Birthday Blues (and Browns and Greens!)

Hello all, and thank you for stopping by today.

There's been altogether too much pink around here lately, so I wanted to revert to some of my more favoured colour tones for my birthday (yes, today).

So here are some glimpses at work in progress inside the Dina Wakley Media Journal which I ordered at a bargain price from Joann's while I was in New York recently.

And since we're taking a bit of an art journal journey, I'd like to share the first and last pages at Art Journal Journey - somewhere I always mean to play along far more than I manage!














There's not much that is in any way "finished", except perhaps the first page, with its ripped teabag texture and finger-painted circles.  You can now see it in more detail here..













These are mostly just beginnings and backgrounds and works-in-progress.  But that's what an art journal is for, isn't it?  Exploring, and following your instinct, and not trying to force anything to be pretty or perfect or complete.













You can certainly see some of my art obsessions playing themselves out over these pages... the colours, the textures, the motifs.













I love working in the Media Journal - it's an inspiration in itself with all the different substrate surfaces.














And I will be back to add more to these pages in the future...

... but there are various "deadline projects" which need taking care of before I can have some more playtime to myself again.















These pages reflect how my New York crafting seemed to work - I would sit down to have a play, reach for something I loved, start something off, and then get completely stuck.














My creative attention was needed for my theatre work at the time, but I think these snatched moments of sticking and brushing and dripping helped to keep me sane in some pretty stressful circumstances...













.... even though they didn't necessarily lead anywhere at the time.  The burlap is so exciting to work on - a whole different way of thinking.













The blues and browns and greens are definitely part of my crafting happy place, as regulars here will be well aware.















And I'm never far from some texture paste or crackle paint, or some vintage script or ephemera, or from grasses and meadow flowers or other elements of nature.














My new and already much-loved Walnut Drawing Ink certainly got an outing amongst the finger-painted circles and splatters and splashes (aaaahhh, splatter!).














I love how the various pages in the Media Journal already have their own qualities - even the "plain paper" has a wonderful texture.












I've got plans for somehow incorporating these tags on the first of the canvas pages.  They're lightly taped in for now to keep them in place while my imagination comes to the boil.















Not quite sure how it'll go yet, but there'll be paint and mixed media and I think some interactive flaps or inserts.














And sometimes I just have to have almost all my favourite things in one go...

I've been enjoying incorporating my "proper" watercolour paints into the mixed media backgrounds, along with all the ephemera layers.













The colours make me so happy.  Who needs a focal point or a finished page?  With this one you just need to let the fingertips go wandering over the texture...











So, as I said, I hope I'll be back before long to share the first completed page in detail, and I also hope I'll be back to develop some of these backgrounds soon, or just start lots of new ones.  I'm not going to put any pressure on myself either way.







Thanks so much for stopping by today and indulging me in my birthday treat of some of my favourite things - even though most of the work is unfinished.  I hope the week is treating you well, and I'll see you all again soon.

Happiness is not a finished product, it is a work in progress.
Khang Kijarro Nguyen

With the ripped teabag papers providing texture and shadow in the first page here, as well as all the collaged ephemera in the final one including some old book pages somewhere under there, I'd like to share this at Art Journal Journey, where the fabulous Craftytrog - also Alison - is looking for pages which Recycle and Collage

A Thoroughly Modern Wedding

Hello all, I've had a busy few days away from my craft desk, and I've been missing you all - though doing my best to get round and do some visiting.  I didn't even manage to share my workdesk for yesterday's WOYWW... bah!  So I decided I'd do a very quick share today of a card I made over the summer for the wedding of some very smart, stylish, (ultra-modern stylish) friends of ours in the Czech Republic.  As you'll see, it's not in my usual mode - but was tailored to their tastes.  Good fun to play in a different way...

I used papers from the Documented collection by Simple Stories, combined with the 6x6 BoBunny Timepiece collection.

You'll see that the brilliant Tim Holtz Paper Distresser was deployed on the edges of the layered papers.

I love the text paper with all its mini-sentiments.










I blended some Vintage Photo DI onto the outside edge of the final background layer, front and back.

The married couple themselves and the heart are stickers from the Documented set, as is the bird on the inside of the card.

I layered and matted some more papers on the inside, to continue the themes... but with a switch from stripes to spots!

I even handmade an envelope from some grid-patterned kraft card from Papermania, whitewashed with Picket Fence Distress Stain, and sealed with another Documented sticker.  Since the card was about 7x7inches, no normal envelopes would fit!




By the way, these friends of ours - the wedding couple - run the most amazing, stylish, boutique accommodation in a converted farmhouse in South Bohemia, in the Czech Republic - if you're looking for a peaceful, beautiful holiday destination, you couldn't do better!

Thanks for dropping in at Words and Pictures today.  I'll be back tomorrow with my Design Team project for the new Fussy and Fancy challenge - so I'll hope to see you then.  Happy crafting in the meantime!

A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.
Mignon McLaughlin

I'm entering this in the Try It On Tuesday challenge Lots of Layers
And Papertake Weekly are celebrating their 5th Birthday with an Anything Goes with the option of celebration as a theme - celebrating a wedding here rather than a birthday, but definitely a celebration
Lisa Somerville's Blogger Challenge this week is Falling For You - looking for love themed cards in Autumn colours - so I'd like to share it there too... Quite apart from anything else, I love the wordplay of the title!

In an English country garden

I really enjoyed creating this card... and telling myself stories as I went!  From the moment I saw the colour challenge inspiration photo on the Daring Cardmakers challenge site, I knew which papers I would be drawing on - the 7 Gypsies Conservatory collection.

And it wasn't only the colours which led me there; the eggs are also a featured element within the papers; they have an Edwardian nature-collector theme, so there are botanical drawings, fauna and flora, and plenty of birds and eggs around all over them.

None of my Distress Inks really tone precisely to these colours, so I ended up playing lots of blending and layering games, to get combinations of colours which would relate to the challenge colours.

Over at Sir Stampalot, they want to know about my 'crafty passion'. Well, anyone who's visited recently could tell them I seem at the moment to be fairly firmly lodged in the world of Shabby Chic, so what with that and the feel of the Conservatory papers, it was pretty clear, pretty quickly, how the style of the card would develop.  So here it is:

The eagle-eyed amongst you will have spotted the green ribbon tab at the bottom - you lift up the front to get a form of what's called, I think, an easel card...


The inside has a more turquoisey feel to the bluey-greens, and some memorabilia.


The story in my head is of the woman in the garden remembering an affair of her youth, and all the mementos she's kept from those halcyon days.


I found both the photos on a Google image search trawl.

There doesn't seem to be a record of the garden lady's identity but Lily Elsie (on the right) was a hugely popular Edwardian actress and singer, renowned for her beauty and charm.

I fell in love with this photo of her, but that of course didn't stop me from taking my inks to both photographs in order to get the newly-printed images from a very 21st century printer to look a little more Edwardian.  

In addition to inking with Tim Holtz Vintage Photo Distress Ink, I did some paper distressing on the edges, as well as giving Lily a good old inked crease too (as though it might have been folded close to someone's heart in a breast pocket; though she demanded the return of her picture in the heat of the break-up!).

All the blue-green papers I created myself, blending Bundled Sage, Tumbled Glass, and occasional touches of Forest Moss and Weathered Wood (Broken China is top of my shopping list when I get home to the UK).

And I've used the little Prima stamp (I think of it as 'the wallpaper stamp' but I think it's actually known as 'Alla Prima Floral 550950') on those papers, including the tag, as well as on the music paper (from an old music book) which forms Lily's background (blending the same colours straight onto the stamp), and as added texture on the front of the card.

As well as the 7 Gypsies, there's a couple of appearances by papers from the Prima Printery collection which I've got in the 8x8 size.  It's a lovely collection of ledgers and text-based papers mainly in neutral creams, some with a hint of green.





I used the Tim Holtz Decorative Strip Die Vintage Lace to make the lace edging for the flap and for the tag inside.  I love this die and, unable to get hold of any actual lace at the moment, I think it provides a really pretty alternative.  I fussy cut (or decoupaged?!) the eggs from the 7 Gypsies Conservatory paper to adorn the tag.  


In my head, this affair grew up around a collector's butterfly net, the naturalist sharing his discoveries with the actress taking a quiet holiday away from the whirl of her West End life.





The internal pocket I made from one of my handmade papers, and used some broad cream chintzy ribbon to decorate it.  The script underneath is the back (yes, the B side!) of one of the Conservatory papers.  You can see why I like them, if this isn't even the primary side!









Amongst the memorabilia there's also one of my mini-postcards (made with the TH postcard and script stamps, and the Prima wallpaper flowers again)...











... and an accommodation invoice (surely they did not share a room, did they?!) cut from one of the 7 Gypsies papers and edged and aged.



And her own final reminder to herself:

When it's meant to be, it's meant to be... they could surely have overcome all the differences between her glamorous life and his studious, academic one.  She shouldn't have been so hasty in bringing the affair to a close.  And now she looks back and knows that what matters is that you Listen to your heart.

Back to reality, and back to the front now, as it were, just for a last couple of details.

The Special Moments text is from one of the Prima Printery papers I mentioned, die-cut with the centre of the TH On the Edge Brackets die.

 

And of course, with Lily being in a garden, remembering her salad days, I had to add some of the little mulberry paper flowers.  The roses seemed too formal somehow, though, so I used these lovely cream and ivory gypsophila heads - an informal bouquet, picked in the meadows one afternoon as they walked, and carefully preserved with the other mementos of a long lost love.

Oh, come on... I've already confessed to being a hopeless romantic - you're surely not surprised!!


In the hope that perhaps they're being judged by fellow hopeless romantics, I'm entering this in the following challenges:

For the Daring Cardmakers, I've been following their Colour Combination
Sir Stampalot would like to know about 'My Crafty Passion' - for now, at least, very clearly Shabby Chic! - but particularly the layering, Distress Inks, and paper-distressing
The Vintage Artisans have a brand new Challenge Blog, and their first theme is Vintage Shabby Chic
I'm offering another entry to the Crafty Bloggers July Anything Goes challenge
I'm taking a plunge on Crafty Boots, playing their Bingo Challenge - with a vertical win on Blue, Ribbons and Lace (I know you can argue the whole blue - turquoise - green spectrum, but given the fight I had with my mother, you can call it both ways on this card!!)
And I'm adding it as my third and final entry for the lovely Danish site Vintage Urfordring's July challenge Anything Goes (as long as it's vintage)
And there's a Shabby Chic/Vintage challenge at the lovely site Paperminutes (it seems right to be doing all these European challenges as I sit here in the Czech Republic)


I'm so pleased you were able to spend some time here at Words and Pictures today.  I really hope I'm not the only one who creates stories at the same time as creating crafting projects, or you'll all think I'm completely barking!  

In any case, I hope your own story takes a pleasurable turn today, and I hope to have your company again soon.

It is good to be alone in a garden at dawn or dark so that all its shy presences may haunt you and possess you in a reverie of suspended thought.
James Douglas

Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.
D.H.Lawrence

Simplify, simplify

A tattered autumnal card today, again playing with my Artistic Outpost stamps (see more here):

I wanted to try out the gorgeous stamps from the AO Old Grist Mill stamp set.  I played around with them trying out some different ink colours, and on some different surfaces.

Both the covered bridge and the mill felt best to me at first stamped in black, brown or rusty ink colours.  


It's probably because they're the first 'photo-real' stamps I've used, so at the moment I'm inclined to stick with colours which could be found in a vintage photo.  Maybe I'll get brave and radical one day soon!
  



I did try one on the wax paper from PaperArtsy for fun.  You have to heat the image after you've stamped it to get it to 'sink into' the surface of the paper, otherwise it will continue to smudge if you touch it.  I love its haunting, ghostly quality.


Pretty soon I started to get itchy fingers, wanting to put something together.  

I went to have a flick through some papers to see what jumped to the eye, and came back with several papers from the BoBunny Timepiece 6x6 pad which seemed perfect.

It all felt as though it was quite homely and rustic, lovely earthy colours, and I started to assemble the layers.  


I've been enjoying bringing some dimensionality to the paper layers recently by rolling and tearing the edges, as well as using the Tim Holtz Paper Distresser (and some ink-blending too, sometimes, of course).

But when I got the stamped image onto the papers, I found I wanted to give it a closer colour relationship to the framing backgrounds.  I got out the Tim Holtz Distress Markers and a water brush, and painted the roof of the bridge using Aged Mahogany, Barn Door and a bit of Vintage Photo.  


The walls were done in Walnut Stain and Vintage Photo.  The trees on the right I did very loosely with some Walnut Stain and a blending tool.  I also flicked some water at it to get 'blotches from the developing process' onto the photo.

The additional elements on the card also come from the AO Old Grist Mill stamp set (hmm... just been away to look up the old phrase which leapt into my mind just then: it's all grist to the mill.  Quite interesting: the grist is the unground corn - or whatever grain - being brought to the mill; it's produce that will bring a profit eventually... and so the proverbial sense of everything adding to the profit of an enterprise arose.  Mills were quite often known as 'grist mills' - that's to say, they would receive any kind of grist, or grain, for grinding.  Well, I thought it was interesting!).  The sentiment is backed on to a piece cut out from some new seedling pots (a much darker, rougher grained set than my others, which I pounced on in the local DIY store) and covered with a coat of TH Crackle Paint in Rock Candy (clear, basically).  

Then there's the lovely old mill advertisement which is stamped in Sepia Archival Ink from Ranger, backed on to some thick cardstock, inked a touch for that antiquated look, and mounted on some padded tape to lift it away from the background.


I was playing with placing the poster it at a higgledy-piggledy angle, in my usual skewiff fashion, but with that sentiment glaring at me - simplify, simplify! - I found myself straightening it all up so that it was all at nice, clean right angles, and that seemed to suit the whole thing much better.  

I'm entering this in Artistic Outpost's July Challenge Anything Goes, as well as in the following:
Top Tip Tuesday who would like to see One for the Men
Simon Says Stamp and Show who are after Layered projects 
Ett Trykk, a lovely Norwegian site who would like to see some Noe for Gutta (Something for the Guys) for July
And Kreative Hender AS (Creative Hands), also in Norway, would like to see Cards for Men as well
There's also an Anything Goes challenge over at Chocolate, Coffee and Cards (a combination I think I like almost as much as blue+brown!)


Thanks so much for dropping by today.  If you like what you've seen, stay a while and look around... or even join up as a follower.  It's always great to hear from you if you'd like to leave a comment too.  For now, have a great day, whatever it brings you...

The hardest thing in life to learn
Is which bridge to cross and which to burn.
David Russell

The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.
Audre Lord

A politician is a man who will double cross that bridge when he comes to it.
Oscar Levant