Hello all! I'm here with a final inspiration journal page for the Summer Countryside theme I'm hosting at Art Journal Journey this month. I was so honoured to be invited to host, and it's been such a joy seeing all the amazing pages you've been sharing. For my final page, I've kept things simple with a soft framing of a watercolour doodle I painted at the start of the month.
Hello all! Yes, I know, I still haven't got around to catching up with the lovely entries for the Summer Countryside theme I'm hosting at Art Journal Journey. The week just seemed to slip away from me. But I have just spent my Sunday morning creating another journal page full of countryside peace and calm to add to the entry list.
Hello all. I hope you are well and enjoying a peaceful weekend. I'm here with another page for the Summer Countryside theme I'm hosting over at Art Journal Journey this month. This time I've been imagining someone spending time wandering through meadows, finding somewhere peaceful to sit and read for the afternoon before heading home again... gathering wildflowers and grassy stems as they go, to take a little of the summer countryside home with them.
Hello all! It's time for another contribution to the Summer Countryside theme I'm hosting at Art Journal Journey this month. There are already so many fabulous entries that I'm just about keeping up with so far - thank you so much - and I'm looking forward to many more. For today's page I'm soothing my senses with flowers and butterflies again.
Hello all and happy 4th July, if that's something you're into! I'm back with another page for the theme I'm hosting at Art Journal Journey this month - Summer Countryside. It would be lovely if you came to spend some time in the country too... find all the details here at Art Journal Journey.
I'm working in a 7.5 x 7.5 inch journal, with pages glued together for extra strength, and today's page has some simple collaging over a countryside view painted very simply with inks and paints.
Hello all! I'm so happy to be back with you all, and very excited to share the reason for my return... I'm delighted to be the host this month at Art Journal Journey. I'll be here throughout July to share some journalling pages on my chosen theme: Summer Countryside.
There are more details over at Art Journal Journey itself, and of course I have an inspiration page today to start you off. I know I've been away for a long time, with only occasional appearances, but I'm looking forward to reconnecting with lots of you here in Craftyblogland this July, and I can't wait to see what you create in response to the theme. Here's my first offering...
Hello all and happy June! And a special hello to those of you who signed up to receive email notifications when there's a new post here at Words and Pictures (yes, I know, there haven't been many lately, but that will all change come July at the latest!).
You may have read that Google is discontinuing Feedburner as a tool. Feedburner is what has been in charge of the Blogger Followers gadget, sending out email notifications to those who have signed up and activated their subscription.
So this is just to let you know that if you are a follower by email, you will (hopefully!) continue to receive those notifications, but they will now come courtesy of follow.it.
You shouldn't have to do anything special. When you get an email, you can just click through to visit me here at Words and Pictures, just as you always have done. You, the followers, will also get the chance to alter how you receive your notifications if you want to, which couldn't be done with Feedburner. But that's entirely up to you. If you don't want to change anything you don't have to!
If you follow by Bloglovin', I think everything there should just continue as normal.
And if you'd like to start following by email, you'll find a brand new button to do it in the sidebar. I love that follow.it lets you design your button to match the blog design - Blogger didn't let you do that!
If you are also a blogger, and haven't yet sorted out how your email followers will hear about your posts after July, I would strongly urge you to check out follow.it and get in touch with them.
I can't have all these words without any pictures at all, so here's a little peek at the samples for my new quote stamps at PaperArtsy to cheer up the post!!
Thanks so much for stopping by today, and I'll be back with something properly creative very soon - probably one or two of those samples in more detail. Stay safe, stay well and happy crafting all.
The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.
Socrates
The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.
Albert Einstein
Hello all! I know I haven't been here for an age, but I'm back with you to celebrate the launch of three new Eclectica Alison Bomber quote sets at PaperArtsy. The new stamps are based on themes which are very close to my heart: EAB21 Nature Edition, EAB22 Summer Edition (finally the fourth season joins the set!) and EAB23 Work & Play.
Thanks so much for stopping by today. I'm in the throes of unpacking, lots of garden work and lots of audio recording, so that's mostly why it's so very quiet here... but one of these days I'll be back to play again. Hugs to you all in the meantime.
Colours fade, temples crumble, empires fall, but wise words endure.
Edward Thorndike
Hello all, and a very happy spring and a happy Easter and whatever else you celebrate at this time of year! I can only apologise for my long absence. It's been difficult to find the time to create blogposts alongside everything else that has been going on.
There have been turbulent waters along the way, but my floors are finally down, so any day now the unpacking can begin, so it's not going to be any less busy. But I have found time for a bit of creative play along the way and I wanted to share these spring tags with you.
In essence, they're very simple, but I really enjoy looking at them - I see different details and different colour blends each time I gaze.
The backgrounds are done with Distress Spray Stains and Oxide Sprays - mainly Bundled Sage and Speckled Egg, with some other springtime blues and greens thrown in there.
It's the Tim Holtz Mosaic stencil (though I have to say I've always thought of it as cobble stones - that's the dollshouse bit of my brain talking!) - and after spritzing through it, I turned it over and printed onto the other tags.
Where I wanted some more patterning, I then did small areas of spritzing and turning and printing again.
The daisies are from the newest Wildflower Stems Thinlits set (number 3) which I couldn't resist. And it nudged me into digging out the BigShot from the packing boxes.
(None of the other dies are unpacked yet, though, so you'll be seeing a lot of this and one other die and one embossing folder which I also ordered.)
I dipped the stems in Bundled Sage and Peeled Paint on the craft mat, and then used Picket Fence Distress Paint, a couple of Distress Crayons (Speckled Egg, Scattered Straw, Wild Honey), and a PITT pen to colour the flower heads and add dimension and shading.
I'm really pleased with the effect. I put the paint on in quite thick strokes (not easy with fluid Distress Paint) and it's given the petals a lovely sense of texture and movement I think.
I'm also pleased with the dotted PITT pen markings just adding a bit of depth and dimension to the centre of the flowers.
And I love the little leaves growing over the edge of the lace trim.
It's Vanilla White Wow powder, and I'm usually much better at getting a really crisp imprint. But clearly I'm out of practice - and had to re-stamp with a couple of them, trying to get the words in the right place to fill up gaps left from the first time!!
So in case you can't make out every single letter, they're all down at the bottom of the post in full as today's quotes.
I hope you like them. After a pretty rough couple of weeks, they give me a sense of lightness and hope which is something of a relief. And although spring comes slowly here in the Czech Republic, there are finally signs that life is stirring.
I hope wherever you are that you are enjoying some light, some warmth and the return of hope. Stay safe, stay well, and I'll see you again soon.
Spring has returned. The earth is like a child that knows poems.
Rainer Maria Rilke
In spring, everything is full of promise.
Charles Lanman
The sun has come out and the air is vivid with spring light.
Byron Caldwell Smith
I'd like to share these at the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge where the theme this week is Spring/Easter
At Try It On Tuesday they are saying Hello Spring! - spring is all about the spring flowers for me, so this fits right in
I don't know whether I'll get away with joining in at Tag Tuesday where they are looking for Mostly Monochrome - my blue/turquoise/greens are very crowded together in one part of the spectrum, so hopefully it will work. Having been away for so long, I'd love to play!
Hello all... it's still slow-going here. As soon as the floors go down and there are some unpacking/organising the craft room pictures, I'll be sharing those, but for now here are some more inky backgrounds in progress.
They're a combination of springtime colours and an ongoing wintry feel... They were made before Christmas (sorry - see I told you it was slow-going around here!) but this is exactly what the weather is doing here at the moment.
We had a wonderful week of sunshine and warm temperatures, but now we're back to freezing fog this morning and there's snow forecast again later in the week.
Ah well, I did know that spring would be later coming here in Central Europe, but it's still a little sad to experience it for real.
Still, the fog adds a touch of mystery to the landscape, and the birds are extra grateful for the food I'm putting out.
For those who want to know a bit about what I used here... one tag has a PaperArtsy crackle background (Snowflake over Crackle Glaze over something dark... don't know what any longer I'm afraid!) and some inky splodges of Stormy Sky and Chipped Sapphire Distress Oxide (and maybe other Inks and Oxides too).
The other has a soft smooshing of, I think, Speckled Egg and Rustic Wilderness over a white painted background, with Stormy Sky and Faded Jeans splodges over the top (there may be some Faded Jeans in both tags, come to think of it).
Then all the stamping is greenery from Tim Holtz's Sketch Greenery stamp plate - which I was lucky enough to win as part of a wonderful goody package from Tim and Mario.
The greens involved are Olive and Leaf Green Archival, tinted with Rustic Wilderness and Peeled Paint Inks and Oxides, and I think there's some Faded Jeans and Speckled Egg stamping too.
I hope you like them. One has already made its way onto a card, and I'm sure I took some pictures, but at the moment I can't find a photograph of it. The other is still waiting for some finishing inspiration to strike (and has joined the pile of backgrounds waiting for the same thing!).
I hope you're all doing okay, and I'm looking forward to spending a bit of time catching up with you again soon.
If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.
Anne Bradstreet
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
George Santayana
