This is the longest title I have ever used. And it is one of the most absurd of historical fictions. And yet. Is it possible in some other dimension? In some other possible universe? The image itself might well spin out an entire novel. In the viewer.

Like most people during this time of year, I too am reflective of all my many blessings.  However, at this point in my life I am more thankful for all of the mistakes that I have made.  All those times that I felt apprehensive, a little scared, or somewhat challenged only got me closer to the place I needed to go.  For that, I am thankful.

My grandmothers call me young and those that I mentor and support have told me that I am wise.  While I take each piece of commentary with a grain of salt, I realize that I am just like everyone else–trying to do the best I can.  I’m at a crossroads of sorts and I am feeling energized and encouraged about what’s around the bend. 

Here is what I know for sure–the minute that you begin to forgive yourself and remember that you too are human, you free yourself to move on to the blessings that are waiting just up ahead. 

While being a mom has undeniable rewards, it hasn’t always been the easiest of rides.  I am my son’s protector and provider and with that comes an amazing weight of responsibility.  However, he is healthy, wise, and wonderfully vibrant.  I am thankful thus.

My full-time job carries with it a lot of responsibility.  When I accepted the position, which was newly created at the time, I had no idea what issues I would encounter.  I’ve been there going on five years now (really?) and I feel like there is still so much that needs to be done.  However, there are people who have been out of work for months, years even, those who have lost their homes and sometimes even their sense of self.  I am thankful thus.

And besides everything that constitutes my real  life (as noted above), I am attempting to expand on this sense of creativity that I have always had.  I study and research my craft just like I was getting a PhD, staying on top of trends and the latest tools, gadgets, and techniques.  My biggest struggle ahead, and ultimately my goal for the coming months, is to really figure out who I am as a designer, a scrapbooker, a card maker…a memory keeper.  It’s not happening as fast as I would like though.  I get frustrated when my project doesn’t match my vision.  What exactly is my vision anyway and why would anyone care?  The good news is that I have time to find out.  There’s no need to rush. It will come. I am thankful thus.

I really like how these turned out.  I hope you do too.  Let me know if you have any questions about them and remember…be thankful, thus.

Hello…I’m back!  It’s been awhile.  I really haven’t been doing a whole lot of art lately…I’ve been getting ready for Thanksgiving…now that it is over…whew…I can relax a bit.  I have started a project…two, to be exact.  I am making two booklets from security envelopes that I plan to fill with photos, cards with quotes or anything else that comes to mind.  I will use magazine pics, decorative papers, old dictionary pages and some of my art to embellish the pages of the books.  If you would like to see more clearly what I am talking about, visit Patty at River Bend Ranch and watch this short video:

http://ramblingrose.typepad.com/journal/page/2/

The photo below is a page I did earlier in my Gut Art book.  The class has ended but I have a few things from the class that I have not posted yet.  This started as a page from a Coach catalog.  I put a thin layer of gesso and then used watercolors all over the page, letting them drip from top to bottom.  Then I used some decorative papers and painted with acrylics and stamped over the page.  I see a sheep’s head and body if I look closely.  The head is to the left of the dark watercolor drip. 

This is the second version of the Savannah Churchill piece.



Su www.1129design.com la nuova linea di collane e orecchini realizzati con perle in carta riciclata. Modelli sempre più unici per donne inimitabili!

This is the alternate version for the Betty Hutton piece I created.

Newly listed Nat Geo paper bead necklace….. order online

Go Green by wearing recycled paper beaded artwork necklaces!

This ethnic looking necklace was made from hand rolled beads from Nat Geo, and coated with an acrylic finish. The necklace is multi colored in browns and blues and the spacer beads are wood tones.

Approx 34″

This is the back up illustration for my Ethel Waters piece.

A brayer is a handy tool used in altered art for making interesting backgrounds.  Here are several tutorials that I found giving instructions on using brayers.

I know!   It’s a rare thing at the moment, but I actually made something this weekend!  Firstly, let me back up to the events of last weekend – the Retreat.  Chef (aka David, aka Lesley’s hubby) came along on Friday to help unload the cars full of crafting gear and ended up staying to help all weekend.  This was particularly useful as our other LHO (Lifter of Heavy Objects, aka Adrian) was playing hospital taxi for his Dad on Friday and rather out of sorts on Saturday, so David’s help was extra welcome.

So we owed David a favour and as the boys sat untangling Zutter O’wires in the hotel lounge on Sunday afternoon, they cooked up a plan to spend the following Sunday watching manly DVDs like Star Trek while possibly enjoying some local curry house’s finest line in home deliveries.  Lesley and I were informed of this plan and determined not to be DVD widows, we figured we could probably find something to do around my craft room.

I nearly scuppered the plan by getting the mother of all colds this week.  Luckily it didn’t develop into anything worse, but I did end up spending three days in bed with no energy or desire to craft at all.  Saturday saw me making a feeble attempt to tidy the craft room enough to fit another person in there, and by Sunday, there was room for another chair at the table, so Lesley and I sat down to play.

During the retreat, Jean Hardy from Crafty Individuals taught a mini shrine class which everyone thought was fantastic.  So that’s what Lesley and I played with on Sunday and here’s what we came up with.

We both thoroughly enjoyed making these cute little things – the Stampbord pieces you can see in there are the mini one inch size pieces, so you can get an idea of the scale of this.

Here’s a close up of mine.

So big thank you to Jean for the wonderful inspiration for this project.  That’s German scrap around the edge of the box – coming soon to the website.

An added bonus to the day was that Adrian decided to cook rather than get a takeaway and he cooked a gorgeous pasta bake for us all which was a surprising and most welcome treat.  He actually had the vegetables all prepared and chopped up in the morning before they arrived so he could “throw” it together.  He’s never done anything like that before – I’m well impressed and using every positive reinforcement trick in the book to encourage more of this kind of thing.  A girl could get used to that sort of treatment!

Maybe there’s some domestication vibe in the air or maybe it’s the time of the year – before my cold struck me down, I actually baked cakes on Tuesday!    Well a coffee traybake to be precise.  Possibly it was the memory of those gorgeous glittery cupcakes we had at the retreat …

Months back, I had friends over and we painted bits of fabric, dryer sheets and nappy liners.

The green one was finally used along with some Angelina film, it was covered in polyester chiffon and I went around the flowers and tacked it down around the edge with green rayon thread. There it sat for a couple of months not looking quite right.
Then I found a paper serviette with green ferns, so I packed it up while on vacation and took it home. I tore the serviette in to piece and had to unpick the previous stitching around the edge. I was more comfortable starting with the hand stitching.
My background was 13″ by 9″ and I was able to get 4 postcards when I was finished. So then I stitched everything down, I really need to practice with the freeform embroidery and added dark brown rayon around the edge. In reality it is much more vibrant with a spring like green.

The biggest delight, Canada posted delivered it in one day!

Go Green with recycled art!    My first attempts at paper beads!   Each bead is hand rolled from recycled newspaper, magazines or circulars! 

I just listed some in my etsy store!

Sunday Circular

Magazine Ads

Nat Geo photos:

Had a lovely surprise today… got this message from Milliande of the Milliande Art Community about this collage:

Question Of Escape

I enjoy the composition and soft hidden emotional feel this pioece has for me, thanks for sharing, chosen as featured artwork of the day ♥ milliande

Want to see Milliande’s video tutorial that inspired this series? Take a look here.

There are 2 iconic figures that I believe will survive the 20th century. They are Marilyn Monroe and Adolf  Hitler. It is not good versus evil. They are both mysteries. One is beauty, but beauty blemished by strange demons. The other is blindness, eyes burned out by obsession.

Sunday Postcard Art… use flourishes/swirls in your art this week. There are always some gorgeous postcards to see on this challenge blog and by the time I get around to linking up there’ll probably be about 40 entries! So, lots to see!

I seem to be going through a punchinella and machine-stitching phase at the moment, but then, who’d have thought that combining the two would be fun? I used a small image from Crafty Individuals Miniatures and a recycled postcard and lots of recycled scraps, as is my wont! The flourish is also one of my favourite CI stamps.

The stamped image is embossed and I thought it’d be fun to see if the fabric strips burned or melted while I was heating the EP. The only reason I used EP is because I had to heat the Ranger ink to dry it anyway and that always irritates me, so I might as well have embossing effects too… I am terribly impatient! Anyway, the fabric strips did curl up but they didn’t melt. (Can you hear the disappointment?!!) Next time I’ll have to use some of the kite scraps – they DO melt beautifully!!

I was watching Gary Reef cutting a huge rhino stencil this morning, in his studio, direct on streaming cam from Norway. He lives on a farm, in a forest, far from his native Oz, and we talked about magpies, buzzards and milking cows – and knitting!! Can you believe that? I manage to get chatting with an artist whose work I’ve admired for ages, and end up chatting to him about ‘country life’… oh and saunas! You may know Gary as “Capricorn Artist 73″ on Youtube – fabulous, contemporary art.

NB: This is a recycled postcard from my local library in Bude. I grabbed a few during BBC Poetry season. On the back of this one is the following poem by Wendy Cope:

Some men never think of it.

You did. You’d come along

And say you’d nearly brought me flowers

But something had gone wrong.

The shop was closed. Or you had doubts –

The sort that minds like ours

Dream up incessantly. You thought

I might not want your flowers.

It made me smile and hug you then.

Now I can only smile.

But, look, the flowers you nearly brought

Have lasted all this while.

Flowers – by Wendy Cope

Well have a great Sunday all – I’m going to watch DD playing on the XBox and get some more paint layers down on various projects I’m in the middle of (no surprises there, eh?!). xo

I’ve recently been working on gifts for Christmas.  My daughter’s boyfriend really likes Walt Whitman, so I made a Poet-tree collage of Whitman’s book of poems “Leaves of Grass”.

First I went to google images and found some copies of Whitman’s poems in his own handwriting and glued them onto my background:

Then I printed a picture of Whitman and the title of the book:

Next I cut the leaves out of magazine pages and any paper I could find with green in it:

I then stained the background green and blue and glued Whitman to the bottom, painted a tree coming out of his head and glued the leaves on the tree.  I also used the leaves for the grass.   I used a bottle cap to print cloud circles in the sky. 

Here’s the finished collage:

A Walt Whitman “Leaves of Grass Poetree”

This is an invisible dragon.

I thought I might go back to some illustrations I created for a series of children’s books. The books sat in many publisher’s desk drawers and almost came to fruition several times but always, at the last moment, something came along to snuff out their public viewing.

Paper Creations for any Occasion!!

Premiering Thursday Night, November 19th. If you are a St. Anne’s mom, I’ll see you there at the Chocolate Lounge + Holiday Artisan Mart…

Look for my banner.

Eli

The difference between an optimist and a pessimist. An optimist believes that the glass is half full. The pessimist wants to know who filled half the glass.