Where are they now?

Hello again!  It's been pretty quiet on the crafting front here at Words and Pictures (though there have been plenty of travel "post"cards - don't miss the latest ones, Beijing - The Forbidden City Part III and Beijing - The Artists' Quarter if you're a travel photo junkie), but now we're in the midst of a flurry of creative activity.

If you missed yesterday's Beautiful Moments guest post for Frilly and Funkie, I would love it if you had time to check that out, and there's more excitement coming very soon, but right now it's time for a new challenge at A Vintage Journey.

It's been ages since I've managed to join in with an inspiration piece, but I'm really happy to be back for Astrid's wonderful Texture or Embossing Pastes theme.  I don't have to be asked twice to use texture paste, especially when crackle paste is included in the list!

This large 12 x 12 canvas has actually been sitting on my craft room floor in a part-done state for months.  (I kid you not, it really was months - I had to remove a layer of dust before I could carry on!)













The background was pretty much in place, and I'd decided on the photo and some of the embellishments, so all I had to do was gather a few more bits and bobs and work out where to go next.














I'd started with some fabulous papers from the Polish UHK Gallery.  They no longer seem to have this collection - My Dear Watson - but they still have some amazing designs.

I loved the woman in glasses, with such gentle sadness in her gaze ...












... and then those spectacles are echoed in the optometrist's sign over the bottle of poison - but there's something so ominously watchful about those eyes compared to the woman's look.











I'd already been the playing with the DecoArt Crackle Paste - smearing it onto some dry-embossed number panels (an Andy Skinner idea from one of his workshops I've been on)...














... as well as in random areas here and there.
















I intensified the look of the crackles by adding and wiping away DecoArt Antiquing Cream in Raw Umber.














And then started to add colour using Distress Sprays and various DecoArt Media Fluid Acrylics.













I think when I started making this many months ago, I'd had a plan to work with more colours but when push came to shove I found myself reaching for my favourite blues and browns.














The blues give that hint of melancholy...















... especially when you add the touches of rusty decay. 














Influenced by the images already in place on the papers, I found myself automatically reaching for the haunting photo of the group of children from Tim Holtz's Found Relatives.

There's something about the ominous question "where", which makes me fear for their welfare.















It's not reassuring that the word Death hovers over them so balefully.
















There are objects and ephemera from their lives around them, fragments of lace and collected bobbins - their mother perhaps was a seamstress...














... but the ornate picture frames speak of reasonable prosperity.  The sewing may just have been a hobby.

We'll never know for certain, as these few fragments and artefacts seem to be all that remains of the family.













Now even their memory is fading, overgrown with rambling vines and trailing ivy.

(You'll recognise the Calico Craft Parts, I'm sure.)












But in that forgetfulness the possibility for fresh atrocities arises - a terrible danger... "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", as George Santayana says.  















All the layered tabs and tags are from the UHK papers too... the Polish language gives us some idea of where this family are from.











Perhaps they are some of the countless numbers of Jews forced to live in the enclosed ghettos of Nazi-occupied Poland.

Or, if you'd like a glimmer of light thrown onto the story, perhaps they were some of those lucky few rescued and smuggled out by Polish Catholics like Irena Sendler...







... and that's why their mother, in what remains of her short life, has been left wondering "where" they now might be, praying that somehow, against the odds, they would make their way to safety and be welcomed in.

I don't know... I prefer to leave this one full of questions, and let you fill in the gaps with your own stories.  They somehow seem to come bubbling up from between the cracks.








I hope you'll come and play along with our Texture and Embossing Pastes challenge this month.

You'll find plenty more inspiration from my amazing team-mates over at A Vintage Journey if you click the link.

And if all this has been a bit too doom and gloom for you, my pages yesterday for Frilly and Funkie were a lot more uplifting - full of light and Beautiful Moments, I promise - so you might prefer those!

Thanks so much for stopping by again today.  I did warn you it was a busy few days here with new projects!  I'm back on Monday with a very exciting post, so I'll hope to see you then.  In the meantime, have a peaceful and enjoyable weekend everybody.








To save one Jewish child, ten Poles and two Jews had to risk death.  To betray that same child and the family that hid him required only one informer or, worse still, one blackmailer.  The risk of being caught by the SS was not prison, but death - death for the entire family.

Fear makes you weak; anger makes you strong.

You see a man drowning, you must try to save him even if you cannot swim.
All quotes from Irena Sendler

I won't send roses...

Hello everyone.  I'm so happy to be hosting the challenge at Our Creative Corner for April - I hope you'll find time to see the inspiration offered up by my fantastic team-mates, and to come and play along.  But just before we get into that, if you're looking for my Artistic Stamper challenge post from earlier today, just click on the link.  Sorry, the 1st of the month is always busy!

Back to Our Creative Corner - and this month I'm inviting you to do your creating "With A Song In Your Heart".  We'd like to see creations inspired by and including a song title and/or lyrics.  I'd like to see the words (either the title or some lyrics or both) appearing on your make, and you also need to let us know in your post the song which has inspired you.  In an ideal world it would be lovely if you included a link to the music, so we can listen while we look, but that bit's not compulsory!

I started with a song I've loved for years, but it took me by surprise, leading me to quite an unexpected place - pink, and very flowery!  And it ended up spreading onto not one but two jumbo size #12 tags, and into another mammoth post - sorry!!

And I don't really know if this counts - since clearly I was already making it at the same time, but evidently I was channelling Tim Holtz through the ether... have you seen his glorious April tag yet?!  So I'm going to enter these in the 12 Tags, even though they happened before I saw the tutorial!  Though I will have a play later in the month anyway... just for fun, and to learn more.

The song, I Won't Send Roses, is from the musical Mack and Mabel.  It's about two of the luminaries of the early cinema, Mack Sennett and Mabel Normand, and in the song the hard-bitten, cynical, older Mack warns his young star Mabel not to fall for him since he's just not the romantic type, and it'll do her no good.

If you click on the name of the song, you can listen as you look.

There are versions with better sound quality, but with the link above you get the added bonus of the genius of ice dancers Torvill and Dean.

It's through them that I first discovered the song - initially in their brilliant Mack and Mabel routine in 1982 (still my favourite competitive routine, I think, over the much-lauded Bolero).









In the M&M routine, you hear just one refrain of Roses within the overture, but then Torvill and Dean used the whole song in a fabulous gala performance to close the 1984 Olympics... that's the one I've given you the song link for, just below the main photograph.  It still makes me cry, though I've watched it hundreds of times.  Utter perfection.








I think one of the things which appeals to me about this song - besides its soaring melody line which is just so beautiful - is the bitter sweet sentiment behind it.

It's built on an internal contradiction, and I love that kind of thing!










He tells her he won't send roses... and yet he can see that's what she deserves.  And unfortunately, she's already fallen for him big-time, so it's a bit late for a warning, and I think he knows that.  The push-pull of that gives their relationship and this song a brilliant dramatic tension.

He won't/can't show love, but somewhere deep down he does love her - though he may not even quite recognise it himself.  He just knows that she's beautiful with roses around her.

I won't send roses, and roses suit you so.

So clearly there had to be roses.  

But I also wanted a sense of bleakness, and a touch of decay, revealing the negative side.













Their relationship didn't have a happy ending in real life (or in the musical, strictly speaking), so there are hints of rust, and the spatter of tear drops shed.










Originally, I had everything on the one tag, but it got really crowded - despite the giant 10.5 x 5.125 inch size - especially with the whole line of the lyrics in one go.

(The background paper is by UHK Gallery, with some Pumice Stone stencilling through my new favourite stencil, TH's Latticework.)










Once the flowers were on top of the underlying structure, I could barely find anywhere to fit the rusted washers which had been a major part of the original swirl of ideas!

It was all just too busy... plus I really didn't want to cover up those bare branches and trellises too much - I really liked them!










Breakthrough time came when I realised that I could just shift the roses across to create a whole
other contrasting tag, reflecting that turnaround in the thought in the lyrics.










I had a lovely time playing with the Trellis Frameworks die: the empty frame for those non-existent roses in the first tag...












... and a rusted hint of it underlying the longed-for rose bower in the second.

I created the rusted pieces of trellis with various embossing powders and paints on some thick card, and the wooden branches are actually wooden, altered with some gesso and paint.













I found I needed to add some colour to the very wintry neutrals so that the two tags looked as though they belonged together more.  

I thought some of my glass pebbles would be a great start, this time with a pinky-red spritzed book page underneath, rather than my usual greeny-blue ones!

All the splattering came later.








The two book page butterflies were late additions - beautiful creatures which arrived, ready-distressed, with an order from my fabulous team-mate Linda, a.k.a. the Funkie Junkie.










They seemed to perch perfectly on the wooden branches, adding some dimension to match those huge flowers across the way.

And you'll see there are plenty of my rusted washers, now fully visible in all their decaying glory.









For the roses, I gathered up some of the many paper flowers I seem to have accumulated, despite only rarely using them on projects.

Clearly there's a deep attraction on some level, which I find hard to admit even to myself...

What, me?  Girly flowers?  And pink?  Really?!  (Hello, Mack Sennett - here's part of why I understand your levels of self-deception!)











I used lots of gesso and spritzing on them (mainly using the sprays I made up with Luminarte Primary Elements powders, though there are some 13 Arts ones in there too).

Some flowers started out a darker colour, rather than white or cream, so they took the inks differently.










I love the colour variation that gives across the whole bouquet.

And of course some of them got left as cream or ivory - until the spattering, that is!










There are more of the glass beads nestled in amongst the flowers here - again, a way to tie the two tags together.

The woman from the Tim Holtz Classics #5 set is a regular feature here at Words and Pictures.

There's something infinitely flexible about her expression, so she can be sad and cold one moment and warm and content the next, depending on what you feed into her eyes with your own thoughts.









There's a little more rust creeping in at the top, with some rusty wire twined around the feminine softness of the ribbons, as Mack is already twined around Mabel's heart.

So that's the journey this song took me on.  I hope you enjoyed it.

Regulars at Words and Pictures will know that my creations are quite often triggered by songs (Write a little more often or the recent You Don't Bring Me Flowers for instance), so this is a very natural way to work for me.




I know, however, that it posed a real challenge to some of my team-mates, but they stepped bravely and brilliantly out of their comfort zones - and I absolutely love what they've created as a result.  Do check out their beautiful projects, along with all the challenge rules and details, here at Our Creative Corner and I hope you'll be inspired to play With a Song in Your Heart - you might surprise yourself!

And don't forget there's a new Artistic Stamper challenge kicking off today too!

Words make you think.  Music makes you feel.  A song makes you feel a thought.
Yip Harburg (song lyricist who wrote, amongst many many others, the lyrics for Somewhere Over the Rainbow, not to mention the rest of the songs in The Wizard of Oz, and Brother, Can You Spare a Dime)

I'd like to enter these as my April tags in Tim Holtz's 12 Tags of 2014.  I know it's cheeky - but I just can't believe the coincidence - so it's irresistible, I'm afraid!
And at the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge it's The One With All The Rules a.k.a. Anything Goes.