WOYWW #647

 Another Wednesday, time for a peek at each other's desks and projects! If you would like to learn more, just go to http://www.stamping-ground.blogspot.ca/p/what-is-woyww.html. Maybe you could join our little group! 

Hello everyone! I hope your week is going well. We finally have a respite today of a few days of solid miserable rain and cold. Brr! We should have a fairly sunny day today, but, since it's Fall, still chilly out there!

Here's my desk taken last night when I thought I was done for the day:

But I was too excited to get this pop up page done that I worked on it a bit later when everything was dry. This is a project from Marjie Kemper, in an Altered Book. I love working in Altered Books but haven't done it in quite awhile, since we stopped meeting in our little group. We used to send altered books in rounds in the post, but the postage got too high and we had to stop. So I was happy to do this page in my Dictionary Altered Book, A for Asia 

I had quite the time with that pop-up, I had to re-do it entirely once, then the first time I glued it in, it stuck out the side of the book! So I had to cut it out and re-glue it. All learning curves! I would love to make another one, maybe further along in the book. 

On Saturday, Hubby and I went for a long "leaf tour", as he calls it, but sadly we were about a week too late and most of the colour was gone, except this awesome tree in Perth, Ontario!

We went there for our Anniversary Dinner, to a lovely German Restaurant that we've been going to for years (it's about 1 1/2 hours from home) called Maximillians. Since I am on a Low-Carb diet, my menu choices were slim, but I did get this!

Smoked Salmon Appetizer

Sausages with sautéed veggies

I only ate one sausage, but most of the veggies!

I also took this eerie photo: (I inverted the colours!)

Last week I mentioned that I had cut down my hibiscus, but saved all the branches with flower buds hoping they would bloom, and so far they are!

And now for the cats, and their favourite sleeping spots...

she likes her privacy!

Well  that's it for us today! We hope you have a wonderful week, Mittsy and Inky say "meow!"

Long Time

Sorry I have been neglecting my blog for such a long time! I've been very busy with work, the end of the school year, and now teaching one week of Summer Camp-hopefully it will all end soon and I can have my break! But regardless, I have been making art!

This was for a bird card swap for my Art For the Creative Mind Yahoo Group. It now lives in Liverpool! I used a Club Scrap stamp that had the 3 birds on it, watercoloured the image and cut it into 3 pieces.

This is the arch I made for the 7th anniversary of the ABC Altered Book club. I will be getting about 13 more, and then I will make a book! I had fun making this, even though it took a few tries to get it right!

This is my lovely Steampunk Mona Lisa, again for a swap on AFTCM Yahoo group. She now lives in Philly! The swap was just art dolls, but steampunk was in my head because they were also doing a steampunk necklace swap that I didn't do, so I did a doll instead!

This is my page for Altered Books Canada Yahoo Group (ABCanada).

We had a Nature ATC Swap and we make an altered book page from the ATC we received. This is my page! My ATC came from Jane in Saskatchwan. The bees on the ATC are raised, so I mirrored that with my bee on the sunflower. The girl came from Dover.

And last but not least, some journal pages. Still a bit sporadic, I'm hoping for daily in the summer. Playing around with style again! Wanting to use more of my stamps that were getting very lonely.

That's it for now! Hopefully I will update before the month is over!

Thanks for looking and I always love your comments!

Happy Fall!

It even smells like Fall now, especially with all the cool rain we've been having. I wonder what happened to Summer? LOL!

Anyway, I did forget my camera when I went to my LRS stamp club meeting, so all I have to show is what we made, which was a teeny little altered book. I knew the book was coming, and needed a theme, and I hadn't done anything about Johnny Depp lately, so hey, it was overdue! I'll pop it into my little Johnny shrine in our downstairs powder room. Maybe I'll take a picture of that for next week! So I brought my papers, my Johnny collage sgeet (made myself) and some quotes to cut up. My friend Marg and I decided which quotes went with which photo and it whipped up nice and easy!

Here is the little book untouched on the left, and altered on the right. These are tiny 3" board books that came in little boxes of about 4 to a box. First we sanded them a bit, then cut the papers into 3" squares and glued them on the pages.

We chose the quotes and matched them to pictures, quotes on the left and pictures on the right. The paper I used was doubled sided pirate scrapbook paper from Michael's. I used one side on all the left pages and the other side on all the right pages.

Here is one of the pages. I'm only going to show one, and you can imagine the rest - all the same but different!
After all was done, I put a piece of coloured tape on the end, kind of like Duct Tape, but not as thick - Dollar Store, comes in a bunch of colours. Then I edged everything in gold Krylon. Hope you enjoyed my little book! I called it "Johnny" because the next one will be called "Depp"!

We also had a challenge to make something from a patterned napkin, we were given the napkin and a link to Split Coast Stampers for the technique called Felted Cardstock. So we'll see what I can do with that!

I've been sick all week, the worst was Thursday to Saturday, today was the first day I felt human again, so of course I spent the day doing errands, shopping, and Starbucks. Didn't have time to do any art, but I will write in my journal tonight, and maybe have some time this week to put up the last few pages.

I have a little teaser about my Generations Project - something I found at Starbucks. . .hopefully I can show you next week if it works out!

TTFN!

School has started. . .

and I am very tired! I am usually too exhausted at the end of the day (I teach children 3-6 years of age) to do much art. But here is what has been happening in my life recently. I have had a few medical problems (not serious, but very annoying), one of which is my mouth. I can't really eat much without getting a very sore mouth, on both sides. My teeth hurt. OW! So I'm eating a lot of liquid meals. Yum. But the homemade soup is good! Still managing to gain 2 pounds (what's with that??).

Here was my art table this morning - not much room! I was working on my altered book page for my ABCanada group. 

So I decided to clean it up. . .

and finish the page. Yay!

I made a metal plate at the top left page, using a stamp (HA) that I inscribed into the metal. Then I sanded the metal to bring the pattern out. I would like to work more with metal! There is also some bling that is very hard to see, that Therese brought for me when she visited last month. I know the mask is not right, the long points should be up, but I was so excited to use it for the first time, I forgot! So I put some bling at N,S,E and W to make up for it!

Does your house look like this?

 

 

Art Books everywhere?

and still, the shelf is full?

I have always wanted to try at least one technique from each book that I have

. . .so I am going to try and make that my weekly mission! I will let you know which book it came from, and show you what I did. There are a few blogs out there that do this already - they were my inspiration. I have so many of these books, and I love reading them, now I have to DO them!

I went to Michael's this weekend, just to spend one little 40% off coupon and get my Xyron refill at 40% off, but I came home with all this. . .

All the stamps were $1.50 except the one I used my coupon on (the cute little round face). Beware the Peace stamp - it's MUCH smaller than the package! All the paper was on sale - bonus! I really needed some new rubber. . .

I took my coptic bound book apart. . .

and re-bound it with some hemp (for jewelry) I found at Michael's (and then at the Dollar Store for only 1$!)

it's much tighter and stronger now. So I've painted 2 layouts in this journal, hoping to give myself a head start. . . let's hope it works! I'm thinking of having several journals, this one as my daily journal. I've been getting inspired by lots of people lately, most recently Judy Wise, I love her daily journals, so mine may look a bit like hers for awhile. . .! Hopefully she won't mind. 

I absolutely LOVED this travel journal by Mary Ann Moss when she went to Portugal - I want my journals to look like that! Here it is full of stuff. Wonderful!

Ok, I think I've rambled on enough! Until next time!

New Altered Book Page

Finally, something other than a journal page!! This AB page was made with an ATC from Judy in my ABCanada group. A group of us swapped ATCs and we made AB pages from the one we received. The theme was 'Birds". This ATC page took awhile to formulate in my mind. I knew I wanted a quote, but couldn't find one I liked. I originally had another idea for the page, but once the page was painted it didn't go with my idea. The stamp I used popped into my head this as the perfect stamp to go with the owl, but I couldn't remember where it was (It's a Meer Image UM, I believe). When I found it and stamped it , the moon was lost in the darkness of the page, so I tediously colored in the moon with a Sakura white gel pen. I ran to the computer, knowing there has to be a good owl/moon quote somewhere, and I found it right away! So the page is born!

Altered Book Page

In reading back over my posts, I see I promised an Altered Book page and never delivered. Here it is!

This is the ATC Daphne sent to me. . .

Ans this is what I did with it. A bit of a mix of Chinese and Japanese, I hope no one minds!

I have another AB page to do for a swap, and some Rolodex cards to get busy with. I'll show them as soon as they're done!

Altered Book pages

On my ABCanada group we are challenging each other with ATCs that we make and send to each other, then we use the ATC we received on an altered book page. I'm devoting a whole altered book to these challenges. Here are two of those pages:

This theme was "numbers", we could make any ATC as long as it had at least one number in it. The ATC was made by Pauline

The theme for this one was "white on white"

Here is a close up of the ATC.
This ATC was made by Mary-Beth.

Saturday & Sunday

I did work both days, but not a lot. I worked in my journal, I rediscovered an altered book I started last year, and I worked in the altered dictionary. Saturday night DH and I went on a date night out - lovely! Dinner at a very nice steak house, then to see Les Miserables at a local theatre. So not much time to post!

This was Saturdays work - putting these images onto the page. I often stamp the image onto tissue paper first, then I can reposition it anywhere I want. I stick it down with the same stuff I use for my journal. It does dry shiny, as you can see, but when looking it the page as a whole it's OK. You can also see the second image at the top of the page.


This is the book I've rediscovered. It started as a children's book. Each of those squares in yellow turn to reveal a new picture. I'll show you again later. There are 3 themes to this book. I covered these pages in paper.




This is what I did today for the altered dictionary. I'm almost done, just one more thing to add. The flower images were added the same way as the others, but I colored them with colored pencil first.
See you tomorrow!

Happy Fourth to my US Friends!

Hope everyone is having a Happy 4th of July today! Our holiday was on Tuesday, Canada Day, and that's when I broke a tooth and had to have it extracted. Great day! Hope yours turns out better!

Here's what I did today:

Finished my 4X4


Worked on my Journal:



Using watercolour pencils I sometimes trace around the edges of the images just to accent them, and I draw the lines. Then I go over the lines in white to tone them down. I decided to use white gel pen to write.



And worked in a friends Altered Dictionary:



The picture is not stuck down, just sitting there so I can think about it. It sitting on top of some of the words. The dictionary word I chose was "fragrance" This page is just started, not finished. Perhaps I will finish it tomorrow.

Altered Book Challenge done

A bit disappointed that no one was up for the challenge, but I did mine! Here it is:




Oh well. I didn't advertise it either, so that may be why. I used images of NYC from altered pages, and a stencil for the edges and the folded piece (a stamp for the other side). The letters are rub-ons. The tassel is an earring found at a garage sale last year!

Not sure what the next challenge will be. It's been a busy weekend, my hubby just had knee surgery, so I'm fetching and caring! I'll try to add the next challenge in the next few days.