Follow Your Path

By the time you read this I'll probably be in the air, bound for New York for another working trip; or perhaps I'll even already arrived (depending on when you arrive here at Words and Pictures).  I'm all for following your path, as this journal page recommends, but my path does seem to involve a lot of travelling, one way or another!

We've been dabbling in green and even yellow (!) for several of the past few posts (mostly obsessed with the new Organic Thinlits die - see it in action in on a tag or a journalling page), and there are some more of those colours to come.  But I'm taking a diversion back into my favourite blues and browns for this page, working in the France Papillon altered book again.





I started by gessoing the pages and then scraping on some old crackle paste just before bedtime.  It was fairly hard and uncooperative, so I wasn't at all sure it would work.

But the next morning there were some really cool crackled parts, which I spritzed with Distress Spray.











I can't remember now whether it was Faded Jeans or Stormy Sky, but so far at this point, it's all only one colour.

I love that where I heated the pages to dry the Distress Spray, the crackle and gesso have all interacted to create these fabulous bubbles of extra texture.












The next step was fiddling with the composition of lots of metal elements to go on the page.  And I also had a pretty clear idea about which word stickers I wanted to use.












I seem to be in a floral frame of mind at the moment, because I was driven to the next step almost without realising it was happening.














I stamped these gorgeous trailing tendrils (from a Rubber Dance set called Weed Love) in Sepia and Coffee Archival here and there - well, almost everywhere, really.













I'd also added some splatters of a slightly more vivid blue by this point - the Cosmos Blue Colorex ink, much beloved in my Winter Journal pages - and some script stamping done in Watering Can Archival.












I realised that the weight of all that metal might be too much for the book pages - even though they were already glued back to back for extra strength.  So I glued on some reinforcing kraft card panels behind where the cogs and clocks were going to go.














Then I got alcohol inky with my metal embellishments.















All of them got a splash of either Ginger, Rust or Espresso...















... or sometimes a combination of more than one of them.














Now to the word stickers, from Finnabair's Art Daily collection.  As a text & voice coach, the first phrase leapt straight out at me.












It's very important not to hurry things, especially with big changes afoot.

This sticker put in an appearance on my What you seek spread too, in one of its other colourways, so it's definitely calling to me at the moment.












And this one's pretty self-explanatory.  Gut instinct has played a big part in my life decisions, and when you follow those instinctive prompts, you have to go head first and full on.

Above all... never give up.  My junior school (elementary school to the Americans) motto was "Persevere!", so this idea has been with me for a long time.













There's lots about this page spread which makes me very happy.  The colours, of course, but also the fairly spare composition, even though the textures and layers are complex and detailed.












There's a simplicity to the circular shapes of cogs and clocks, with the twining tendrils providing a more organic contrast, and the word stickers giving us the only straight lines and corners.














Ah yes, those tendrils - that really was the step that lifted this page into something special for me.














And I honestly don't remember the conscious decision to do it.  I just found myself there with the ink and the stamp ready to go!












I always love my crackle, of course (I've put two different kinds in my travelling stash for NYC, which is probably excessive, but there you go).  And for a last minute touch I highlighted the crackle with some gilding wax.













There are touches of the gilding just brushed onto the metal pieces and even the edges of the word stickers in places.  It's a lovely extra touch of light.














Brown, blue, crackle, book text and words... what more could a woman want?  Well, maybe just a little more time...










I'm going to take my time settling in to the swing of rehearsals in New York, but some time soon I'll share what's in my travelling stash with you, if you're interested.  And there's another journalling page heading your way shortly, done before I left the UK, with some more of Tim's new Thinlits in action (and some more yellow!!).

Before that, though, I'll be back in a few days with a very exciting post - in the evening on the 13th, in fact... unlucky for some, but I don't think it applies in this case - at least, I really hope not!  I do hope you'll be able to join me then for some big news.

In the meantime, thanks so much for stopping by today, and I hope you'll all be following your paths passionately this weekend.  Happy crafting all!

When the whole world is silent, even one voice becomes powerful.
Malala Yousafzai

I'd like to make this my third and final entry for this month at the Creative Artiste Mixed Media Challenge where, as always Anything Mixed Media Goes
Anything Creative Mixed Media Goes also over at the Love 2 Create Mixed Media Challenge so I'm playing along there too