A Visual Journey 2015

A Visual Journey 2015

I have decided that this year I need to free myself from over thinking some of my designs. Don’t get me wrong, standing back, walking away and giving yourself some time can be a good thing but often I am making a small project and I start to procrastinate, try to change elements and over think so that my creativity goes out the window and I completely lose the thread. So I thought that if I made a Visual Journal/Diary/Sketchbook and practiced making quick designs at least once a week or fortnight it would help me to free myself from this constraining practice and would also give me the chance to experiment with techniques and ideas that I pick up when visiting your blogs or that I see on Pinterest.

So today is day ONE and I am looking to post something hopefully every Thursday and wondered if you would like to join me? Along the way I will tell you what my inspiration is or what I am trying to achieve and I will add a linky to the bottom of my post. There are no prizes and certainly no pressure to share every time I post but by linking we can visit other artists or crafters who would like to show us what they are doing and find even more inspiration between ourselves.

I bought this old book sometime last year and have been waiting for the opportunity to use it and now is the time. It's a fabulous hard back with gorgeous watercolour type paper pages. Some were cut and some were just torn when it was made so it attracted me straight away when I saw it on a market book stall.

I have started with a double page collage. First I prepared the pages by drawing round some of the words I wanted to show through then painted them with gesso and a little frayed burlap distress paint. When they were just about dry I places waxed paper between the pages so they wouldn't stick together and put under a heavy box to make sure they were flattened well.

My collage is made up of a variety of scraps found on my desk and as I started to design the layout and pick up each of the elements I was creating links to the book title, so that when I had finished putting it all together I added some words that I thought The Roadmender would see or be aware of when he was out every day. They've added the dialogue I felt this collage needed.

I added a little bit of stamping and consciously chose the tissue tapes to go with the design, but otherwise the pieces were all picked up from scraps that were left on my desk from previous projects. Can you believe that they fitted together so well?

The number 8 is foil tape on card and the piece I played with before making my my new year plaque (see previous post).

I hope you will consider joining in with this visual journey. Anything goes with whatever journal/sketchbook/ type activity is right for you. My Pinterest page explains it as -
'Keeping a visual journal is a journey of experimentation; giving time to be free in expressing yourself and not constrained by others expectations. Practicing design, layouts, composition, colour mixing, techniques, materials, mixed media. Creating your own exercises, titles, mood boards, taking yourself out of the box, finding yourself. Bring new ideas to life, to spark you off in new directions, to allow your own imagination and creativity to develop in complete freedom'.

Thanks for joining me today

hugs Brenda xxx

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  Please join our Visual Journal Link Up and thank you for sharing your inspiration with us.

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Happy New Year plaque

Foil tape plaque for 2015

Happy New Year I hope you will have a happy, healthy and peaceful 2015 and be able to enjoy some regular inspiration time to create and make beautiful art.

I am starting the year with something special I made to hang in the dining room for our new years eve party - a plaque to hang over the mirror with the year on it..

Process steps

Cut 4 ATC size pieces of card (2 ½  x 3 ½  ins) covered with foil tape and run each one through  the texture trades numbers set for 2015. I've used a mixture of Ranger foil and DIY foil.

Cut more pieces of card covered in the foil tape and run through a selection of embossing folders. And adhere the patterned pieces of foiled card patchwork style to an A4+ sized piece of greyboard.

Add strips of the foil tape to join some of the edges and to seal the edges.

Use metal tools to edge each piece and to add any other decorative features you might want to add,

Paint over the whole piece with black soot distress paint and before it’s dry wipe over with kitchen towel to take most of it off leaving black paint in the crevices.

Next take the numbers and again paint and wipe away the excess, let them dry.

Blend alcohol inks over, then drip some blending solution over then recessed areas and wipe off. I was aiming to get reddy numbers and a brown background. Drip the browns in the recessed areas and again drip a couple of drops of blending solution on. Pick them up and move them around so that the colours move across the foil. When dry I got a very small paint brush, the black soot DP, the brown alcohol inks and blending solution. I painted some black around the numbers to help them stand out more and then just played with the other supplies until I was happy with the blending and colourisation.

The numbers were mounted onto brown card and adhered to the board and a spread a little teak wood alcohol ink around the edges to frame it (just like I would with vintage photo or walnut stain distress ink on my papercraft projects). Add some snaps with the Cropodile and some wire to hang it by.

It was dark by the time I got to take this photo so it looks completely different to the one above it, but here it is hanging on the mirror, you can just see the reflection of some Christmas lights.

Thank you for all your support and wonderful comments last year, I so appreciate them particularly when my teaching schedule got so busy and I couldn't get round to see you all as well. But new year and fresh start, I am definitely going to try and do better.

We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.

Walt Disney

Enjoy your creative moments.

hugs Brenda xxx

Tim's tag for December

I am so pleased I managed to find a bit of time today to get my last Tim tag of the year done, all the details and process steps for Tim's own tag are over on his blog. Although I have got the prancing deer that he used, I decided to go with a lantern which reminded me more of the new year and the candle signifying peace. In fact you will see candles from me again very soon.

I didn't have all the supplies Tim used but I did use all his techniques from the background to the lantern and greenery. The word vision comes from Tim's stacked artful words strip die

I love the way the lantern turned out with the distress paint background and the glitter over the top and of course I added one of my rusted bells, it just seemed to fit, I love the candle stuck behind the frosted tag

The little clip at the top of the tags is one I bought when I went back to my home town of St. Ives recently (near Cambridge). One of my old school friends was working in a vintage shop in town so I popped in to see her and found them, they have a hook on them so the tag can be hung up.

Well it's New Years Eve tomorrow, have a great day and evening I will be back Thursday with two posts to start the new yeatr. I can't go without giving my huge thanks to Tim for an amazing year of creative inspiration and these wonderful monthly doses of sheer brilliance. As I am so late (again!!!) getting this completed and linked to Tim's blog, I won't have so much time to wait till the next one. I shall now pop over to his blog and link my tag for the last time this year.

Take care everyone.

Year's end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.

Hal Borland

hugs {brenda} xxx

Ring–ring, ring-ring…… new challenge at AVJ

Ring out the old – Ring in the new

It is my turn to choose the challenge at AVJ for the next fortnight and I thought it should be themed around the New Year but trying to keep it as ‘open’ as possible.

I found a short poem –

“Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.”
Alfred Tennyson

This inspired me to think about using the bells die, I don’t have the big one just the mini movers and sharpers ones but even with Christmas looming I didn't get much of a feel for it. I also thought about using the Tim clock but some of my amazing teamies were posting their fantastic contributions with clocks on and I decided I needed to go in another different direction. It was after chatting to my sis about it that she took me off to ‘telephones’ – ringing friends and family to wish them a Happy New Year. So this is my contribution for ‘Ring out the old, ring in the new’.

The Tim telephone was cut in greyboard, daubed with black soot distress paint and a small amount of vintage photo, broken china and peeled paint distress embossing powders sprinkled in and heated. When cool I blended walnut stain distress ink over it.

The cover was made with a linen type fabric sponged with tarnished brass distress paint.

Over this I adhered some old telephone book pages and then I applied Wendy Vecchi's black embossing paste through the clockwork stencil and let dry then some black gesso through Tim's texture layering stencils.

When that was dry I stamped some images, words and numbers in black, brown and white acrylic paints and used black and white posca pens for outlining some of the numbers.

These became the covers. I added just a few collage pieces…..

… and another collage on the inside cover…

.. some tabs …

.. and left the back cover with just the textured background.

Tim’s label letters came in really useful for the index and the front cover. My inspiration this week was his telephone die and the layering stencils. By using other textures (book paper, hessian and sewing) and mixed media techniques I am really quite pleased with the outcome.

I hope you'll be inspired to translate the theme in your own way for this challenge.

Have fun.

Hugs Brenda xxx

Flat card for posting

I can't believe how much it's costing to send Christmas cards this year and the ones with even small embellishments on are costing a bomb. So as I needed to make a few more cards to get out, here's one that isn't too fat and should go normal letter size.

This is my last DT sample for Country View Crafts Project Blog for this year, that just feels so strange - the year has gone so fast. 

More details are over there if you would like to see how I made this one and the supplies I used.

But for now - thank you so much for all the wonderful comments on my AVJ Secret Santa Tim Tag Book, it was one of those projects that just kept evolving and I loved every minute of making it and all the details I added.

Have a great week.

hugs Brenda xxx

Altered Book for Secret Santa and Giveaway news

We all agreed at AVJ that we would take part in a Secret Santa gift exchange and each of us had one person (drawn from a hat) that we would send a gift to. So if you have a cuppa in hand I will take you through the making of my pressie.

My Secret Santa project went to the lovely Anne at Redanne. She, like all of us at AVJ, loves to get into the vintage, grungy and distressed look that the amazing Tim Holtz creates.

I was delighted to make this and send it to her, however it didn’t end up as I imagined it would, in fact I named it Topsy in the end because the ideas grew and grew, as did the book. So here’s the story.

The concept began with the idea that I would alter one of Tim’s worn covers and add the plastic tag pages for Anne to keep next years Tim tags in …. but as I thought about it more I decided to use one of the old books I had in the cupboard instead.

I started with an old vintage book that didn’t have a publication date in it, but some research on the internet suggests it was probably published in the early 1900s.

I took out the inner section just leaving the cover and reinforced the spine with some builders drywall joint tape which is a very strong paper (forgot to take a photo here). My intention was to add some flaps on the inside covers for the bound pages to slip into. But I next wanted to add a page to go with each month of the year and tag pocket. So the pages were cut to size and punched with the ‘Bind It All’ ready to put together later.  Each page was sprayed both sides with tattered rose, antique linen distress stains plus several glimmer mists to get the distressed background but keeping the colours fairly light. 

I stamped and cut Tim’s calendar months and cut the pocket hinges edging them all with walnut stain, these were later attached to Tim’s tag pockets and put through the ‘Bind It All’ as well.

Next I gathered lots of die-cuts and collage pieces as I wanted to decorate each page and decided that each one would have a tag theme to correspond with the month and I chose one main colour for each one and wrote them down to refer to.

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

So as you can imagine, by the time I put all my collage pages and the tag holder pages together they wouldn’t fit between the covers of the book the way I imagined. So I cut the covers off and put them through the ‘Bind It All’ but soon realised that even the largest O wire wasn’t big enough to bind it and believe me I tried lol. I knew that Anne was going to need space to add her Tim tag every month so even more room was needed. At this point I was very disappointed that it wasn’t working out and wondered what I could do to remedy the situation.  I remembered back to when I had bought scrapbook kits many, many moons ago and they had spacers which allowed the pages to go in the albums and not get crushed. So I sat and cut 12 spacers that had bee run through the ‘Bind It All’ and adhered them to each page. As you can imagine by now this book had grown enormously in depth and with the covers on was now over 2 inches deep. But I still had to get it bound. Eventually I solved the problem by googling how to bind single pages in a book and found this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q35JN8cSHs8

Eh voila, new learning for me and problem solved.

It took a while to get each page bound to the next page ….

… it’s a slip knot method that I had seen before but never tried ….

… and actually in the end I was rather pleased with the result.

Each page opened fully and there is now room for the additions Anne will hopefully make.

To finish off I also added a tag to suggest to Anne what she could use the book for.

This is soooo typical of me, start with one idea and then change things as I go along.

As for my Secret Santa gift I was very lucky to receive a sketch book / journal from the lovely Jools with the most amazing cover on it. I love these hard backed books with plain paper that you can keep to add journalling, ideas, snippets of work, photographs etc, so this one will come in very handy over the coming year. The textures are gorgeous and it’s kept to a monotone palette which looks stunning.

More photos and information can be found on Jools’ blog.

Before I finish today, I know I said we all agreed to take part in the Secret Santa but dear Terry was unable to commit to it. As a dear friend who I love to see when I go to California we always swap little gifts with each other at this time of year, so I decided to send her something as well. In my haste to get it in the post to the US I forgot to photograph it and this is all I took.

But Terry has received her gift and very kindly sent me some photos.

I won’t show them all now, I will point you over to Terry’s blog for today, but I will probably be using this technique and ideas in a workshop next year.

ONE MORE THING BEFORE YOU GO

We are having a Christmas Giveaway and Creative Guide hop over on ‘A Vintage Journey’ We would love you to come and join in the fun and there are some fabulous goodies to be given away.

I think all it needs is for me to say thanks for stopping by today, especially if you got here to the end of such a long post. Please pop over to see all the amazing projects my wonderful teamies have sent around the world and maybe get some ideas for your own hand made gifts, if not for this year then bookmark the pages or add them to Pinterest to come back to next year.

Have a wonderful Sunday.

hugs Brenda xxx