Sunday, April 05, 2015

A Nation Mourns


A week ago, our nation lost our founding father, Mr Lee Kuan Yew, he was 91. 
He was our first Prime Minister, that led our country to independence nearly 50 years ago. Singapore was a tiny nation with not much resources at all, and he, together with his team, gave themselves to the building of this country, and brought us to where we are today. To me personally, amongst all the many accolades, his contributions are most outstanding and long-lasting in that he gave us an incorrupt government, a very safe home to grow and thrive, where many races live in harmony in a modern cosmopolitan society, where nationhood has been forged, and we are proud to be called Singaporeans.



It was a time of profound sadness and grief. It was also amazing how it bonded Singaporeans together. My family were very involved too. So I had to capture it in my PL album. I took the photos of Mr Lee off the internet, and the rest are photos taken by us, when we queued with everyone to pay our last respects. 
The journaling on the yellow card reads:
Saying goodbye to Mr Lee Kuan Yew. This week was amazing in the life of Singaporeans. We all know what he did for our country, but until he passed away, had not experienced such a unity in outpouring of national grief before. It was almost surreal, the more we heard and read, the more we felt we must personally pay respect to this founding father of our nation. So did hundreds of thousands of Singaporeans. Over the week, half a million piled into the Parliament House where he laid in state. The queues were 5 to 10 hours long, snaking everywhere, extending 24 hours overnight. We joined in too, on Thursday evening, and felt such commaraderie and unity, with young and old, from all walks of life, as everyone quietly waited, with little grumbling and a sense of determination. Which prompted Daddy to say "there is hope for Singapore!". The boys could not join us but managed to go to the Bedok tribute centre to sign the condolence book too. 

We all hope for our children to know our history and how much the founding fathers did for us, and that all of us will remember and do not forget.


The journaling on the beige card reads:
Thank you, Mr Lee Kuan Yew.
It was the human side of Lee Kuan Yew, revealed this week of mourning, that most touched a lot of us. Besides his hard-core policy, hard-nosed style (that we know and not all can agree with), we glimpsed a man sold-out for his country, given everything for his convictions only to ensure Singapore and Singaporeans thrive. The story of the Red Box, his home that remained unchanged over 60 years while Singapore transformed and advanced, his love story with his wife of 63 years, those made us realise he is human too, but one who forsook personal gain, and self interest, to make a country where we will be safe, prosperous, have equality and peace. He made us all his children and we felt like we were sending off our father or grandfather today...

Thank you for letting me share these words and thoughts as I know many of you who come to my blog are not from my part of the world. I am glad I can share about the founding father of our country with you. 

How have you scrapbooked national events? I am glad I incorporated it into our family album. I also intend to make a page or two of excepts of speeches, photos, news, eulogies that our family discussed and were moved by. Our views and feelings will be captured and that feels very satisfying and meaningful :)


In the weeks before the week of mourning,in March, life went on as usual, we did a lot in fact, especially because there was a one week school break. :)

I'm continuing to use these Monthly starting cards with circles for each day of the month, which can be decorated. I had so many photos of our outings so you will notice that I used a lot of collages in this month's pages. I used templates from Designs by Lili (4x6 photo collages No 1) and Tracy Larsen (Simply white).


I first saw the workshop for making Terraniums on Leena's blog Findingnana. Managed to 'make' the boys go with us for a family outing at this cute local shop Make Your Own. We made a terranium each, of little succulents of our own choice. We could choose our own rocks, soil, stones and decorations, so much fun! Now to keep them alive :) Here is a close up view.


On two consecutive weekends, we visited University Open Houses. R has been receiving these invites because he is due to apply by the end of this year. It was wonderful to visit as a family. J actually found that there is such a thing as a Design and Technology University that is right up his alley. Something to look forward to, maybe! R also has been completing school counselling questionnaires etc that ask him questions about what he is interested in, what kind of career he might be hoping for, and what course of study, we have been having meaningful conversations together. And much praying too. It was also fun for me and dh to visit our alma mater, we wanted to show the boys our old haunts, but things have changed so much! It felt less nostalgic and far more foreign than we anticipated. It's their world now!


My 365 photo - half monthly layouts for March are also completed.


The second half month of March is on a more sombre note, so I used more black tones to complete the layout.


And here are the Monthly starting cards for January to June. If you had donwloaded the earlier Jan and Feb ones, please note that there was a mistake in the February month, where the days was wrongly placed. Sorry!! In this download they have been fixed. 

13 comments:

  1. Wonderful tribute, Yin. It made me wonder how people responded in America when our first president died. It is amazing that you are alive to witness this time in your country's history. Someday when your boys are old, their grandchildren or great-grandchildren may be amazed to hear about how they lived when Mr. Lee was still alive.

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    1. Thanks Jenny for that perspective! I had not thought of that. It is very cool for a scrapbooker and memory keeper indeed!

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  2. Hello Yin! Seeing your templates several years ago was the start of my interest in digital scrapbooking! I am currently working on my first book and it's for my nephew's wedding. I was hoping that you would be able to answer a few questions. I made some pages and while they looked GREAT on the screen, when I printed, I saw some blurry fonts, etc. How do you know when a picture is too small to use (for example, not a lot of pixels)? How do you view your page to make sure that everything will look good once it's printer? I didn't want to go to the print shop to print each page to do a 'proof' of it. But I don't want to submit the whole book and then find out that some of the pages came out really bad. Any suggestions?

    Thanks! Sue in Dallas, TX

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    1. Hi Sue, I think the easiest way to make sure your photos on a layout will look good printed is to enlarge the layout on your screen. You would want to make sure your photoshop file is set to the right dimensions as you want them when printed - eg, 12 inches by 24 inches, at 300 dpi resolution. As you work or when you are done you can enlarge the image on screen to 100% actual view (I use Ctl + on m PC) (the % of enlargement will show on the bottom left of your screen). Then you can see how the image will look when printed, and any pictures with too few pixels will show up blurry quite clearly. That should work! Let me know if you have any more questions!

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    2. Thanks!! That worked like a charm! Thanks for pointing that out to me! I pulled up one layout that looked awesome and then when I made it bigger... uh oh! One picture was EXTREMELY blurry.

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    3. That's great! Enjoy your first book!

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  3. When I was going through my pages, I found a couple pictures that were fuzzy but I really wanted to use them as my background layer. I had run across this action and after running it several times, I got the background to be as large as I wanted without the fuzziness. I wanted to point it out to you in case you've never seen it (after all there is so much on the Internet nowadays!) Check it out at Chelles Creations and be sure to watch her video about it. Thanks again for all the inspiration!!

    http://www.chelles-creations.com/free-actions/resize-larger-action/

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    1. thanks Sue! I downloaded it, will be trying it out, this is great! Another thing I sometimes do when I want to blow up a less than perfect photo to double page background size, is to layer a textured paper over it, and changing the blending modes in photoshop. It gives a slightly grainy or textured look but is great as a background. Thanks again!

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  4. What awesome memories of such an important time in your nation's history. It is great that you have documented your impressions & feelings of this moment. Thank you also for sharing the month templates -- what a great idea!

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    1. Yes I do feel great that I could write and document our impressions and feelings of this moment in our nation's history, I'm sure my family will appreciate it even more years later. Glad you like the month templates!

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  5. Thanks so much for sharing your talents and your heartfelt love for your home country. You always make me smile as I learn about not only scrapbooking but about the world as you know it so far away on the other side of the world. You have given me insight into my aunt who came from the Phillipines. Keep up the great work!

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    1. Thank you Kathryn for your wonderful words, very heartening to know! I'm so glad!

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