February, but feels like Spring!!

Sorry I take so long between posts. I always feel I should have a bunch of stuff to post, but really I could post with fewer things! just have to DO it!! The weather today is amazing - warm, sunny, and smells like Spring. I hope it stays this way! Saturday we had the most beautiful snowfall, lovely large flakes gently falling and sticking to the trees in clumps - so pretty! I was already thinking about how I was going to put that in my journal!

I'm going to go backwards with my journal pages, this first one is really the last page in my moleskine book, luckily I have another one in the wings waiting to go! I think this page is my favorite one though. It started out horribly! I tried to stencil a bird and a birdcage on it, then realized it was upside down! Darn! So I sprayed it with black glimmer mist, and used a lot to cover it all up. Let it dry, and realized it had seeped onto some of my other pages (to come).

Then I thought I'd stencil it with white gesso using a credit card, but it was horrible. Thus the smeared white. I found an Altered Pages image I liked, plopped that on, and the rest just came. I love the trees, because that is just what they looked like during the snowfall on Saturday!

OK, less chatter and more journal pages! I've smudged anything private, so don't hesitate to enlarge!

Stamps from Altered Pages

Funnily enough, I didn't like the green around my men, and the seepage from the black spray fixed it for me! I like it now!

 

new stamps from Michael's (Hampton Arts)

my oldest cat died. Very sad, but it was her time.

new $1.50 stamps from Michael's

Thanks for looking! I hope everyone is having a wonderful Springlike day like I am! BTW, take a trip to Altered Pages - they have lots of new stuff!

Valentine Canvas

I made a Valentine Canvas for Altered Pages, and it's on their site (here) as a kit! There are lots of awesome collage pages here, as well as stamps, papers and lots more! Come take a look!

I made this canvas because I had a canvas that I made a few years ago that I didn't like, and it was just sitting around. I had a brainstorm one night as to what to do with it, and I came up with this:

It will probably be a Valentines gift for hubby! I painted over the canvas, and you can see some of the previous design coming through the paint, which is awesome! If you buy the kit you get everything you need to make it, including the (new) canvas! You could always do a quick collage on the new canvas, then just paint over it to let the design come through.  


Thanks for looking!

Some journal pages...

I now have 4 journals on the go - my Moleskine, my daughter's travel journal to make for her, my large art journal, and my journal that I'm hoping to use for my Kelly Kilmer class that I haven't started yet. My idea for going back to the Moleskine journal for everyday was that it was small, and I could prepare it easily to work on everyday for a week on each double page. At first I wanted it to be more private, and I wasn't going to post it, but it's so much fun I have to. So I took photos rather than scan it so that (hopefully) no one can actually read the words. Here goes:

This was when I started back into my Moleskine in November. It was also the first day we had snow which was gone by the afternoon! The next day that we had enough snow to stay was last Friday!

 Got out my Christmas stamps which I hadn't used at all yet because I hadn't made any Christmas cards yet!

 More Christmas stamps. First I scribble neo-colors (watercolor crayons) all over the page, then wipe with a baby-wipe. This smooths the background color out. I do this for the next 2 or 3 pages, not really worrying about which colors I'm choosing, although for December I did choose "Christmasy" colors.

 For this page I scribble dark red around the edges, then pulled the color into the middle. The envelope is from a swap I was in with the Byhand artists group, a 12 days of Christmas Swap. The envelope was from the 1st day of Christmas giftie.

 This next page I did in green and red stripes. It was AWFUL and I hated it, and wondered what the heck I was going to do with it. I decided to showcase the 12 days of Christmas swap gifties and I had 2 different circular shaped "shapes', not doilies exactly, just some shapes I had bought a few months ago thinking to use them as stencils, which is what I did. I sprayed over them with Maya Mist red, and I loved the effect! Then I spent my TV watching evenings doodling away, making each shape different, and used my 12 Days of Christmas stamps for each spot. I added anything like tags etc. that came from the gifties as well.I'm also using my Bienfang watercolor pens to color in the stamps.

 This page was better with the green on the border and red inside.

Gifties 7-10-I remade the ugly page to match the other one, and have made each circular shape different by the way I doodled them.

 These are the Character construction stamps my daughter gave me for Christmas. I had pre-stamped this page, not knowing what would go in the banner yet, but as it worked out, it was New Years Day at that spot!

I needed more 2 pages for my 12 days gifties so I remade the same ugly pages as before. More character construction stamps that CJs boyfriend gave to me! So lucky that he lives near Bizzy Bee stamp store! I used these stamps to make a birthday card for my step-father.

So that's it for today! Don't forget to stop by Altered Pages to what what new goodies they have! They now have LOTS more than just collage images!

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas (and Happy Hanukkah!) to all my wonderful blog friends who keep me up when I am down! All of you are such wonderful and caring people, and I am so thankful to have each and every one of you in my cyber-life!

I was only able to make 4 cards this year, and I only have 3 of them to show you. I really have to start Christmas card-making in January!

All images are from Altered Pages

I will be posting some Journal pages after Christmas when I have more time (2 weeks holiday!!!) and I am starting a new Kelly Kilmer Workshop called Revel in the Moment, so I will show you what I'm doing there too.


Merry Christmas! Happy Hanukkah! Hope everyone has a fabulous holiday!

November already!

Boy, time is flying by. I'm not getting much done, barely started thinking about Christmas, but everyone else seems to be - it was so busy today at the stores! Working on a few journal pages that I can share anyway. . .



 I thought this background was done. . .

but then I started doodling!

This is the next page background, the writing isn't quite done yet, and I have one more page on the go. 

Not much to show, but then I haven't been working on it much, either too tired at the end of the day or too busy on the weekends. But I'm trying to get a few minutes in before I go to work, and a few minutes in just before bed (but that doesn't last long, I'm no good at night). I'm also trying to get into my art room before I do the things I HAVE to do!

Happy Thanksgiving to all my US friends! Hope your Turkey / Tofurkey Day is a delicious one!

Birthday Card

Hopefully this card reaches my good friend Marg before she sees this post. It better! But here it is, I had no idea what I was going to do for this card when I started, except that I had just bought the new Tim Holtz pad of paper and knew I wanted to use it.

I had also just bought a new Crafters Workshop swirly stencil that I thought I would christen. The "Life is nothing" stamp is from Viva Las Vegas Stamps. This is the result. I like it! Hope Marg does too!

Check out the giveaway on my sidebar for Ink On My Finger's blog!

Finally - an art post!!

Hives are all gone, hopefully NEVER to return! But if they do, I am armed! Thank you for all the sympathy I received. I needed it!!

OK, so here are some new journal pages. I've been experimenting a lot with backgrounds and stencils. Not sure how I like it.

The cross is a canvas I'm doing for a good friend who is sadly moving away. I will miss her very much!

My friend Therese came to play with me!!

I thought I would use my Character Construction stamps and create some people on my journal - unfortunately, I only have a couple of these stamps - I have to get more!! Well I'm off to finish this page.

My thoughts go out to all of you who are remembering 911 today, especially those personally affected. It was a horrible day, and though we don't want to remember it, we need to.

Warning: this post may be uncomfortable!

I have been caught in the throws of HIVES!!! Aaaack!! Here is the lesson that I learned: ALWAYS wash fabric before you sew with it! I was making an outdoor curtain for the playground at school, and bought heavy outdoor fabric, not realizing that I would be ALLERGIC to the sizing in the fabric! I've never been allergic to anything like this before, in fact this is my FIRST allergic reaction (with hives) to ANYTHING!

These were taken August 26, 2 days after I started treating

Hard to tell, but my hands are very swollen, and you can't even see the hives because of the swelling

It didn't show up right away either. Two days after sewing the curtains, the hives came up, and I had no idea at the time where they came from.  I had been suffering from what I thought at first were bug bites, then some kind of rash, on my ankles and under my knee. I fought with that for a week before I started to sew with the fabric. On thinking back to where these hives could have come from, I realized that I had SAT on this fabric before I began sewing with it a week later. I then spent about 2 hours over 2 days touching the fabric, and having it sit on me feet as I sewed it. Two days later I started to get the hives, which just escalated over the next few days. I think I had hives on top of hives on top of hives! Luckily I went to the doctor immediately (the 3rd time in a week) and he gave me some VERY strong cortisone cream to apply 3X a day. Two days ago I woke up with hands so swollen that I couldn't even hold a cup of coffee. Luckily I had taken my rings off.

taken today, Sunday, August 28

(yesterday)

 Thankfully, getting better! 

 But no suggestions from the doc except for Benadryl as to what to do about the ITCHING which was driving me mad.  So I came up with something that worked for me: ice.  

 This bag is full of frozen freezies and a few ice packs to help keep them frozen.

After lots of different experiments with bags of ice, and ice packs, I finally found the solution in frozen freezies. I could put them on isolated parts that were itchy, and even pop them between my toes. So I carry my insulated lunch bag with me, full of freezies, and I have more in the fridge to swap them out with when they thaw. 
      I also switched from Benadryl to another stronger antihistamine, which although I'm sure it helped, certainly didn't take away all the itching. The itching was so bad it kept me from sleeping a lot, but in the last 2 days I have finally gotten to sleep most of the night. I took my ice to bed with me, and even had my feet resting on bags of ice on those first few days. But I seem to be on the road to recovery now, yay!

Well that's my excuse for not doing much art these past two weeks (I did manage a little bit in my journal)! I'm back to the classroom tomorrow to get ready for school next week, so it may be a little while before I'm back.

Hope everyone is well, and for those of you who were/are in the path of Irene, take care and be safe!

Playtime!!

My good friend Therese came and spent a few days of playtime with me last week! It has turned into an annual event that I look forward to every year!

We played with beeswax!! I finally christened my new Ranger Melting pot I bought over a year ago. we also went to our mutual friend Marg's house for a wonderful lunch and more beeswax fun!

But we spent a lot of time talking about Art Journaling, and looking at videos, especially Gulfsprite and Journal Artista (Paula Phillips). And then we got to making stencils and our own spray ink!

 Here is the pile of stencils and things to use as stencils that is on my desk right now. 

  Therese brought me a pile of stencils that she made with her die cuts-cool!
  I sprayed these:

 

And this tree, but left the stencil on so you could see - she gave me several little baggies of these - how nice its that!

Then we went to the Dollarama and bought some plastic file folders, cut them up, and Therese started cutting out designs for me:

The "glass shards" was made by taping together all the little pieces she cut out -clever!

Some diamonds:

And this is what she did with the pieces she cut out -stuck them together with circle stickers!

Here are some stencils I made a few weeks ago:

Then we started playing with making our own sprays. I have some sprays

But of course, never enough. We did some online searching and came up with several different ways to do this, ended up with re-inkers and alcohol or water. Will also try some with Pearl Ex.

We also went to Chapters and found lots of kooky crazy fun stuff, but bought these-who can resist this typewriter font alphabet set for $12.00?? And I thought the bubbles would be fun for my journal.

At Staples, while looking for Portfolio watercolor oil pastels, we found these very cool watercolor paints, each one has paint in its reservoir. I first heard of these from Gulfsprite. So, of course, picked them up. never did find the Portfolios though.

It was a fun week! Can't wait until next year!!

Next time I will show you some Journal pages made with the stencils.