Feeling a little sombre

Hello all... I've been having a weird couple of weeks, feeling about as grey as the weather has been.  Not actually ill, but not quite up to par; restless, unsettled, and unable to get anything constructive done - especially at the craft table.  Things just kept on ending up in the bin.

Then the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge offered up Artist Trading Cards as the theme.  I love ATCs (I still miss the Fun With ATCs challenge where I was on the design team until it stopped running), and they're really small, so I decided I must be able to manage a couple of 2.5 x 3.5 bits of crafting... and I did, but the grey mood made its way onto the craft mat, so it's a sombre little set of ATCs I have for you today.

And there were still stages during this process where I nearly gave the whole thing up in disgust.  So I thought I'd share some of the struggles along the way... maybe it's useful to know that it's not always all plain sailing around here!

Things kept not going according to plan, and nothing pleased me, but I tried to embrace the discomfort and push on through, and somewhere at the end of it I managed to make my peace with them.














I think they do reflect a truth about how I've been feeling, so that's something, even if its not the most cheerful of destinations.














I started by gluing scraps of book page across the top end of a piece of A4 manila craft card.















I gave that a watery wash of gesso and scraped on some Watercolour Ground with a palette knife for texture.














Next step was a good spritzing of Pumice Stone Distress Spray.  You'll see mine's taken on quite a greenish tinge, but I don't dislike the green-grey tone.











Hang on... Time Out - I'm lying... that wasn't the very next step.  There was a whole mess in between.  I tried some wrinkle-free distressing with lots of greens - ink and Oxide - and hated it completely.

I rinsed away as much as I could, but it took a good coat of Snowflake Fresco paint to completely cover it up - and then I was cross because I'd lost all my book text.  They almost went in the wastepaper basket, but this was where I decided I couldn't put another thing in the bin.  I had to push through...










So I cut my three ATCs from what I had.  The last one was so wonky I nearly dropped down to just a pair...

I mean, this is how it's been - I can't even cut straight lines at the moment!  But I stuck a bit of chopped off card back on to even it up, and carried on.










That cobbled-together edge determined the next step... I thought some tissue tape would disguise it quite well, so all three ATCs got a nice strong column stuck down along the edge.

If you look closely, you'll see the extra stuck on card under the Paris postmark over on the right!











It's not how I would usually use tissue tape.  I prefer delicate shreds of the stuff, but desperate times call for desperate measures.  (Okay, even I can hear that's a little melodramatic for the situation at hand!)













And, having done it, I started to be less cross about the whole process and a little more interested in where to go next...













... though still far less decisive than usual.

I hadn't even managed to decide on the orientation yet - portrait or landscape.













I needed something to make me happier so I reached for meadow flowers - the Tim Holtz set of Wildflowers silhouette stamps - and stamped my favourite in a slightly different position on each ATC.













I used Watering Can Archival and - for the first time - my stamping platform.  Just as well I did... over a textured surface like this, it's fantastic to be able to go for a second stamping to get the full definition.













And things definitely started to look up when I added some lid-stamping with gesso (large circles are done with a Distress Paint lid, smaller ones with an alcohol ink lid).










But I hit another delay at that point and pottered around for a long time trying all sorts of possible embellishing, discarding idea after idea in disgust.

I settled on the messy thread quite early on, but couldn't quite work out what else belonged there.  I nearly left them just like this.








I knew I wanted words, but resisted - at first - the idea of using the same quote on all the ATCs, even though they were the words calling most loudly to me.  It's the Pythagoras quote from my EAB02 Darkness and Light set.

So in the end I yielded and stamped it three times in Watering Can.  I clear-embossed them and trimmed them, but they were too blockish in the full form, so I started to trim them again.










As I was slicing them up, I was arguing with myself about where to make the cuts - speaking the words out loud to hear the difference - and found that I actually quite liked having the variations...












According to where you split the phrase, it slightly changes the emphasis and therefore the precise meaning.  Go on, try them out loud with the different phrasing - I dare you!














Of course, that tickled my word-head no end - these are the things I make my living out of! - so I decided to let it play out on the ATCs themselves, so they each play with the phrase slightly differently.

The simple wooden buttons provide an echo of the lid-stamping circles in the background...














... and I finished off with some doodled white pen frames around the edges.

In the end, those strong stripes of tissue tape have softened into the background...











... and I do love the textures here, so that, although I wouldn't say these exactly make me happy, they do somewhat soothe my soul.  And it certainly made me feel a bit better to have got something finished.







Thanks for putting up with my small helping of sombreness and my stop-start process on these ATCs.  It may feel like there are lots of process photos where not very much seems to have changed... but that's exactly what it was like trying to get these done.  I kept getting stuck and having to really battle for the next step.  But I am glad I persevered.

I hope you all have a lovely weekend.  I'm off to visit friends, so hopefully that will reset my internal mood and I'll be back next week full of inspiration and delight.  Happy crafting all!

I'm offering these up for the Artist Trading Card theme at the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge
At Mixed Media World they have Anything Mixed Media with a Moodboard - in the mood I'm in, my eye went away from the brights to the soft green greys of the picture at the bottom right of the board, with flower heads against the sky
Anything Goes at Emerald Creek Dares, so I'd like to play along there too

It doesn't matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.
Confucius