Organized Yet?.......STAMPtember with Simon Says Stamp Challenge

Me? Organized? Never going to happen to my satisfaction and maybe that is what is wrong.  I need to re-visit my satisfaction levels.  But, isn't this a lot of women's dilemmas, enough is never enough?  So, over the years of working at a desk in corporate America (and a need to recycle all those boxes that are thrown away everyday), I designed a desk organizer.  I have given these as gifts over the years and designed one that I used on my desk for some of those years. This is the newest one that I made.  The step-by-step is long and intrusive, so I will give a short version.

I also have been enjoying STAMPtember over at Simon Says Stamp.  Great projects, challenges and giveaways this week. Check out all of the goodies and blog hop going on right now!

The box is a rectangle that held chlorine for the pool. I covered the box with Tyvek paper and then painted the paper.  I then covered that with two colors of StampinUp! card stock. I stamped the card stock with Versamark and a StampinUp! wheel.  I stamped the Bible verse and embossed with clear embossing powder. The butterfly and bee were stamped and hand painted. The Pen holder is a small recycled can covered with stamped card stock. I cut a piece of white fun foam to fit the bottom of the can and the bottom of the organizer.  The flower image I hand painted on the front and the sides.

I have a lot of fun working on these.  Unfortunately, I no longer have a pool, so I no longer get these boxes and I have gone through my stash.  I am now looking for any subs I can find, so far no luck.  I have moved onto a large desk organizer/postal center that I will post soon.  I am building this one from the ground up out of card board.  Time will tell.  Here are some pictures of the first one I made that sat on my desk.

I had also made a clipboard and little notepad to go with this green set.




















Hope everyone had a great Labor Day weekend.  I am still waiting for cool weather here in Texas.  This week the average high will be about 104 degrees.  Stay cool everyone!

Enjoy and God bless!

 

Weekly Scripture

"I have set the Lord always before me: because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved."  Psalms 16:8

Imagination........

I finally finished the August challenge on Limor1278 Mixed Media Art Group.  This month it's about Faber Castell Design Memory Craft.  I love the Artist Pens. They are permanent india ink pens and I can watercolor over the drawing without running ink.  They are my favorite.  I am going to try rouging over the ink next and I will let you know.  Actually, the Artist Pens are the only Faber Castell Design Memory Craft product that I own.  I would love to try the Gelatos  and Big Brush Pens!  Below are the details of my project for this month.

I started with creating the floral image on the right of the page and penning it with the Artist Pens XS.  I then went around the page with an outline to give me a border.

Next, I just started to watercolor.  I tried my new watercolors and even though I still have a lot of practicing to do, I really like them.  The only thing I did not like was the paper. I used Mixed Media 98# paper.  Although, it is smooth for the pen work, the pilling was immediate.  I did a water wash for the sky and I could not get my color on the page before the pilling started.  I will definitely need to find a smooth 140# watercolor paper for my future work.

So, not wanting to start over on a heavier paper, I worked around the paper and continued to paint.  All the watercolor was done without the use of masking medium, so you will see some slight bleeding here and there.  I left it over night to dry.  Then I went back and added some stamped butterflies and a bird.  I colored the butterflies with distress ink Peacock Feathers and some more watercolor.  The white on the butterfly wings is gesso.

I decided that I wanted to add a tag with a stamped sentiment on the left of the page. So I colored the tag with distress inks Spiced Marmalade and Peacock Feathers.  Then I stamped a Tim Holtz sentiment.  I used one of my stencils with the Artist Pens Brush to create the flowers on the edge.  Really cool effect. I will definitely be using the pens with my stencils in the future.

I finished the page by going around the border with the Artist Pens S to make the border line stand out more.  I finished the flowers with grey watercolor in the daisies and used the Artist Pens to make some dots around the centers of the flowers.  I added the clouds with white gesso.  I also added touches of black with the Artist Pens to the butterflies and the bird which was stamped with Black Stazon.

I hope you have enjoyed my walk through for my page.  I really loved the way the Artist Pens work with watercolor.  I will be exploring more of this in my daily journal.  As I said previously, I will also be experimenting with the Artist Pens with some pen & ink rouging. 

Hope everyone had a glorious August and will have a blessed September.  I love fall, so I am ready for cool weather!


Enjoy & God Bless!

Cottage Chic Mini Journal

Digital files are all the rage these days in the scrapbook/crafting world.  I made a journal from pages that I printed from a digital file.  Marion Smith has some of the most beautiful digital journal files I have ever seen.  She had a challenge for her Cottage Chic Mini Book this last month.  I submitted my journal that I made with her designs and I did so via YouTube and I want to share my experience with this project. 

To be honest I have always been skeptical of digital files.  I have printed some freebies out that have not been very "clean" digitally and I have an inkjet printer.  So when thinking about printing out 12+ pages of digital imagery, you want everything perfect so you're not printing over and over to get a "good" print.  Well, Prima has freebies on their facebook page every week.  Marion had a file for her new Romance Novel paper line with Prima, so I decided to print it out.  I was so impressed with the file that I knew I had to get the Cottage Chic Mini Book even with my inkjet printer.

I cannot say enough good things about Marion's digital files.  Every one is beautiful, digitally clean and easy to print.  The best part is you can print as many copies as you want.  Say you have 10 friends that you want to make journals for as gifts, you can print 10 copies.  There is not a limit on how many you can print.  When you purchase the paper pads at the store, you only get (at the most) 3 sheets of each print.  So you would need 4 paper pads! Ouch! Now you say what about the card and ink that you use with your printer?  So much cheaper than the paper pads.  I just purchased index card weight cardstock, 250 count, for less than $8.  Printer ink is expensive, but I printed my whole Cottage Chic Mini on the color ink cartridge low ink warning and I am still printing in color. 

To sum up my experience, I love Marion's digital designs.  I would recommend these to anyone looking for quality digital designs.

In the journal I did a lot of stamping.  I painted this dress form with black acrylic, Martha Stewart black glitter, and Liquid pearls.  The dress form is a two piece form from Mini Album Scraps ning site.  I then made a number of different pockets to handle all of the tags from Marion and multiple freebie websites.  The two butterfly tags are stamped images that I stamped in Stazon Black and then colored with colored pencils. 

I have attached my video below.  I go through the mini pretty quickly, so if you have any questions, please leave me a comment.  Hope you enjoy and go check out Marion Smith Designs.

 Enjoy life!

Happy Girls are the Prettiest..........

It's been awhile, so I thought I would post my art journal page that I submitted to the Limor1278 MM July Contest on her Facebook group page.  I have a Glitz stamp set that I love the quote stamp in by Audrey Hepburn, "Happy girls are the prettiest!"  It's sooo true.  Beauty comes from deep within.

For the page, I first layered 4 or 5 torn scrapbook paper pieces and covered the whole page.  I then white washed with gesso.  I tried a couple of masks from Prima with Tsukineko color sprays.  I then tried a mask with some green acrylic paint, which didn't work.  So, I washed the whole page with the green, which I liked and brought out the two other masks I used first.  I then grabbed a Crafter's Workshop stencil and using Black Soot Distress Ink, stenciled the while page.            

     










            
I then decided to try drawing a girl again.  She's not perfect by far, but I kind of like her.  For her clothing I created a pattern and cut from Prima scrapbook paper (Alla Prima & Annalee). Her neck area I cut from Alla Prima as well.  I then colored her face and hair with Distress Inks and Tsukineko color sprays.  I cut her headband from the Annalee paper to match her pants. Inked edges and put together.

I stamped with Black Stazon the Audrey Helpburn quote and then from Prima the Beauty and Style stamps.  I decided that she needed shoes, but she has no feet.......hmmmmm?!  Ok, it's the end of the day and she is headed for the beach, she can carry her shoes.  These were stamped with a Prima stamp on a paper from the Annalee Prima line.

I had fun creating this page while watching the Olympics.  I have been behind with the Tim Holtz monthly tag challenge and hope to get caught up soon.  I am currently working on a journal that I will show soon.


Enjoy!

Jon's Birthday.......

This year for my brother's birthday, I decided to make him a bookmark.  He had just ordered The Hunger Games trilogy, so I thought it would be cool.  He loved it, so sweating over with I did not mess-up.  Now I gave him a larger gift, but this was the handmade portion of his gift.

I used a shipping tag which I inked, sprayed and stamped.  I then used a piece of Tim Holtz paper on the back and stamped with the large owl clock LaBlanche stamp.  I love these stamps by the way! I then sealed the whole tag with a satin varnish.  Which I do not like the satin and I need to purchase the matte varnish for future use.  In person the bookmark is really dark and cool, but for pictures, the satin reflects the light.

 Enjoy.......

Street Art Anyone?????

Here is the second page in my art journal that I posted to the art journal ning site.  I know my posts have been short, but I am still recovering and my shoulder is screaming at me this morning. So, hopefully I will be back to normal soon.

This week's study was on Street Art or Graffiti.  This was a challenge for me because I do not do graffiti, have never done graffiti, so I winged it.  Still not sure how graffiti my page is...........but I tried.

I call this page Faith.  I did an original drawing showing faith growing from my heart.  The stems of the flowers have faith written in them and all is colored with colored pencils. The scripture is written with a black bic pen.  Yes, bic pen.  It worked with the background.

Oh, the background! I started with white gesso, then acrylic paints.  I wasn't happy, so I used a credit card and scrapped on more gesso.  I used a stencil, paper towel and water to remove the paint from the stencil area which created the "flower" areas. Then i decided black was needed and I wanted a stencil with little circles. So I pulled a scrap piece of card stock and started punching holes.  I used two different sizes of hole punches and made a "design".  Then I used the Tim Holtz Ink Applicator with Distress Ink Black Soot.  Over-all I like it.  I may at some point go back and add some stamping here and there, but for now it's done.  If I do add stamping, you will see a re-post with the updated page.

Enjoy.......

A smashing page...........

So I am behind on my art journaling.  I have been dealing with a pulled muscle in my shoulder and some others, so I have been resting.  Needless to say, i know........

So I was finally able to complete my two art journal pages and I posted them to the ning site. It was a smashing page that I want to talk about today.  I will post the second page tomorrow.

We were to put acrylic paint on one side of the journal and then close the book.  Smashing the opposite page into the paint and creating a background or design.  It was a disaster at first.  The paint did not transfer and then if it did, it pulled the paper apart. Yikes! You can see below where the white bits are in the middle of the painted areas, this is where the paper pulled off.

So, I tried again.  I used so much paint on the next try, it oozed from the journal.  Still do not think I got this technique down right, but I will keep trying.  So, here is my finished page that I posted on the art journaling ning site.

All of the color was smashed between the pages.  I then went in, using black acrylic paint, and added all of the black accents.  To me this looked like a close up of a butterfly.  Not sure it came out correctly, but I really like it and that is what matters in your art journal.  Do what you like and keep working even if it's not working, keep at it.  Enjoy........