five layers of journaling

Still catching up on sharing my pages from my moleskine planner, inspired by the Original Documented Life Project and this is another of my favourites.

Art Challenge: Using at least Five Layers

The challenge was to use at least five layers and I was hugely inspired by the fabulous Art to the 5th Cardboard Crush workshop.

I painted up a strip of paper with a repeated mark and created five separate 'pages' that I then stitched together.

Each of the five 'pages' has five layers on it....

...and they lift up so are journaled on both sides.

I hope you get a good idea from these photos; it was hard to get good images of the way this page was put together!

I'm loving adding doodling to my pages :)

The above 'page' started off as a scrap of paper that I'd added some watercolour paint to.  I then doodled around a leaf shape and added some collage.

I'm not sure where this little guy came from - possibly an old lotto game.  I just loved him and decided he'd be happy in my journal.  I added art journaling to the other side of the card ...

Another page featured a verse from Documented Faith

I really can recommend this art challenge.  I'm loving it :)

Challenge #9 at The StampMan: It's CHRiSTMaS!!!!! and anything goes...

It's Bonfire Night in the UK, so lots of treacle toffee, sparklers, fireworks, baked potatoes and parkin.  I'm at work all day and into the evening tonight so no partying for me until tomorrow.  Instead we're having some sparkle via this fortnight's Stamp Man challenge.

It feels a bit like coming home, being asked to be on The Stamp Man design team as I've know Jill and Ian for so long.  Look at the photo Jill chose to introduce me to the world lol

Not that I mind, it's my normal look when I'm crafting ;)  although for this challenge I indulged in my love of Hero Arts and show my clean and simple side!  I saw Karen Jackson demonstrating these baubles at Happy Stampers Northwest at Port Sunny and just fell in love with the 3d idea.

-To make the baubles this way, just stamp the image three times in a colour of your choice, cut them out then fold them in half.  Choose the best one for the centre the glue a folded ornament on the left and one on the right.  

-Stamp up the card (that Merry Christmas is a denami stamp from The Stamp Man many years ago!), using the Fabulous Flourish.  This is truly, truly FaBuLouS and a sell out at the Port Sunny show.  It calls your name when you see it, and is so, so versatile! [looks fab on dark blue, stamped in white, with snowflakes, but can I find where I put that card?  No....arrrgggh!!]

- Attach the long thread to the card by taping it to the back then bringing it over to the front and taping it down.  

- Tie a bow around the top of each ornament then glue them down on the card.

There's lots more inspiration from The Stamp Man design team over on their challenge blog, along with details  of the winners from challenge #8: cards for men and space to link your work so we can go and take a gander at it :)  Have fun :) :) :) 

It's time to play in the Play Date Cafe!!

...with new colours from Alison - how fab are these!  I'd just never have put that pink with orange but it works brilliantly and I loved doing this journal page with Alison's digi-image :)

As soon as I saw this bird I thought of her as an old lady, dressed up to go out to bingo.  I love the huge flower she is wearing in her hair/feathers!!  I had great fun making the background with Spiced Marmalade distress ink which I then stamped on using acrylic dabbers whilst making up Gladys' story :) 

soooooooooooo tired...but what a fabulous workshop!

I was teaching at The Stamp Attic yesterday, my first workshop for Wendy.  And it was just GREAT!  I went down to Wantage on Friday in time to help prep for the workshop.  It was like having the world at my feet, look at all those yummy stamps to play with in the workshop :)   I don't own any Wendy Vecchi stamps, yet, so it was great to use them to demo with.

The workshop space is opposite the shop,  So I had the absolute pleasure of sitting in the quiet workshop, working away in my journal,

and being able to turn and look out of the window at the shop; it was fabulous once it had gone dark outside,  looking out across the cobbles, from such a safe, magical space :)

The kitchen area of the workshop has a very distinct roof...

Wendy said this is protected; it was the garden shed from the buildings that were here before the shops!  Isn't it fabulous :)

Anyway, back to the workshop, what a wonderful group of people they were.  It was great to meet Laura (who I spent the day calling Paula, sorry Laura, I misheard!!) who is a regular visitor to the play date cafe.  Once I'd persuaded her that she really needed to journal on paper to keep it permanent

(only joking, couldn't resist that quip)

...she produced one of my favourite pages of the day!

To me this penguin like bird looks like it's saying, "right, ok, WHAT am I doing here?  In fact, where am I?  What's going on?" and it just tickled me!  I loved lots of the pages people made, and will share some more with you tomorrow. 

Just look how hard they all worked, you can't see an inch of table!!  And at the end of the day, when they'd all gone, and the room was quiet once more, I worked hard too!  Any guesses as to what I was up to?

And sorry Mrs Roddis, you know so no giving the game away ;)

play date cafe challenge 6: my turn again!

My turn to choose the colours again this week.  I decided it would be fun to use the colours from my blog header, which  was taken from one of my journal pages, before I worked on it some more.

For the challenge, I turned the colours around and used orange as the main colour [yummy Distress Spiced Marmalade] and used a colour copy of the journal page to add embellishments  - that's the recycled art bit :)

The cute owl is from a Hero Arts stamp set from my visit to The Stampman last Thursday.  I love owls!

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

cute alert!!

I received a text this morning from a very good friend which said, and I quote,
"CUTE ALERT!! Do not go in Ashton on Mersey pet shop" (that's our local village).
So of course, Sophie (my 12 year old daughter) and I had to go and see this cuteness. And look who we came home with :)

He looks like a little squirrel but he is the most chilled out, beautiful looking guinea pig I've seen. His fur is kindof wiry, hence the name 'brillo' :) We already have two guinea pigs that belong to school, but live in my classroom. They often come home for the weekend. Now we have our own guinea pig, and a second one is coming tomorrow. Tom (13) has decided to buy one with his birthday money. He's wanted his own pet for ages.

But now to arty stuff. I belong to a small group of people who send out one ATC to everyone once a month. Any theme. Not very demanding time-wise(there's only 5 of us), but I still find it so hard some months to do it, time just catches up. I owe them all July and August at the minute so I decided to use my new tree stamps and do a mini-series of trees. The Hero Arts tree is one I already had.