Next step on my journaling journey

Hello friends, - it's Friday and that means another blogpost from me. As Journaling is the main thing I am doing art and craft wise at the moment, all I have are a few more journal pages to share, so this will be a short post....
First of all, my weekly calendar page, the photo was taken when it was partially filled in.

Here is a slightly closer look:

-Next up a spread from my "Draw Your Day" journal. I don't manage absolutely every day, but most days I do.

And finally a few further pages in  my junk journal, this is where I record some of the deeper aspects of my life and as these are quite personal I have redacted some of the writing....

I am using this journal also to write quotes that I love, practising the next steps on my calligraphy writing journey. I have moved from brushpens to dip pens, and as you can see, it's like starting all over again, - what a mess, - but hey, I'll keep practising.
And here is the final one I will share today:

Well that's it for this Friday post. I hope these journal pages are not too boring for you. I am sure that at some point I will come back to more mixed media stamping and Tim Holtz inspired stuff, but this is what I am at now.

Thank you for your visit like always

xxxxx

Second Look - an Autumnal Journal page

Hello friends, thanks for dropping by. While I am away from home and unable to do many new crafting projects, I thought I would share some of my older Shimmerz projects that have never been shown here.

I started this spread by covering the pages with a layer of extra thick gesso uisng a credit card

Here you can see a close up of the texture, - dried with a heat gun to add some additional bubbles and raised bits.

Next I adhered two of Tim Holtz's Layered Leaves, embossed with the matching folder and then painted with some Decoart crackle paint.

Here you can see more clearly what happens when you heat the gesso with the heatgun. I love the additional textures you get.

Next I set to work with sprays in autumnal colours of browns and greens

I added some background stamping and some random strips of tissue tape to add a bit more interest to the background.

I added some darker coloured spray with a paintbrush, to add a little more depth. 

And finally a word die to finish it all off.

Well that's it for today, thank you for your visit like always and happy weekend, with hopefully some crafting and creating!

xxxxx

Begin journaling once more

Hello friends, hope you are all well. I have been a terrible blogger, apart from DT commitments I have hardly done anything and barely done any visiting. My apologies for that specially!
Anyway, I finally have a journal spread to share, trying to carve out a few moments just to create...

I have never had the good fortune to attend one of Seth Apter's workshops, but did manage to watch some of his periscope recordings from Creativation, and this was inspired by those.

The background was done with a mix of acrylic paints and sprays.

Strips of paper, old book pages and background stamping came next.

The focal point, one of Seth's older stamp sets that has a matching die to go with it

Some doodling and stencilling and some words from a Prima/Finnabair stamp set.

And here the facing page, using the same techniques but this time another Finnabair stamp.

Well, that's it for now. I will be back later in the week with some design team pieces, and there will soon be a few more planner freebies coming your way too :o)

Meanwhile, stay warm, cosy and I hope you will find some creative time. My day-job is pretty crazy at the moment but I hope I'll have more time to blog soon!

xxxxx

Mixed Media Monthly - Put a Stencil on it..

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL MY VISITORS!!

May 2017 bring you all that you wish for. 

It being the first of the month, means a new challenge starting over at Mixed Media Monthly

Our theme this month is "Put a Stencil on it", and our wonderful sponsor is......

Here is our monthly graphic which you need to include in your post if you decide to play in our challenge.

Ok, onto my project, - a while back I made a so called Transitions Journal, you can find the original post here. I have done several pages for it, and today's project is another spread for it.

Here are the stencils I received to play with, I also added another stencil from my stash, designed by Seth Apter for Stencil Girl

Below you can see my first step:

I started with a pre-cut piece of paper using the Eileen Hull minibook die, then added some crackle glaze through one of the Stencil Girl stencils and then highlighted the raised bits with Treasure Gold in the colour Pewter.

Here you can hopefully see the effect a bit better.

Next I used one of the other stencils, this time using a white Distress Crayon.

I turned the stencil so the diamond shapes fitted exactly in between the first layer and like that created a star.

I made it pop a bit more by adding a little center with a pearl pen and also some shadows to bring it out a little more against the background.

The finishing touches were all done with the help of the Seth Apter stencil that includes some cool words and grungy patterns. I stenciled the other elements with Distress Crayons from the Neutrals set.

Below a few close ups still:

Our guest designer this month is no other than Mary Beth Shaw, - if you want to check out her amazing projects and those from my talented teamies, please hop over to Mixed Media Monthly and if you love stencils and would like a chance to win some, do come and play along!!!

Before you go I would like to wish you all a very happy, healthy and peaceful new year. 

May your hopes, dreams and  passions, give you new enthusiasm, new confidence and new understanding in the coming year and may we all strive to guard, protect and keep the world from harm so that everyone can live their lives without the fear of violence, abuse and harm! That is my dream!

xxxxx

Follow your Heart, - a journal page for Shimmerz

Hello all and thanks for dropping in.
Today I am sharing a journal spread over on the Shimmerz blog, so like usual, I am just showing a little sneak peek here....

I have a tutorial there and step by step photos, - hope you'll take the time to have a look. All you need to do is click here.

Thank you for dropping by today and have a wonderful weekend!

Finally back and some blogger news

Hello everyone and thanks so much for popping in.
I have just returned from quite a long blogging break, so it's good to get back into the swing of things.....

Like many of you I decided to join Wanderlust 2016. A year long event of art classes and exploration, and this is the project I created after watching the first video. If you don't know about Wanderlust, do check it out here.

I will not share the techniques with you in detail, as that would not be fair to Kasia, but this spread was very much inspired by her prompt and great example.

Unlike Kasia I used Paper Artsy Fresco paints for my background, and used a mini brayer, a brush and my fingers to blend my colours.
Kasia shares a great technique of scratching into the paints, using part of the Prima Distress tool and rubbing alcohol (surgical spirit). I've owned this tool for years and had never even discovered that particular part of the tool. I found the technique works really well with Fresco paints.

Here is a close up of some of the scratches, I kept them quite thin, but like the texture it creates.

Kasia suggests using chipboard pieces as focal points, - a great way to use up some of those chippies that many of us have flying around in our stash.
Below some close ups of how I coloured them after having covered them with gesso.

A mix of Fresco and Golden fluid acrylics paints and Lindy's Stampgang spray with some Treasure Gold in Pewter highlights.

I also used stencilling and background stamping to add more interest to my background.

I used a Tim Holtz stencil and Watering can Archival to stencil with.

Kasia suggests to choose just one word to express how you are feeling at the moment. I chose Explore for that's what I hope to do while following along with Wanderlust....

And then of course the challenge of using your own handwriting on your page. I always need to take a deep breath before doing that, and also found out that really I need to invest in some better pens.....

Well, that's pretty much in as far as the journal page is concerned......

Now as to the blogger news, - some of you may have heard this already, - I found out about it a couple of days ago from my lovely and talented friend Alison/Butterfly.

As Alison says:

Apparently it's in order to make life better for everybody... Don't you hate it when they "improve" things?! "New and improved" is my least favourite proclamation to see on a much-loved product.


Here's the announcement they made on Blogger Buzz:

In 2011, we announced the retirement of Google Friend Connect for all non-Blogger sites. We made an exception for Blogger to give readers an easy way to follow blogs using a variety of accounts. Yet over time, we’ve seen that most people sign into Friend Connect with a Google Account. So, in an effort to streamline, in the next few weeks we’ll be making some changes that will eventually require readers to have a Google Account to sign into Friend Connect and follow blogs.

As part of this plan, starting the week of January 11, we’ll remove the ability for people with Twitter, Yahoo, Orkut or other OpenId providers to sign in to Google Friend Connect and follow blogs. At the same time, we’ll remove non-Google Account profiles so you may see a decrease in your blog follower count.

We encourage you to tell affected readers (perhaps via a blog post), that if they use a non-Google Account to follow your blog, they need to sign up for a Google Account, and re-follow your blog. With a Google Account, they’ll get blogs added to their Reading List, making it easier for them to see the latest posts and activity of the blogs they follow.

We know how important followers are to all bloggers, but we believe this change will improve the experience for both you and your readers.

Posted by Michael Goddard, Software Engineer

There's not much we can do, other than alert everyone that if you signed up to follow Blogger blogs without a Google account, you'll need to get a Google account and re-follow with that if you would like to stay connected (and/or sign up to Follow By Email so that you get notifications in your probably already overloaded inbox).

It's hard to know what the impact will be. Many of us are Blogger bloggers, and so we have Google accounts anyway, so maybe it won't make much difference - we'll see. I lost about 30 followers in one fair sweep already a couple of weeks ago, maybe they were trying things out then already, - who knows.

In any case, to those of you who are still following, - thank you so much for being here and of course for visiting today!!