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Whispering Secrets journal page

November 9, 2012 By 5 Comments

I thought I’d show you one of my recent journal pages.  Sometimes I love bright bold colour and other times I like to tone it down.

All the little snippets you see on this page are offcuts that almost got thrown away.  Each one is attached to the simple gesso background with a single strip of masking tape at the top which acts as a hinge and allows each piece to be lifted.  I’ve added some stickers and washi tape and the writing is hidden under the flaps.

I think of it as whispering rather than shouting.

You can have real fun with this technique – use it for writing those things you don’t want on show, even to yourself; use it to turn around a negative – write the whiny stuff under the flap and turn it into a positive on the top; write about your guilty pleasures; or write about those hidden, secret dreams that you don’t dare to say out loud.   There’s lots of scope for having a whispered conversation with yourself.

What would you whisper about?

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Bits and Pieces

October 23, 2012 By 8 Comments

Can I start by saying thank you for stopping by and reading my blog.  I am not very prolific at the moment, either with my crafting or my blogging and I know that there are a lot of people who come here looking for inspiration and I’m not showing up an awful lot at the moment.

Right now, most of my energy is going into other things like helping Adrian sort out his parents house, being his emotional support and helping him deal with everything that comes with that.  It’s tiring stuff and one thing I learned during my few months of illness earlier this year – there has to be plenty of rest to balance that or exhaustion will set in and lead to more health problems.  Remember the Mars bar slogan – ‘work, rest and play’ – well it’s my goal in life to get those three in perfect balance.  I’m a work in progress …

I have been fitting in some journaling and using little pockets of time to play with no purpose or goal in mind. I’m not finishing much so my ‘bits box’ has spilled over from one drawer to two with lots  of unfinished projects and random experiments.  I did manage to finish a Christmas card last week – this uses the same embossing powder technique that I wrote about in October’s Craft Stamper.

I used Ruby Romance and Silver Wow embossing powders with a Prima damask mask, then used a mixture of our clear stamps for the sentiment (Best Relative Ever for the label shape and Warm Christmas Greetings).  Instead of flipping it over, I just lifted the mask off and  you can see a little fuzziness which is from the powder that spilled through as I was lifting it.

I also made a couple of tags while trying out the Vintaj Patina kit.  The paint is designed to be used on metal, but I tried it on black tags and loved the rich metallic finish they give.

I used a mix of gold and silver on both, then when dry I embossed the images from Gothic Fragments with black embossing powder and used Copic markers to add some colour.  As the markers are transparent, the metallic colour shines through and gives the colours a wonderful glow.  The patina colour is super rich and when spritzed with water or spray inks, the metallic particles dance around and break up into very interesting patterns.  It’s on my list to get to know this product a bit better and I really need to try it out on textured surfaces.

Some days when I have the time to create, but the muse has gone a-wandering, I simply paint background pages in my journal.  I have three journals on the go at the moment, so I work on all three, usually using a credit card to scrape a thin layer of paint onto the background.  By the time I’ve done the third one, the first one is dry enough to tackle another page so I can get a few done in one session.  It’s usually a good mojo-buster if you’ve got the crafting blues – just sloshing paint around randomly is good for you.  I’ll often have a stack of tags or paper to hand and if  I like the colour combinations I’ll do a few tags too.

I have a ‘journaling drawer’ full of words and images I’ve cut out from magazines, together with papers, doilies, stickers, etc so I always have lots of journal fodder to go at when I feel like making a page.  It never ceases to amaze me how the words I cut out six months ago can be so relevant just when I need them.  I also use alphabet stamps to stamp out my own phrases and words.  When I’m tired though, I don’t ‘harvest’ images or words from magazines.  I always prefer to do that when I am fresh otherwise I miss the good stuff.

Here’s a page I made recently (click on it for a larger view).

I used paint, a random collage of magazine pages, stencils, wrapping paper, hole reinforcers, stickers and an old greeting card to make this page.  The card is stuck down and sealed on three sides to create a pocket for the tag which is stamped with the words ‘PLAY IS SACRED’.

And if I need any advice on getting that ‘work, rest and play’ balance, then of course I have the perfect consultant for the rest and play part of the equation.

Cue Trillian …

Well I figured a 16 hour long video of a typical day’s napping would be a bit much – even with her infinite number of mind boggling optical illusion poses!

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You can’t use up creativity …

August 23, 2012 By 3 Comments

This quote was a tweet published in issue 44 of Cloth Paper Scissors magazine which landed on my doormat today.  Definitely one of those “yeah, what she said” moments.  Thanks Sue Brown for the inspiration.

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After the Storm

July 6, 2012 By 8 Comments

Like many people we had torrential rain and dramatic thunderstorms yesterday and it looks like we’ll be getting a repeat performance today too.  The power went off at work which is a real pain as computers don’t respond well to sudden power spikes, even with protective power supplies in place.  All was well, though we did end up playing Botticelli for half an hour while we waited for things to get back to normal.  I had to be home by 4pm yesterday, so I set off early, only to be brought up short a few hundred yards from the turning into our country lane by a rather impressive flood.  There is a haulage yard just on the corner and a the beck running through it had burst it’s banks  causing a waist deep small pond.  I know it was waist deep because I was told by a poor chap who had had got stuck in it and had to abandon his car.  Plus I could see into the car park and all the cars were up to their wheel arches in water

Luckily there is another way in which goes over higher ground, so I got home safely and warned Adrian to take the longer route and avoid the flood.  In the evening he wanted to go and see this big dramatic flood I’d told him about, so we headed off in his car (which has much higher ground clearance) and approached it from the other side only to suffer a bit of an anticlimax – it had all completely vanished!  The evidence was there – the road was covered in silt and the car park that should have been empty at 7pm was still full of cars, but other than the beck being right up to the top of its banks, our flash flood was gone.

The evening proved to be the best part of the day so we took a long round about trip home which took us through the private estate road and stopped to take some photos. There is never any traffic on the estate road, just cattle and sheep and when you stop the car the air is full of birdsong.  We stood and looked around at the gently steaming fields and took a moment to drink in the peace and stillness and freshness that you get after a storm.

The battered, weather-beaten poppies still managed to put on a beautiful show of colour.

A storm is such an apt metaphor for those really difficult times in life and I think it’s important to celebrate that stillness and peace that comes after a storm.  I find metaphors a great way of capturing an idea and expressing it and often use them in my journals to help me make sense of things.

Earlier this year I did a journal page about my own storm and I’m actually going to do something I don’t often do, which is share what I wrote in the hope it may strike a chord and help someone else to keep on going through their own troubles.

“I’ve been through a STORM.  You can’t do anything in a storm, but put your head down and battle through it.  Well, unless you want to be tossed around like a leaf and battered about.  Head down, plod on, one step at a time.  Eventually the storm will pass. It always does.  The skies will clear and the landscape is washed clean.

But … this new landscape – it’s familiar, but different.  I don’t quite recognise it.  There’s new paths washed clean and I don’t know which way to go.

There’s bits of storm debris still kicking about, piling up where the wind has blown it.  Don’t sift through it – leave it to the wind and time and MOVE ON …”

The storm will always pass and sometimes it reveals a new and unexpected landscape which you wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

Here’s hoping you stay snug and dry as this current weather system plays itself out – both literally and metaphorically!

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Well done Waist

June 11, 2012 By 9 Comments

Here’s a journal page created with PanPastels, Crafter’s Workshop Templates, polychromos pencils and acrylic paints.  The little poem is a reference to the fact that my hips are lagging a dress size behind my waist at the moment which makes trouser buying an interesting exercise.  (You can click on the image for a larger view.)  I used the pointy circles template in the background (I actually stencilled a little gel medium through it then rubbed pastel over when it was dry) and when I was doodling on the page, I used the spacing of the design to create the hourglass figure.  I wasn’t intending to draw a person, so her head is a little squashed onto the body to fit on the page.

It’s very clear to me that my journal pages are getting brighter and more lighthearted.  I wouldn’t say journaling has saved my life, but it certainly helped me cope with “stuff” and the pages dealing with it are literally as well as figuratively dark and messy.  OK, so they’re still messy, but so is life.  At least I’m viewing it through multi-coloured glasses these days (rose-tinted is so last year dah-ling!).

Tomorrow I have a Steampunkery sample and a review of the Ranger Inkssentials Speciality Stamping Paper, plus news of a giveaway …

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Journal pages

May 22, 2012 By 11 Comments

You saw this page on the table at the end of the last post.

Ease journal page

It’s pretty raw stuff because what I’m dealing with on this page is pain.  I will be going straight back to the docs when I get home as I’m in constant pain now and that’s just not right.  This holiday is teaching me new lessons – back home I found the pain completely debilitating and just wanted to curl up with a hot water bottle and do nothing.  Here I am determined not to let it stop me and finding ways to cope.  I’m on strong painkillers (always a last resort as I hate taking medication), but they don’t take it away, just reduce it to a bearable level for a while.  I’ve learned what my limitations are – I am better in the mornings and need to take it easy after any kind of activity (plus the painkillers make me drowsy).  Life really does seem to be one long series of lessons sometimes.  I’d really like to graduate from this school someday …

Anyway, the journal page was an attempt to find words that have the opposite meaning to pain.  I didn’t want to say ‘pain free’ because that still has the word pain in it.  So I came up with the words you see here – ease, joy and comfort which speak to me of the opposite sensations.

The writing at the top left says “IT IS HENCEFORTH DECLARED THAT THE SENSATION KNOWN AS ‘PAIN’ IS BANISHED FROM THIS BODY”

One of the things that helps is deep breathing, yoga style.  I take deep cleansing breaths and imagine I’m exhaling the pain.  Last night I created this double journal page.

Slow Down Journal page

The page backgrounds are done with PanPastels.  I then doodled over them with a Pigma Graphic brush marker and coloured the doodles and words with Polychromos pencils.  I discovered that the Polychromos work like a dream on top of PanPastels – the colours were coming out really creamy and rich.

slow down

I added some stenciling with the PanPastels too, but I don’t have any fixative with me, so it isn’t really staying put – the background colour has been rubbed in to the paper and is not going to budge.  So I enhanced the stenciling with a touch of acrylic paint.

breathe

Doodling and journaling is also a good way to combat pain as you can get engrossed and absorbed and detatch yourself for a while.

I have a new found empathy for anyone else suffering from chronic pain and hope that you too have found ways to cope.  I do think my problems are fixable, though there is still a slight mystery as to what exactly is going on and I suspect I will need surgery to find out (laparoscopy).

Hmmm, I’ve just thought, I think of my journal as a place to creatively visualise solutions to problems.  The ‘slow down’ page is a good message for me, but I think I should create a ‘hurry up’ page aimed at the NHS!

Maybe all this visualisation is working – today I’m actually feeling better than I have all week.  And it’s another gloriously sunny day so we are off out to enjoy it.

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