Amelie

Photograph by bunchadogs & susan on Flickr.

I'm pretty sure that if you hunted down every girl on the internet that loves the film Amelie, you could fill a lot of football stadia. However, this does not deter me. I love Amelie. What, frankly, isn't to love? It's a film about appreciating the small things. Eccentricity. And it gives me warm, fuzzy feelings in my stomach. Not to mention the wonderful sense of style throughout the film; a whimsical grainy, lost-in-time atmosphere. If you have developed a taste for eating raspberries off your fingertips or plunging your hand into sacks of grain, then you might be interested in further Amelie-fying your life.

Polyvore is stuffed with Amelie-inspired sets; here's one I put together:

There are lots beautiful sets (that my amateur blogging skills cannot get to cut and paste) that can be found here. My favourite thing about most of these sets is the simplicity of the items involved; it goes to show the power of a colour scheme and a garden gnome!

However, for those who want Amelie's philosophy, and not her clumpy shoes and cardigans, I've found some sites dedicated to making the small and ordinary an event. PostCrossing is a vast network of snail mail enthusiasts swapping postcards with people all over the world. It only takes a few simple steps and a few postcards sent to start recieving postcards from all over the world! Keri Smith, illustrator and author, offers activities and prompts for your own creative revolutions, however great or small. I sincerely recommend her 100 things, a list of creativity-based prompts for your life and sketchbook. Her blog, Wish Jar, is a great starting point for viewing the ordinary in a whole new light.

Lomography, whether you love or hate the company, is a wonderful concept. Looking for subjects for your spontanous photographs, as I found, makes you see details and patterns in very ordinary things. If you prefer concept over the cost, great sources are Just Shoot, a collective based in Manchester, and the lomography group on Livejournal. I'm sure I'll write a longer article on Lomography at some point, complete with my own badly-lit shots.

These are just a few to get you started; there are so many ways to appreciate the everyday! I love Of Mornings, a community dedicated to photographing your first meal of the day. Go for a walk and look at the flowers growing in the cracks in the pavement; eat a clementine and draw or photograph each segment. Slip poems between the napkins in a cafe or collect apple stickers.

If loving Amelie makes me an internet cliche, then baby, I wouldn't be any other way.