Spring Melancholy

Hello all and happy Sunday!  I've managed some intermittent blog-visiting this week - apologies if I haven't made it round to you yet, I'm doing my best.  And I've been squeezing in some art and craft playtime too (we had our one and only two-day-weekend last week - albeit Sunday/Monday - so it felt like a luxuriously long time!).   So in between sharing the new stamp samples, I'm here with something new for you today... a journalling spread to say hello to Spring.

Not that there's much sign of Spring here in New York at the moment... we keep getting snow overnight, though it mostly vanishes through the next day - though we are enjoying fairly frequent blue skies and sunshine, but c-o-o-o-l-d!








The tag which forms the main focal point here has been sitting on my NYC craft table since almost the first day I arrived.

To crack open my travelling stash, I did some Distress Ink blending and then dipping and spritzing with some of my favourite springtime colours.















I then added the meadow flower stamp in Olive Archival, and then got stuck.  I really wanted to add some of the new TH die-cut flowers, but I have neither dies nor a die-cutting machine with me, so that was really a non-starter.













On another day, I'd stuck a couple of torn pieces of book page into the kraft journal I have with me, and gesso'd them, and happened to add the same meadow flower stamp (not with any idea then of connecting the two... it's just I have only limited stamp selections with me).  I didn't take a picture of that stage, but you can imagine it I'm sure.











Cut forward a few weeks, and the new theme of "Hello Spring" popped up at Art Journal Journey, and suddenly inspiration struck... to combine the tag and the pages together, and off we went.













Though I don't have the dies with me, I do have Tim's Wildflower stamp set, so that became the next layer of stamping, both on the pages as wild background stamping...














... and on the tag in a more "finished" version.  I've used white paint pen to add flower head detailing.














I wanted to echo the intense DI colours of the tag over on the facing page, so Dina Wakley's acrylic paints came into play for the vivid wash of the sky.  It's a combination of Turquoise and Peacock, applied with plenty of water.













I love that, being opaque and highly pigmented, it works over the kraft as well as over the whitewashed book page.











I liked it so much that I did some spattering with it too, as well as adding some around the foot of the page to bring even more colour to the grassy hedgerows.  There's some olive green watercolour paint going on at the feet of the flower stems too, to add more depth.













All the lid-stamping, in various sizes, is also done with Dina's paint, the trusty White.

I love the bubbles of light dancing around the page, almost a Bokeh effect.













The Idea-ology Paper Dolls always bring an air of nostalgia to any project, and I think that's particularly true of this grouping.

I'm sure they partly prompted the words I later added, scribbled in white pen across both pages.












For all the joys that spring brings, I find that there's also a touch of melancholy about it... maybe something about knowing how short the spring will be, or memories of springtimes past, or lost youth or whatever. 

The Germans have a word for the feeling of weariness and sadness which can overcome you at this time of year - Frühjahrsmüdigkeit (literally early year weariness or spring fatigue).











So there's something about the combination of the childhood smiles in the photo with the bright springtime feel which actually makes me a little melancholy.  It seems topsy turvy, but there it is.










If you'd rather just say hello to spring in a nice cheerful way, then look away now, but if you're curious, here's what is scrawled across the page spread in white pen:

When I look back, it seems to me that it was always spring or summer, and that there was always laughter.  But that can't be true, can it?  So when the spring sunshine arrives, along with the joy I find I am filled with an aching melancholy, for the lost springs which have gone and for the winters to come.












It's usually a sort of pleasurable melancholy - a wistfulness - full of memories and hopefulness along with the sadness, so don't worry about me too much!

The butterflies, unbelievably, have made several trips back and forth across the Atlantic - strong wings! - in my travelling stash envelope of ephemera.  They were here last year and the year before without being used.











They're made with the Tim Holtz punch and were left over from some project years ago (just found it - it was these money envelopes back in May 2017!), so I tucked them into the travelling stash, thinking that one day they might come in handy.













Now, finally, they get to take their place on a project!  It's a sign of how often I return to the same colour zones that they match perfectly in their new setting. 














Some simple twine through the top of the tag finishes everything off.









I hope you enjoyed taking a walk in my springtime meadow, and I hope you'll be filled with the joys of spring in due course (the proper kind, not the sad kind!).

Thanks so much for stopping by today, and I hope to see you again soon.  We're about to head in to the technical rehearsals for Julius Caesar , and then Dress Rehearsal and Previews, so the days get even longer and more intense... so when I say "soon", that may turn out to be a somewhat elastic term!  But happy crafting in the meantime, and I'll see you on the other side.

The word "happy" would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
Carl Jung

I'd like to share this at Art Journal Journey where Jo's theme this month is Hello Spring
And I hope they enjoy the spring sunshine over at the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge where the challenge is Whatever the Weather
At Moo Mania this fortnight, they are inviting us to get Close to Nature, so this should fit right in