Behold, the kindness!

On Friday morning, before I set off for Tivoli's, I got a phone call from Mel, our choir leader, about the poster for our Sea Symphony concert in December. The person who'd volunteered to make it, because he'd never done one before and wanted to have a go(!), had printed out his attempt and discovered that the picture had come out too dark and the text wasn't legible. Could I help, and have a poster ready to go to print by Monday morning?

Mel sent me his WordArt document, with a very lo-res and boring flat-horizon picture of the sea, huge white margins and capitals in green, purple, turquoise, red, dark blue and black.

I thought of all the fabulous pictures I've seen on blip of dramatic seas (the words of the piece are a poem by Walt Whitman, and start 'Behold, the Sea!' so the image has to be engaging) and I looked through some that I could remember. Very soon I realised that a picture walkingMarj took on Islay in March would be perfect. I screengrabbed it so I could start working on the text while I emailed her for permission to use it. She very kindly agreed and found and emailed me the picture impressively fast. What kind people inhabit Blip.

The choir leader and I sent my drafts back and forth a couple of times for some small tweaks (every one of Mel's emails started, 'WOW!!!' and that was not about the words or the typefaces!) and this is a not very good jpg of what went to print this morning. The printed poster should be better but even so, you'll see that graphic designers are not very respectful of their source material - I've had to lighten the foreground to make the words more legible and a lot of the dramatic spume is no longer clear. That's a shame, so please admire the original.

Thank you hugely, walkingMarj, for helping us out.

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Oh, and tile update: the lovely customer service people at the tile warehouse in Kettering have wangled a ride for my tiles on one of their vans, free! The quotes I was getting from Men and Vans were between £450 and £1,192. They'll be delivered to my building site next Tuesday.