Live with passion

This page started out with a gelli print that wasn't doing it for me, but after I added this face stencil (this was while playing with my new stencils) it blew me away. She reminded me of a Spanish flamengo danser, wich fitted in perfect with this forthnigth's Q&L challenge word passion. I didn't add much more to it, just made her lips red and added a red glittery hair accessoire. Then came the dilemma on how and where to add the quote, finally I decided to make a frame around the picture and add the quote on the edge as if it were the title of a painting. The frame took me some time: deciding the color, the size and then came the even harder bit: the measuring.


Me and my husband like it so much we will give this a prominent place in our hallway. 
This also solves my problem on how to incorporate it in my quotes book (which I will be making at the end of the year) as this is not the same size as the other pages, but is much bigger.

Be Free (junk journal page #18)

Junk used: cereal box / tissue wrap  /wrapping paper

I started out by gluing this pink tissue paper which originally was a wrapper around some biscuits we got on a baby shower on a piece of cardboard from a cereal box. The tape with stars and text 'made with love' was also from this package. The pastel pink reminded me of the may junk journal inspiration page from Shilpa Nagaonkar. This pink page has been laying on my desk from the beginning of this month, but this week however the inspiration suddenly flew in. I was wrapping some gifts and had some excess paper leftover with these pretty butterflies on a pink background, just perfect.
First I sprayed some Dylusions through my new butterfly stencil; glued the butterflies with matte gel medium; did some heat embossing with baby blue embossing powder and a KaiserKraft stamp and added this fun quirky royal bird with a paper pieced crown.
Thanks Shilpa for the inspiration.

NEW TOYS!!!

Past weekend I bought these new stencils:

Which, off coarse, needed to be tested as soon as possible:

I LOVE this print: it's just perfect, pristine and crisp

The ghost print however doesn't blow me away.

Of coarse I couldn't resist the butterfly one.

The alphabet one is amazing, so versatile

works well as a first print

as a ghost print

as a stamp (this is the clean off from my print)

or with spray ink

I love my new stencils, I'm glad I splashed out to buy these, because normally I hold back and try to make all my stencils myself with a heatcutter, but I'm just not able to get such great detail.
They are just FAB!!!

gellistickexperimentsbooklet

If I would lay that word at Scrabble I surely win :-)

I made this cute little book using the crossed-structure binding I found in the book "Making handmade books" from Alisa Golden. The cover is made out of a piece of those large sheets of paper I have laying on my desk to clean of stencils, stamps,...

When I read the instructions, I found them complicated, but while making the book it all became clear. The book has over 100 bindings, so I have a few more books to go if I want to give them all a try :-)
I will use this booklet to keep track of all my experiments, like the ones I did with the gel sticks.

gel sticks

Yesterday my son was invited for his first birthday party, which meant that I had a couple of hours to myself.

And instead of doing all sort of chores (grocery shopping, cleaning, washing,..) I decided to be selfish and spent it with crafting.

I still needed to test-drive my gel sticks and that is exactly what I did.

I experimented with all  kinds of techniques, and wow are they versatile.

Here’s a summary of what I tried:

Applying and smearing them out with my finger (dry) 
lesson learned: probably best to do the techniques on a gessoed surface.

Applying color, spritz some water and paint with a brush

    Same as above but using finger as paintbrush,really like this.

Blending together with a babywipe (love the softness of this)

     

color a raised embossed image

color, activate the pigment with water and paint with finger or brush;let it dry; take a stencil and babywipe and create a tone-on-tone effect.(this definetely only works on a gessoed surface) Depending on how long you wipe the color difference becomes larger or you can even remove all the color.

Stamping:

there are different possibilities:

first spray water, then add color and stamp (see left image)

Or first apply color, then water and stamp (rigth image)

Or just color and no water (right image)

you can also use foam stamps

even a detailed stamp gave good results, although I had read that this was not the case:

To create a nice texture you can sprinkle some salt in the wet paint, let it dry completely and wipe off the salt.

or you can also create some drippage  

                 

Some resist techniques:

with hot glue

with heat embossing

Conclusion after a relaxing session in my studio: it seems that everything with gelli in it is way too much fun!

PS: Have not done any research, but it seems that you do need to fixate the finished piece? With what?

Be Unique - junk journal page#17

Here is the other finished page that started out with just some pieces of scrap paper on them.

Here is the process of this page:

1. randomly glued strips of scrappaper on white cardstock      (if I would have been thinking I would have used a piece     of scrap cardboard)

2. gelli printed over it with a gradient of green colors, I like the ghost print as well, it even shows the pieces of scrap.

3. I made my own stamp with a piece of cardboard, string and glue

4. used a crunched up piece of tissuepaper as a stamp with purple acrylic paint and stamped all over

5. diluted some hot pink acrylic paint with water and added as drippage

6. finishing touches: the paperpieced Julie Nutting doll, some tape and the handwritten sentiment "Be unique"

While writing this post I thought of adding my fingerprint with ink, I saw this on one of the other entries of the Q&L challenge from Twinkle's twaddle, so thank you for this idea.

junk used:

* scrap paper

* dictionary pages

So here are the 2 pages that started out almost identical but both went there own way

linking with:

* Darcy's Journalling Month 4

* Q&L challenge

junk journal page#16

A while ago Clare asked us, the junkjournal group, what kind of junk we were collecting, I posted a picture of a jar filled with dried up pieces of acrylic paint:

jar full of yumminess

At that time I did not have a specific project in mind but now was the time, I wanted to use some of it.

I started out by gessoing a piece of scrap cardboard with the gelliplate (more details will follow later in my gelliclopedia)

The sky is painted in a blue liquid watercolor and the grass is green acrylic paint in which I dropped some of the pieces of dried acrylic paint when it was still wet.

That was the background done and then I had to lay it aside until I got some inspiration on how to progress further.

This inspiration came yesterday in the form of the fantastically amazing blog from the paperartsy (definetely need to place an order,such amazing stamps, but sadly my wishlist will be way more than my finance will allow me).
I was mainly inspired by the tissue flowers.

I added some random stencilling to create some more interest in the background and outlined some of the shapes with my white pen. Then took a flower stamp which I stamped on a piece of gelli printed delipaper , didn’t want to overstamp with dark ink, so I used versamark and clear embossingpowder to give it a shimmer, cut them out, crumpled them up a bit and glued them down, they don’t look like flowers to me, but rather butterflies.The red chevron stencilling draws the eye into the page.

As a final touch I added some glitter rub-ons and done.

Here are some close-ups:

shimmery shiny butterflies

great for texture

Linking with:
Paper Artsy Darcy  Journaling Month 4

Limitations – junk journal page #15

I am notorious for being unable to throw anything away, so much I think my husband will go insane one of these days. And to top it all of my son has inherited this quality and even in a worse degree: he keeps the caps of plastic bottles, the confetti from the paper punch, even yesterday the lid of his dessert (which I didn't allow with a massive tantrum as result)

On my desk there were still some strips of paper lying around from the garden book (I already used some leftovers on page #10)

After watching the video about faux chine collé on the GelliArts blog, it struck me, I should just glue all the scrap pieces that are lying around on a piece of paper and print over it.

So that’s what I did with these strips, there were enough for 2 pages:

I decided to only print on 1 of them and do something different with the second one, just to see how totally different the 2 could turn out.

This is the printed one (I still need to finish this one off)

On the other page I scribbled some with my new gel sticks (still need to give them a proper test drive) and sprayed some Dylusions through some objects which I use as a stencil (a flower coaster, a doiley and a doormat). Then it became clear to me in which directions the page should go, the strips needed journaling so I added all the limitations I encounter with crafting, the main one being time restriction.

Which limitations do you encounter while crafting?