it is best if you print out the journaling on plain paper first to test the size and placement, then be sure to follow the package directions on which side to print on (naturally I found this out the hard way). It was a great way to include a lot of information in a limited amount of space. I also used it on the title "A Girl at Last!" for uniformity. The above layout is of yours truly and is embellished with flowers cut by hand from patterned paper from Paper Loft's Grandma's House line. Some of the flowers were enhanced with an application of Ranger's Glossy Accents, which add dimension as well as a nice shine. This is a great reminder that scrapbooking embellishments need not stress your budget. We often overlook opportunities to use images from patterned paper as fabulous and inexpensive accents to our pages. This product by Ranger is similar to glitter glue, minus the glitter. It is very easy to apply and works best when applied generously, but it is important to let it dry thoroughly (preferably overnight) before handling or slipping into a sheet protector.

As you can see below, the next page is centered around our sister, Ildi. Her page includes six photos and is designed to be compatible to the page that sits to the left of it in the Heritage Album. Many of the same elements were used on both pages to make them coherent. (She was an adorable baby, wasn't she - and a blond!)

I am particularly fond of the colors used on these pages. The Heritage Album started out in mostly brown and sepia tones to reflect the era that my parents were born in and then the couple's war-torn courtship. With the introduction of children into the mix, a little more color is added to the pages, illustrating the joy that children undoubtedly added to the family.

I hope you're enjoying this series about my family's heritage and that by now you, too, are working on your own Heritage Album. If you've enjoyed this post, please leave me a message below and do subscribe to my blog.

Sharing the Love, Enikö

Scrapbooking a Heritage Album: Part 5

First comes Love, then comes Marriage...

Yes, we know what comes next in my Scrapbooking a Heritage Album series...

It was quite the challenge to fit six photos of my brother Attila on a single-page scrapbook layout and still maintain order. Notice, once again, the use of the "power of 3's"...Three large photos carry the eye to the three smaller photos, and the three journaling blocks tell the story. There are also three areas in which the striped paper was used as matting. Using 3's will not necessarily guarantee balance in scrapbooking, but when the items are placed in a harmonious way, it can create pleasing order on a layout. In the photos, we see a happy, but contemplative boy. The outfits are precious and I'm very fond of the photo of Attila being fed by his maternal grandmother, Mami at our summer cottage in Erd, Hungary. The gnome was a beloved fixture in the garden of the cottage.

Opposite the layout of Attila, my brother Csaba makes his entrance into the Heritage Album...

Here, it is the repeated use of circular images that moves the eye effortlessly from the date of Csaba's birth to his name. I chose these photos very carefully, since they needed to illustrate the relationship between the brothers without words, since I wanted to limit my journaling. In the upper left-hand corner, we see Csaba helping his older brother button his jacket. (I thought this was a particularly sweet picture.) Below that, we see the brothers hanging out their heads from our summer cottage window with mischief on their faces. The photo of Csaba in his mother's arms shows the love she felt for her beautiful toddler. The next photo shows big brother Attila coming to the defense of his little brother in a clearly protective gesture. To the right, another photo taken at the summer cottage shows the boys frolicking in their pajamas. -All together, the closeness between them is quite apparent in this layout, hence the story is told.

Details that are noteworthy in these Heritage Album scrapbook layouts:

• The scroll on the upper right of Attila's page was continued from the patterned paper onto the matting with a similar rubber stamp.
• A simple word such as "Cherish" or "Together" is often enough of a title to give the layout meaning and direction.
• When using many photos on a layout, it is best to use embelishments sparingly, such as the copper brad which attaches the date of Csaba's birth and the ribbon that softens the look of the journaling tag, which both add interest to the layout -without distracting from the photos and the story-telling.

Stay warm my friends, and take pleasure in scrapbooking your family's heritage.

Sharing the Love, Enikö

Scrapbooking a Heritage Album: Part 4

In Part 4 of my latest scrapbooking project, my family's Heritage Album, we have come to the engagement of  my parents, Edith and Peter.Theirs was an interesting courtship, indeed. Peter literally risked his life on several occasions just to have a date with his love. There were times that the train to Budapest that he was traveling on, was stopped as World War II bombers were spotted, and my dad and the other passengers had to scurry off the train to hide in the nearby bushes. My mom told tales of their dates where the entire evening would be spent holding hands in a community bomb shelter, where even resting her head on Peter's shoulder was considered inappropriate behavior. -So kissing had to wait until they could sneak away to a secluded bench on Margaret Island in the middle of the Danube. "So romantic", I always thought as a naive young girl.

So in the scrapbook page above, I wanted to capture the little bit of intimacy they were allowed to share in that straight-laced, war-torn society. If you look closely, you'll see that Edith is showing off her engagement ring in this photo. The scrapbook layout itself was inspired by  a workshop I attended at the Creative Keepsakes Scrapbook Convention in Manchester, NH. The basic layout (sans photo, title, and the addition of the metal keyholes & the metal key -both by Tim Holtz) is the copyrighted design of the Creative Crafts Group, and the workshop was sponsored by Creating Keepsakes Magazine.

As I mentioned in earlier posts in this scrapbooking series, even though I've been designing my own scrapbook pages for many years, I thoroughly enjoyed incorporating someone else's designs into my work - and loved adding my own spin on things. I also love discovering new scrapbooking papers. The bulk of this Heritage Album was created with patterned paper from Paper Loft's Grandma's House line, and they suited the sepia tones that I chose for my Photoshop Elements-enhanced photos. This next page, in which I celebrate the wedding, is entirely of my own design: 

Here we see the happy couple as they looked at their civil ceremony as well as at their church wedding. My mom often reminisced about the sparseness of the church on her wedding day. -Flowers were scarce during the war-time wedding. Apparently the lovely caretaker at the church got her hands on a field of baby's breath and filled the church with them. Edith said it looked like heaven, but she always mentioned that she wished there were more flowers. Her story was my inspiration for adding the lovely paper flowers (mostly from Prima) that caress her photo. Here are the two pages side-by-side, as they appear in the Heritage Album:

Notice that the metal elements that embellish the layout on the left are repeated by the use of the metal brads in the center of the flowers, and the metal frame that draws the eye to the date of their union. I also like the repetition of the scalloped edge on the far left (made with a paper punch) achieved with a similar paper punch by Martha Stewart Crafts, which I used to mat two of the photographs.

Sharing the Love, Enikö

Scrapbooking a Heritage Album: Part 3

My father, Peter Farkas, celebrated his 89th birthday in June 2010. He's still handsome and quite a charmer in spite of the Parkinson's Disease that now limits his mobility. Back in the day -when he made the bold leap to leave farm-life and his family's country cottage to attend college in Budapest, I'm sure he had little idea that fate would one day land him in America. This scrapbook page is a snapshot of his rise from farm-boy to engineer.

There are no known photos of my dad as a little boy, but these pictures from his youth represent his character well. We see the house he was born in, we meet his family, we learn about the farm work he left behind, and we meet his first girlfriend. We also see his fun-loving side. When we see these two pages side-by-side, we can study the layout design a little better.

There's a playfulness to the placement of the photos and the title that reflect the playful personality of the subject. It is always a challenge to fit many photos into a layout when "storytelling" in a scrapbook without making it appear overcrowded. Here, I chose to cluster the photos by threes to create continuity. The eye travels from the profile photo on the upper left and the whimsical title in a linear fashion, glancing at the photos three-by-three, until the eye rests on the cluster of the large head shot and the journaling on the right.

Perhaps I've inspired you to start scrapbooking your own family's Heritage Album. Choose some great vintage-style paper as I did here, organize your photos (I recommend copying them first) and get started. More Heritage Album scrapbooking tips to follow soon.

ENJOY!   Enikö

Scrapbooking a Heritage Album: Part 2

When scrapbooking a Heritage Album, the intention is to capture the personalities of the ancestors and relatives being documented, in addition to their images. We don't always know much about the past history of family members, especially if they are deceased, but it is important to include what we do know, so that it may be passed on to future generations in the albums we are creating. This Heritage Album was intended to be about my parents and their four children, and the story about their flight to freedom after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 against the occupation of Communist Russia failed.

The scrapbook page above was one I put together in a workshop I attended at the Creative Keepsakes Scrapbook Convention. The layout (sans photos & title) is the copyrighted design of the Creative Crafts Group, and the workshop was sponsored by Creating Keepsakes Magazine.

As I mentioned in my last post, I've been designing my own scrapbook pages for years now, and this was the first time I incorporated someone else's design into my work. I must say that it was a lot of fun to work with some new ideas. For instance, in the layout above about my mother Edith, I was surprised how well the circle graphic worked to capture the fun-loving essence of the carefree young woman -especially since it emphasises the circular straw hat she is sporting in the photo.

The flowers in the layout were all cut-out of patterned paper (from Paper Loft's Grandma's House line)-something I had done before, but not to this extent. The following page, which sits opposite the one above in the double-page layout of the Heritage Album, is of my own design, using the same line of papers.

It's not easy to tell the story of a person in just one double-page layout, so one must choose the photos and words very carefully. In the first page, which sits on the left of the layout, the viewer sees the young woman as she looked when she met her husband, Peter. In fact, the playful straw hat photo was taken by Peter on one of their dates. The photo on the lower right of that same page was Edith's engagement photo, as indicated by the date & sentiment written in Edith's own handwriting and was given to her new fiance as a memento of the occasion.

I love that the second page takes the viewer from Edith at age 2 to age 16. We see her with both her parents and her cousin, and we see her as a budding child actress. The journaling on the right tells Edith's story in carefully selected words and brings us to the young woman who is about to meet her future husband.

Join me for Scrapbooking a Heritage Album: Part 3 to see how Peter Farkas' life was captured on my scrapbook pages. Until then, Happy Scrapbooking! Enikö

Scrapbooking a Heritage Album

I started this layout at the Creative Keepsakes Scrapbook Convention in Manchester, NH last spring. It is an amazing, very well organized convention - every scrapbooking enthusiast's dream come true. I had signed up for a workshop entitled: "Because of You" on opening day - having no idea what to expect, since it was my first event of it's kind. The first layout we put together in class was this one, above. I knew at once that it would be the first page of my Family Heritage Album. The layout is the copyrighted design of the Creative Crafts Group, and the workshop was sponsored by Creating Keepsakes Magazine.

The layout appealed to me right away, with its transparency title set off by the bold chipboard "B" and the clever juxtaposition of printed papers from Paper Loft's Grandma's House line. I added the lovely photo of my parents, Edith and Peter Farkas, on the day of their civil ceremony in Budapest (they also had a church wedding, as you will see in a later photo) and added the words "We Are" on the bottom of the page, to reflect the couple's four children, who would not exist if it wasn't for them.

While I pride myself on being a very creative scrapbook designer and layout artist, I thoroughly enjoyed following along with the class, being inspired by another's designs for a change - using them as a springboard for the rest of the album. The exercise forced me to step outside of my comfort zone and to embrace combinations of patterned papers that I may never have combined on my own.

This second page, also designed by Creative Crafts Group, was the perfect place for my maternal great-grandparents' wedding picture. I added some of my own touches, such as the rub-on filigree in the upper left corner, the brads holding up the title, and a few other minor alterations that suited my own scrabooking style a little better. Kudos to the Creative Crafts Group for the idea of the trees. I love the idea of cutting out designs from the printed paper to form the tree tops...how clever is that? Page three, which sits opposite this one in the album, continuing the "Family Tree" theme, is of my own design:

In case you're wondering, I did not use original photos in these scrapbook layouts. Many of the images I had were in sepia tones, others were in black and white; many were faded and some even damaged. I scanned them into my computer and altered them in Photoshop Elements. I wanted the album to have a uniformly soft sepia look and feel. They turned out quite beautiful against the aged-looking papers. Each photo, and just about all of the papers and embellishments used were inked on the edges with Chestnut Ink to give them an even more aged look.

So I begin the New Year by honoring my roots, my ancestors, and the sacrifices my parents made on behalf of their children. I encourage you to sign up to follow my blog - you won't want to miss the upcoming posts, which detail my family's exodus from our homeland after the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1956 in search of freedom and a new home. Many wonderful ideas to use in your own scrapbooking and Family Heritage Album will follow as well.

(If you're interested in attending a Creative Keepsakes Scrapbook Convention just click on this link for a list of upcoming locations and dates.)

Spreading the Love, Enikö