Kasia's advent calendar - journal + first page

 

HURAY!!! 

I found my creativity back 

or maybe better said I forced myself 

to take some time 

and sit down

 to allow the creativity to flow back.

 What did I create?

This lovely, colorful page

(thx to my new marabu sprays)

I used this page as my front cover of my advent calendar journal for Kasia's class

Inside are all sort of papers: embossed, gelliprinted, patterned, ....

For my advent calendar book I choose to use bright vibrant colors 

in contrast of the weather and dark days over here now

and circles because I just love circles and they are so versatile:

small, large, stencils, bubble wrap, stamps, found objects,....

the first assignement was self portrait,
I started the page by writing down my feelings about myself 
and then added on top a heart,
because I hope people see me as someone who cares and is passionate,
a butterfly because I want to be as free as a butterfly 
and the stamped image is who I'd like to be. 

waiting for assignement 2 to be released...

WOYWW 406

Hello,

It's that time of the week again where we all join in in the fun over at Julia's place.

The purpose is to show our desks (because people are by nature curious) and who knows maybe even inspire one another. 

Here is mine

I'm having fun using new stash I scored last week on a fair in Antwerp,

I'm creating a journal with kraft paper and bookrings I bought and the cover is well on its way

The background is made with a homemade stencil and some modelling paste, then I used my new Pebeo gilding waxes, doesn't it just look like metal??

Now I'm playing around with some embellishments, what do you think?

Still need to search for a focal image in the top left corner.

Last week I was busy with organizing my stamps and some of you were interested in my CD cases filing system and wanted some more info, so here we go:

 I just use empty CD cases (not the slim ones, and take out the black part)

These all get a number and are placed in a CD box.

I've also created a catalogue where I can flip through my collection, I've also added the numbers here so I can easily find the correct set.









It's still a work in progress and after last week I'm not sure anymore whether to unmount my wooden mounted stamps.
Time will tell.
Thx for stopping by and have a lovely week.

Lille

Welcome to my revamped blog, hope you'll enjoy it.

Remember I followed a workshop 2 weeks ago on a craft fair,

 creating a mini album,

 I was so chuffed with the result I immediately started another one

This was my present for my nieces B-day,

 no her name is not Lille, 

she went away for the weekend to Lille in France :-)

I used subtle flowery feminine papers on the inside. 

Needless to say that she loved her book.

envelope clasp book

Somewhere in the summer I held a tea dying/coffee staining marathon together with my then 5 year old son.

We took a whole bunch of paper, a bowl with tea and a bowl with coffee, old sheets to lay on the grass and off we were.

Now I have a huge stash of new  “old” paper.

I used some of these papers to make this journal.

The cover is a folded envelope which I slit open to create an extra insert ( the back already has an insert where the envelop closes)

I used some pretty vintage papers on the cover and on some of the inner pages.

Initially this journal was one for me, but I eventually gave it as a b-day present to my mum. It was accompanied with this b-day card

I must say, I love looking at all those beautiful journals on fb, pinterest, youtube,… and would like to be able to make such wonderful journals myself, but once I start it seems not really my thing (don't know where to start or how to finish, what to add...). I think I'll stick to making mixed media pieces and getting my hands dirty with paint, inks,… 

patchwork book

If you don’t already know, you know now, I am an absolute horder, I even keep my used kitchen towels.

What on earth can you do with those I hear you say? Well, for one you can use them in your collages, they have nice color and texture.

Or you can turn them into little canvases.

Here is a step by step (credit for Jennibellie, find her tutorial here)

You take a paper towel, apply a generous amount of glue all over the surface, fold it and smear all the airbubbles out with your fingers (o yeah, did I mention that this might get a little messy)

Repeat, so add some more glue and fold.

Now you have your little square canvas, let it dry (this can take a couple of days) and you'll have a sturdy little canvas.

Once dry I place some heavy books on them to flatten them.

My idea was to stitch 4 squares to form a patchwork page, once I have made all the pages I will bind them together with the Bind-it all.

But as you can see my stitching is rubbish, so I thought maybe I can staple them together

But didn't really like the look, so I just glued them to a page, this way however I do loose the back of them.

In each square I will be writing funny stuff my son tells or does.

Some examples
What are we eating tonight? veal. you mean the veal has laid some meat. euh, no, we are eating the veal. That's not nice, the veal should grow up first and become very old.
or we were playing a guessing game and I gave the description of a car: we have 2 of them and they have 4 wheels, he answers the garbage bins :-)

Light

The last 2 years I've made and sold Christmas cards of which the earnings I donated to Unicef (you can see the designs here and here). Now I'm thinking of expanding by not only offering cards, but also little gifts like little notebooks, canvases...

I probably will try selling them on a local Christmas market on which only handcrafted items can be sold and am thinking of adding a page on my blog with a listing of all items so everybody who's interested can order. Just figuring out all the details, but keep a close eye on my blog.

Because the date of the market is coming nearer I really should get cracking on, so I made for this week's Craft Barn Challenge a little notebook with the theme light.

The notebook measures 9x9cm, the covers are made out of recycled cardboard (cereal box) covered with a layer of black gesso and stamped with this beautiful Lavinia fairy stamp.
I added a quote about light which starts at the front and continues inside: light is the symbol of thruth.

Kasper's preschool art book 1

Do you know the feeling that you’re always running way behind with everything. I do.

For example I have a whole pile of artwork from my son from in kindergarten which I intend to sort through and bind the most beautiful in a book and that per year.

Well, my son started 2 weeks ago his first year of elementary school (where has the time gone??), so I am hopelessly behind.

But in these moments of sudden panic I try to remember this quote I recently read in a magazine: You are not behind, you are just starting.

So with this mantra in the back of my head I got started.

Step 1: collect all art from kindergarten year 1, that was easy as I kept them in separate boxes, one for each year.

Step 2: select the works I want to keep and which ones can be thrown away, I did this together with my son so he could tell me which ones he really would like to keep and it also teaches him that you can’t keep everything.

Step 3: I glued pages together to make double sided pages

Step 4: punch holes in the pages with my Bind-it all

Step 5: aha, and now for the fun part, creating a front cover (I got the inspiration from Artangel)

I covered a piece of cardboard with crinkled tissue paper

Painted it with metallic paints and rubbed over the creases with some blue and green oil pastels.

In the middle I am going to glue down the letters of his name in gypsum which he decorated himself, around I wanted to create some kind of border.

Because this week is stencil week over at The Craft Barn I was playing around with stencils and another way of using them is laying them underneath a piece of paper or in my case a piece of tissuepaper and rubbing the pattern with a crayon.

I tore the leaves and glued them to the cover, followed by the letters for which I used my heatgun.

Bind it all together and tada finished.

One done, 2 more to go.

toilet roll mini book

If you have visited this spot before you probably already know that I like to use everyday materials. Well, what do we all have in abundance and just throw away, toilet rolls.

There are numerous tutorials on what to do with them and one that caught my eye was transforming them in a mini book.

This was such a cool idea I just had to give it a go.

First I flattened the rolls out and gessod the front, back and inside (only the first cm or so). I used homemade gesso (last time I used plaster but this gave a rough structure, so now I tried it with baby powder, much better and mmm the smell)

Next I applied a layer of ochre acrylic paint which I left to dry,

I toned it down with walnut DI and also distressed the edges.

Cut out rectangle pieces of pattern paper,

distressed the edges with the same walnut DI and glued them down.

Next I needed to make ‘spines’ for each page, I cut out small rectangles, used a decorative scissor for the edge and stamped a small flower on it.

I punched 2 holes in each roll/page and used 2 book rings to hold everything together.

The neat part about this book is that each page can hold a tag, so I made some tags out of the same patterned paper.

newspaper junk journal

The inner pages of this truly “junk” journal are made out of newspaper and the cover was a cereal box in a previous life.

I started by gluing 3 newspaper pages together to give them some sturdiness and let them dry on a washing line

Whipped up a batch of homemade gesso with following ingredients: white paint, glue and gypsum powder.Gessoed all the pages and cover, couldn’t hang this on the line because the pins would make marks (although this could be interesting too), so laid a couple of large plastic bags on the floor and laid them there until dry.

This gesso is really gritty, next time I will substitute the gypsum powder with some baby powder and see how that turns out.

I made 5 signatures of each 2 pages, I cut them to 25x18cm to fit in the cover.

I decorated the cover as followed: painted it in metallic colors and stamped some text randomly 

glued some tissuepaper on top which I stamped all over with butterflies.

I reinforced the border with some ordinary purple masking tape which on the outside was beautified with a flower stamp.

On the inside I collaged some vintage styled scraps, gave it a whitewash and stamped this heart shaped text. 

I wanted to add some beads to the binding and tried to make my own for the first time, watched some tutorials and got to work. I love how you can turn paper (scraps of paper in fact) in sturdy, wonderfully patterned beads. It was time consuming though but worth it in the end

I used a 3 hole pamphlet stitch to bind the 5 signatures, adding the beads on the outside. 

Really like the end result.  The only thing I find a little annoying is the space between the signatures on the inside binding, between 2 signatures you can see the cover. Maybe I should make the spacing between the signatures smaller? But I measure the spine and evenly divide that, otherwise it would look odd on the outside, no?  Is this something you always have with this binding? Maybe it disappears when you add to your pages?

mini album

Along with the monthly calendar challenge The Craft Barn is also hosting a weekly challenge, all details can be found here. This week's challenge was to make a mini album. 
I wanted to create a book for the ICADs I am creating with the Embrace your art 365. These measure 10 x 15 cm, a little border around them and the cover and the book would easily measure 20x20 cm, is this still a mini album? Apparently it is, I found somewhere a description that mini albums come in all different sizes with 8"x 8" being one of the most popular sizes, so I think my book qualifies. 

In all the videos I watched this week the cover was made using chipboard pieces and one scrapbook page, but my book is too big for a single 12" x 12" paper, so I used a packaging box instead. Glued my pattern paper on the front and back and used a piece of brown cardstock for the spine. 

On the inside I painted the spine brown and glued 3 pieces of patterned paper. (I forgot to take a picture,oeps)

Now it was time to create my waterfall pages. I cut a base page of 15 x 17 cm out of off-white cardstock, glued some flower paper at the bottom and used a decorative corner punch. For the waterfall I cut 5 pieces of 15 x 12 cm, scored them at 1 cm from the top and added a border at the bottom with the flower paper and finished it off with a decorative corner. Then all I needed to do was to glue them down on my base. On the left side I made the waterfall vertically and on the right side horizontally.

As I do not own a scoring board I needed to make something myself, I just took a soft pad, a ruler and my bonefolder.

my second sold book

Remember I had a commission for my very first 2 books,

well, here is book no 2.

It measures 21 x 15 cm and consists of blank pages divided with pockets.

The outside covers are gessoed in black and have a border of texture paste (I liked the effect of this paste and stencil so much in the 7 backgrounds challenge)

The insides are like little memobords, I covered a piece of cardboard with some fabric and added some ribbon with a brad to create a place to store some tags

 The buyer was so pleased that she is thinking of ordering a third one for herself :-)