WOYWW 591 – much improved!

Hello WOYWWers!

Well.  What a difference from last week!  MUCH BETTER overall, even if the actual desk is less than pretty.

The tiny little stamps are from a printing press stamp set I got decades ago.  I use it all the time, and the tiny storage pots from Tiger work great to sort the letters – even so I bet I’ve lost half of them to the floor and then eventually the Hoover!

This is a little art journal that has mostly political venting in it.  This will ultimately be the last page and you can see it better here:

That is before I stamped what I am arranging, which is the URL for VoteSaveAmerica.  I HAVE already voted. Hopefully it will count. Just a reminder to anyone from any country, at any point in the election cycle….

And now a few shots of the cleaner areas of my desks, cause the contrast from last week should be noted!

The mask is on my desk because I had to hot-glue the little frame inside, to make breathing easier.  I don’t dare allow my glue-gun out of my office or I might never find it again.  Like my mini-sander….no clue where it got to.

My Cricut desk has some stencils on it and a big pile of collage stuff that needs sorting into the little tray/drawers.  It’s a real mix of magazine stuff, vintage ephemera, and other found items. That is going to take a LOT of time.

My Gelli-desk is not too messy – I have the paper towels and the journal base I will cover with them set up, a bin of some old prints, and my mop-up journal.  Pretty sure that was a gift from a WOYWW person from a long time ago. Does the name Deckled Edge Bindery mean anything to anyone?  Do let me know!

Have a great day!

Little bottles of colour.

My room is much cleaner than it has been, thank goodness.  Or maybe I should say at one point this week it looked pristine but as soon as I started working on something it swiftly went to hell in a handbasket.

One thing I have been super keen on is using up old supplies.  No, using UP is not what I mean, just USING.  I bought stuff a while back that I never even opened.  And in the intervening months (years) there were newer, maybe better, similar products.

I spotted a video on using Colour Bursts I think they were called, and I immediately thought Those seem very like the Brushos I bought ages ago.  I think I went to the trouble of poking a hole in the top of one or two of the little post to test them and then… nada, zip, zilch.  But while I liked the squeezy bottles as applicators of the newer product, I ALREADY had something similar.

I dragged them out, and also dragged out some tiny bottles I had with dropper tips, that I used when I made alcohol inks by soaking old marker pens in, well, ALCOHOL.  I decanted the Brushos into them and now they work with a squeeze to scatter grains of pigment over whatever.

I tested them out on a partially coloured mop-up paper towel that I have a plan for (ooh look! you can just see my very colourful facemask there by the towels)

And about those paper towels/kitchen roll… we ordered some from Costco and hubby accidentally ordered the American version.  We’ve done this before. I recall when we first moved over to the UK lamenting the tiny paper towels.  Now, 20+ years later, the bigger version seems wasteful and less appealing.  Go figure. Having said that, they do mop up more….

A few of the items that I used in my current project, that I have not used either at all or in a very long while. I must work harder on making them an actual design choice rather than  forcing them into a project where they may not actually fit…

AND my sadly neglected Gelli plates have been utilized finally for making some background pages for a project I am using to vent my spleen in.  More on that tomorrow.

The new placement of stuff is working out pretty OK. Again, more on that tomorrow for the desk crowd.

Back to cutting stencils…

WOYWW – out of practice!

LOL! I am SO out of practice doing WOYWW that last week I totally forgot to add the link back in my post.  THIS week I was so consumed with cleaning and reorganizing my space to move all the beads and things I had front and centre for making knitting stitch markers and shifting my art journaling supplies to a more usable location and FINALLY (after only 4 years!) trying to get the rest of my stuff under control that it kinda slipped my mind that I should pre-prepare a post for today.  Shocking.  I almost skipped it totally, but what kind of track record would that be, a run of ONE?

So I have not one, not two, but THREE desks on show, none of them in good shape.  My knitting friend who was here yesterday for a quite cold, socially distanced knitting session out in the garden, asked me what the heck WOYWW was.  I explained.  Now, if she sees this, she will realize the full horror of my craft room. Words are inadequate to describe it. (waves to Kirsty….)

Desk ONE:

Not as bad as it could be – my desk where my monitors sit.  Usable, just about.  You can see my 2nd hand Cricut, a first gen one that still has 1.1 firmware so I can still use SCAL on it.  Yes, yes, I could probably buy a new Silhouette and be the better off for it, but frankly, I have this one and it works well enough. Mostly I cut the occasional paper stencil or mask. To be completely honest, the Cricut is actually on desk 4, but right now you can’t actually see that.  Maybe one day….

Desk 2:

Holy crap.  This one is what I might call my primary desk.  At the moment it is littered with stencils (bought ones and my own) and things like the texture plates I made AGES ago from textured wallpaper stuck to cardboard.  I am in the process of sorting them out and organizing them into usable storage, like binders, etc. It’ll take me the rest of the week, I’m sure, to accomplish that! Much of my art supplies have moved there, but they are just out of frame.

Desk 3:

This is the one in front of the window.  My plan is to have it ready for Gelli plate printing and deli-paper stamping and Copic colouring.  The lighting is crap at the moment but the little unit on the window ledge is full of texture tools and foam stamps, etc.

With any luck at all, next week will reveal a much more organized and tidy space.  I can dream, right?

Apologies in advance for visiting without commenting to any who have their Blogger blog set to disallow ANONYMOUS comments (or ones where you can comment with a name and, if desired, a URL) – I could comment if I wanted to create a Blogger account and log in to it, but frankly, Google gets enough of my personal data that one more cross-reference point for them is just a step too far.  Feel free to click away if reciprocal comments is your requirement.  Trust that I enjoyed seeing your desk even if I wasn’t able to say so!

Have a lovely Wednesday! Off to examine desks much more organized and full of actual creativity than MINE….

RBG – notorious, iconic, gone

When I woke up yesterday to the news that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died and I have to admit it, made me well up.  She was a feminist icon, lived a long and amazing life, and will be sorely missed on the US Supreme Court.

I have been playing around, old school, with my 1st generation Cricut and Sure Cuts A Lot.  It worked well enough for me to cut a stencil of RBG and make an art journal page.  Simple, focused, and will probably carry on making me get a bit teary as I page past it at least for a while.

The stencil is in two parts, because it was too hard to join up the bits and still have the image look enough like her to work.  Limited colours, as red, white, and blue are all that it needed – anything else, save black and white,  would muddy the waters.

Still a bit wet.

As a side note, I am finding that working on the crumpled paper bag pages of this journal do offer great texture, but the thinness of the pages and the lack of stability when wet, even with a coat of gesso, limits the techniques I can do.  At this point I am 90% done with a thicker card journal I am anxious to move on to but I have 8 or more pages in this original one.  I know many people have multiple journals on the go, but I really am not ready to jump to that, given I had already set journaling aside for, let’s be honest, YEARS.

Should I have waited to make this page, or leapt into it as I did when it was a fresh, as I did?  Not sure. Is it the best, most artistic page I could have made? Probably not.  But I do love it anyway, and it speaks to me.  I think it always will, possibly BECAUSE  I didn’t wait around and overthink it.  It looks as raw as I feel. It’s hard to know what more to say.

May the Almighty comfort all the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.

Are two pages “a roll?”

Impossible to overstate how much fun I am having with my paints and inks and stamps and stencils.  I keep coming across things I bought years ago that I have barely touched.

I was actually looking for some tissue paper and came across an old Starbucks flyer that had some text on it which sparked this page.

I also found a couple of other things – a Teesha Moore stamp, a graffiti stencil book, and a bit of non-skid rug underlay stuck to a piece of cardboard.  The 2020 stencil I cut on the fly from heavy card.

Some of the text from the flyer I used as it appeared – well, close to anyway.

I think originally it was Terrifying? Perhaps and Thrilling? Definitely but I think my re-shuffle works more accurately for 2020! And the Are you ready for a challenge? was cobbled together from other text as well.

The waving tentacles from the Teesha stamp might not be a biologically correct depiction of the virus, but the slightly unsettling movement implied gives the right sort of feel for me.

Better use of white on this page, although it could be a better photograph.  No matter, I am enjoying the process and that works for me, for now.

 

WOYWW – OMG it has been so long…

Wow.  I can’t even think when was the last time I joined in with WOYWW.  I think about it often, read the posts when I have the time, and miss the community that was built around it.

Medical issues forever altered life.  Now there is the Covid.  Ugh.  It’s all just a bit much.

I won’t dwell on that.  There is little point.  ALL the WOYWW folk have had their struggles over the years.  Some soldier on, some drop out, drop back in, drop out forever.  We all deal in different ways.

When we moved, and I was diagnosed with a debilitating and rare myositis, my strength and energy levels were nil.  Getting up to my craft room was harder and harder.  I basically shifted completely over to knitting.  Something I could do sitting on the sofa and even on very low energy days.  I recently had a small window of improvement (sadly, now heading in the other direction, but with another new treatment to try perhaps soon) and it made me anxious to take up my art journaling again.

AGES ago (2018!) I made a journal based around inspirational quotes to do with strength and illness and the like.  It was prompted by the Permission to Play workshop by Carolyn Dube (there is a link in the sidebar if anyone is interested – I loved it BTW!) and you can see more about that here. That was really one of the last times I did anything arty.

Last week I made TWO (!) pages.  Wow am I out of practice.  The first one had a couple of elements I really liked but overall was a hot mess.

Too many colours, too dark, overwhelming text… I loved the stencil I cut from a magazine image.  Just lucky the wingspan matched the sides of the page pretty well! The figure also will work as a mask.

I scanned the photo and changed the contrast and saturation before printing on heavy cardstock to make a more substantial stencil.   The other item I loved was the stamp. Made up of the numbers for the whole family’s birthdays, cut from sticky-backed fun foam and mounted on a strip of plastic placemat.  Some of the numbers are a little wonky but overall I love it and expect I will use it a lot.

Those of a sensitive disposition, click away now.  Warning of a rude word on what I see as the better of the two pages:

Happy with the more limited colour palette, the limited stencils and stamps, the increased white space.  Not perfect, nothing to crow about, but not bad and not hot mess.  A few more pages and I will reclaim my style…maybe.  Pretty sure the leafy stamp is from a Scrap Magic crop class about a million years ago, the Anyone Home? bit is a section of a Teesha Moore stamp, the circle of numbers is from…Banana Frog, maybe? The Mona Lisa is from ….can’t recall the name! Some mail order only online stamp maker.

Not having taken part in a long, long while, I will have to see what happens as I try to comment.  I have a dim recollection that one of the reasons I stopped was commenting issues, but I’m hoping that has been sorted.  It will be quite nice to catch up on the work of some of my favourite WOYWWers. Fingers crossed.