marbled

The background for this page is made using red and orange gel sticks. Through my new homemade brick wall stencil I removed some of the color with a baby wipe.

I stamped an angel statue and some columns on the marbled papers (which immediately popped into my head when I saw the word marbled,these papers were made in a crafting session with my son using shaving cream). After cutting the images out I was a bit disappointed because the nice marbled effect was hardly visible.

For that reason I used the stencil as a template to cut out some bricks and glued them randomly on the page and added a marbled plaque with my quote on it: write the bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble.

Me Time Message #6 - stubborn

Finished my last message yesterday.

I’m so glad I completed this challenge (I’m good at starting something but not so good at seeing them trough to the end).

And I must say I liked the challenge more then I thought I would.The idea of writing notes to myself didn’t really do it for me, but I gave it a try and I must say I grew towards journaling and who knows maybe I’ll be doing it more in the future.

salt

I started this page ages ago, but I didn’t seem to get it quite together.

I first started with painting the background with blue watercolors and sprinkling in some salt, but this didn’t turn out like I had hoped.

Then some spraying through a snowflake stencil and some embossed snowflakes to picture the crystal structure of salt.

Then it needed something more but couldn’t decide what so I laid it aside for a while (this while turned into months)

As I want to finish of this project I needed to tackle this page and suddenly I knew what to do, recently I bought some felt snowflakes at a garage sale

(actually I think I got them for free, I intended to use them as a kind of a stencil on the gelli plate)

But they were the perfect topping for this page, so I painted them white (as they were brown), added some glitters and glued them down.

The only issue is that they are really bulky, so I think everytime I will flip through my altered dictionary it will open on this page first (which by the way is not one of my favourites)

thing

It’s the sweet simple things in life which are the real ones afterall.

When I read that quote I had to think about cupcakes.

And as it happens I had already some stamped and colored cupcakes laying around on my desk (I think almost a year or so, I thought to use it for my birthday calendar but didn’t eventually, luckily I hardly ever throw anything away because it was perfect for what I had in mind).

I painted my primed page turquoise using a credit card, added gesso through a butterfly stencil in which I sprinkled some glitter (because what’s sweeter in life than some glittery butterflies??)

Then used my new made cherry blossom stencil again (just love it), glued the cupcakes which I glammed up with some silver stickles and the quote down.

As I stepped back and looked at the page I felt it was missing something so I added some more stamping in the upper corners, wasn’t enthusiastic about that so I added some pearl in some of the dots and think it’s okay now.

Thanks for stopping by, make sure to check all the other wonderful entries over here.

oriental

It’s been quite a while since I did some work in my dictionary and I had set myself the goal to complete it by september.

With 6 more letters to go and september approaching very fast it was high time to get started again.

First off I choose the 6 words for the remaining letters and prepared the pages:  glued some pages together for extra strength and torn out the ones which I didn’t need.

Oriental was the word I choose for the letter O as I have a set of oriental stamps.

I started out by adding a coat of gesso to the pages,which I sprayed with  red Dylusions sprayink, I was surprised that it didn’t become a solid vibrant red page, but instead was patchy and rather dull, even a second coat didn’t do the trick. Maybe the glued dictionary pages absorb the ink??

Instead of figthing it I went with it.

I added black stickers I had which felt very oriental to me, I used both the positive and negative (no waste here) and a text sticker with the quote Life is too short.

A few weeks back I would have stopped here, but after Clare’s workshop I’m getting over the fear of layering and added some more to the page.

I wanted to add some japanese lettering and tried to make a stamp, but this was too fiddly so I gave up, instead I printed the letters on a piece of tissuepaper (I glued a piece of tissuepaper on regular printer paper and held my breath when I ran it  through our printer because I was scared that it would get stuck, luckily for me it didn’t this time, but  if anyone has a better way of printing on tissuepaper please let me know in a comment below)

I tore the letters and glued them down with some matte gel medium, of coarse the ink reacted with the water in the gel, but that’s fine with me.

I also printed out this japanese lady and glued her down in the center of the book.

Thought this would be it, but still wanted to add something.

And that something was some delicate cherry blossoms, so I sat myself down and made a cherry blossom stencil. This is the try-out, just perfect:

Then I ran one problem into the other with stenciling this on the page, the pink and green were hardly visible, so I thought delicate white flowers,  but the white was not that clear either, then black maybe? Better, but still wasn't that happy about it, so while the paint was still wet I added gold glitters to make them stand out more. 

Still not sure whether I like it, but maybe it's best to let it rest for a bit and have a look at it later and decide then.
What do you think?

Me Time Message #5 - creative

As always I followed Clare's instructions, but along the way there were some oopses (outstanding opportunities presenting suddenly).
After applying gesso to my envelop I stamped some paisley motives all over with Kaleidocolor ink, then I clear embossed circles, but my ink from the paisleys wasn't completely dry yet, so they too picked up the embossing powder, oops#1.
Then while heatsetting the embossing powder the plastic from my window melted off course, oops#2.

Searching the net for quotes about creativity I found so many that spoke to me, but this one fitted in so well with my message and is so true, because the more I create the more ideas pop up in my head for a next project.
Does this happen to you too? And how do you keep track of your ideas? Do you write them down?

vintage birthday card

Hello all,

Hope you're all doing well, we're enjoying a vacantion day here in Belgium. The weather is not with us though, I think summer might be over.

That's not all bad, because then I don't need to feel bad anymore if I'm sitting inside in my art studio.

Here is just a quick post with a birthday card I made for my aunts' birthday, which is today. hope she likes it.