July - turquoise and beach huts

This month's calendar challenge at the Craft Barn asks for turquoise and beach huts. So I started with a 12x12 turquoise paper, cut it in half and stamped 2 designs all over on each half. Fishes on the one and sea horses on the other, just wright for a beach theme, no? 

On one of the halfs I added some walnut DI to create another tone.
Then I cut strips of 2 cm wide and glued them alternating on a piece of paper. 

Again I cut strips of 2 cm wide (now cut in the other direction, so in the width) and glued them on my final page, this way I created a mosaic, the easy way.

Then the beach huts, that needed some thought as I do not own anything with an image of a beach hut.
So I thought about carving a stamp or making a stencil, but while searching images I came across a pattern of a beaded beach hut, so I took that design and created a beach hut with iron beads from my son. 

Now I only needed a fitting quote which I found after some searching:
A little sand between your toes helps to take away your woes.
Wrote it with the help of a lettering stencil, outlined it with a black marker and filled it with some white correction fluid.

Hopefully I manage to create the August page much quicker than this one.

canvas hearts

While sitting with my son helping him sorting the colors of iron beads for his project he suddenly gave me an assignement. I needed to make something for him with hearts and glitter.
So I made this for him

I started out by prepping the canvas with some gesso and scribbling some yellow and green gelsticks on it

which I smooshed out with a wet babywipe. Love the magic of seeing the dry crayon-marks turn into paint. I sprinkled some salt on to the canvas while it was still wet and let it dry, but I didn't achieve the desired effect. O well, so be it, it did however add a glimpse of glitter so that was good as that was part of my briefing. 

I cut some hearts out of bookpages which I also colored with the gelsticks and added a black border with a babywipe which I rubbed over the black gel stick. Some washitape and text stamping and I was pleased with how the background turned out.

I knew the focal point would be the hearts my son had made with the iron beads but it needed something more, while browsing my box with collage material I found these cute birds thorn from a kids book and another bird from a magazine add.

I like how it appears that they are looking at each other or even how  it seems that the bird is serenading the 2 birds up in the tree.