Just a quick one while the house is in chaos

I was working on Easter cards for the family and as I made them, I figured I might as well share them, as the painting and minor repair etc. will mean the house is chaotic and getting to do actual crafting is tricky.

eastercardDownload

I am also experimenting with a new way to add the PDFs. Not sure how much I like it but we will see when it publishes how it looks! Sometimes, “improvements” are not!

Anyway, easy peasy. Print and cut the quadrants then pop them on a cardfront. These fit an A5 card but should be easily trimmed to fit a 1/4 US letter size or perhaps even a few others.

Darling daughter is mad keen on anime, and she has been missing her annual trip to HyperJapan for the last few pandemic years. They did hold it online in 2021, but it’s just not the same. Anyway, kawaii cute cards are perfect for here, and these bunnies made me smile. Hope you find them useful if you need a quick card!

I’m curious – is it better to do a card with the front arranged so all you have to do is print and fold on plain printer paper? I always cut the high-quality printed PDF images then stick them to the front of an actual card base, either a commercial one of one made from quality cardstock leftovers. But I always wonder if more people would prefer the easiest and most basic option. LMK!

More words for Art Journals (or ATCs) – not overwhelmingly positive

Hands up if you work in your art journal to help you process things in your life that aren’t all fluffy bunnies and rainbows…. Yeah. Me too. In exploring all the pages I see here there and everywhere, I am struck by how many times I see a page with what appears to be a totally random word plunked down on it. I’ve done it too, plenty of times. Not so much recently but I have been guilty. Well, maybe not, actually. Scrolling back thru my pages I am hard pressed to find single word pages. The only one I found was this one, in all of my finished pages:

I do find some ATCs with things like ART and CREATE and BELIEVE. But positive words are not always the thing you need. Sometimes, I make a page and maybe the right word is PAIN or SCREAM or BOREDOM. And it is both a waste of time and a hassle to create a single word to print and add, or grab my stamps and stamp it out. Since I have been on a bit of kick, making words for my art journaling that I can draw from randomly, I decided to make a couple of pages of not very positive quotes and words. No up-lifting, not artistic really, some have a slight positive spin, but most are depicting ambivalence in the best case, or real anguish in the worst. You might find them useful, unless your art journal is more about the pretty and the positive. Print ant cut, but grab the actual 2-page PDF not this image!

I did them in two styles, the ones I generally prefer, which is blackout or typewriter. I hope you find a use for them.

As a side note, if you recall I mentioned some fab paper that I use for printing.

When printing my words to cut, I grabbed the wrong paper. As I had both, I thought the side-by-side comparison might interest you all.

I know which I prefer! I’ll add it to the AJJ more for the download than the page. The custom cut stencil is very much part of my style so I guess that works!

Printable quotes for Art Journals

I’ve been tidying and sorting, both physical desk stuff (like sorting my mark-making stamps into a more usable system:

^{dragging out that art journal too, for a play}

but also digital files. I decided to challenge myself on my next art journal pages. I guess it is a bit of a take on the old Journal Jars. I weeded thru some lists of quotes, found the one ones that were speaking to me NOW, and created some sheets to print. Simple typewrite style font, not too big, not too small.

I made them into a two-page pdf and printed them on reasonably heavy cardstock, cut them out and stuck them in a tube.

When I am planning a page, I will select the quote, consider it, then make the page and add it. I’ll see how that goes.

Just in case the quotes speak to you you can download the PDF here.

First attempt, tomorrow!

Tidying up my blog, bad news and printable ATC backs

I am getting close to the limit for storage on my blog. Back in the good old days, when it seemed like I had nothing but space, I tended to upload quite large images. Now, after blogging since 2009(!) I find I am nearing the limit. Because I have never monetized my blog, it is not something I am keen to start now paying for. So I am going back and deleting stuff – mostly it’s old calendar PDFs. The thing is I don’t trust what I see when I click to see “unattached” images. I can’t figure out a clear way to know if they are actually attached to something or not. So there might be things (links) that no longer work, especially for old (2020 and earlier) Calendars. I have left the images of those things but I feel like I might need to delete them as well. I am also considering deleting all the Project Life printables. I feel like the style of the ones I did years ago are no longer in fashion, and for the very very occasional hit they might get, it isn’t worth keeping a big PDF file and a large image. Sorting that.

The bad news is my knitting mate has tested positive. Almost 100% caught it from her daughter and her daughter from school. Not good at all. I did a test and so far I’m negative – it was almost a full week between when last we met and her testing positive, and while we met inside cause of the crap weather, we did keep distance between us and no hugging hello. Not sure having the 3rd jab yesterday will help but you never know. Have now had to tell the potential birthday guests the timeline and test status, and will test again (and maybe again) and update them on the day for a final decision. It’s only three guests in total and if need be I can just stay well away (on a different level I think) while guests are in the house, if they do choose to come. Bah!

So now I am going to ADD stuff LOL! I have been printing and attaching backs to some of the ATCs and Coins I have made recently. I have my standard image that I tend to alter with colour so all my backs don’t look exactly the same.

It’s simple to do and keeps things fresh. So I made a set of Halloween/Creepy ones to download (see the bloody drips above for a closer look) and they look like this:

And the other set is a trio of three cards in three different patterns to download as well:

Hopefully that will be helpful.

I have quite a lot of behind the scenes stuff I need to do

Can you resolve a blurry art journal page? Printables for you

{sigh} Yeah, I had an idea but it went badly awry. I planned to do a fairly simple art journal page in my very small Roben-Marie journal and decided to begin by stamping a large-ish Dina Wakley figure on it. I thought I had worked out a way to use my stamp positioner so I could get a dark impression on the heavily coloured base page. It did not go to plan.

The page shifted, which I should have expected, and I got a bit of a double image, as you can see. There went my plan, out the window. I won’t share the original plan, cause I am not giving up hope I can use it some time in the future. I will share how I … fixed it is not right, but how I resolved it, I guess. I added some mark-making and some watercolour and stamping to complete the background and focal point image

I decided I would embrace the blur, and find a quote that said something about the blur to complete a page. After a short hunt and a bit of reading to winnow down the choices, I came up with a small handful of quotes that I thought could all work. I began working on the text, readying it for printing and while doing so I ended up making a full sheet that I thought might be useful to others who find themselves in this predicament. Only a handful of quotes, but in different sizes, fonts, spacings, etc.

I printed the sheet and cut out some to test them. You can grab a PDF copy here. I liked the ones I tried and had kinda settled on this one:

But then I saw that the final line on the page was blurry as well! I think I pulled it out of the printed before it had finished printing! It was perfect for the page:

And there you go. The longer quote bears sharing – it is from a BBC interview with J.R.R. Tolkien:

J.R.R. Tolkien: I suppose … I was about three and a half. Pretty poignant of course, because one of the things why people say they don’t remember is, it’s like constantly photographing the same thing on the same plate. Slight changes simply make a blur.

And over the last 18 months it has all been slight changes, hasn’t it, after the massive changes the pandemic brought? Glimpses of freedom, slight easing of restrictions (some self-imposed, some mandated) and really the whole thing just feels vague and unclear. There are no defined and sharp edges. Just a slight blur to everything.

Will the world ever resolve into clarity again? We can but hope.

Been a while… Tear off calendars for 2019

I have been busy and also had a little relapse of my NAM so blogging has not been my top priority.  But I did manage to make a couple of sheets of tear-off blocks for 2019.  Those of you who like to make calendar related gifts might find them useful.  There are older posts, like this one,  that show how to make a tear-off calendar from cut month blocks.

I’ve tried to make these simple to cut this time, just cut along the lines.

Here is the flat-topped circle one:

And here is a version with a bit more space around it, in case you want to make your tear-offs a bit special, like these:

You can see how I do that here. There is also a cute, simple foldable calendar card project in that post, so worth having a look anyway.

And here are the plain block ones:

No idea why the line looks darker here.  I doesn’t look like that in the PDF preview!

I hesitate to say the dreaded C-word (not THAT one, the DECEMBER one!) but if you make gifts, that Calendar card project is one you can easily whip up and have a stash on hand in case you need an emergency gift!

Also bear in mind that many of the Project Life sized cards also make nice tear-off blocks:

and you can see other 2019 calendars here.

Have fun!

PS I am still more or less keeping up with the book folding templates, getting a few requests every day, just in case people think I am not doing them because I am not posting about them.  I am.

International Women’s Day PL printables

Yes, yes, it has been a while since I have made printables.  But this year I really wanted to make a set for International Women’s Day.  2017 was a tough year, personally and for women in general.  CNN says 2018 will be the Year of Women – but then again it could just be “fake news” right? {imagine a snort of derision here}

I have been seeing a few graphics for Women’s Day and most of them are more like Mother’s Day in tone – very sweet and floral.  If 2018 is the Year of Women then I think the graphics should reflect something … stronger.

I’m still playing around with things but these two (very different) sets are heading in the right directions.  The first is a combination of the sweet and floral feel that I mentioned:

Download that one here.

The second one is a little more graphic, although it IS pink…but then, so are the pussy hats, so I think that is fine.

Download that here. There is also a trio of little circles that can be used as embellishments for anything really – might be nice as a full sheet of bits for a planner, for example.

Hope you find good use for them!

 

2018 DIY calendars (Decorate it yourself)

By request, I have a couple of 2018 calendars that you can decorate yourself.

First, here is a CD calendar sized one:

Download that here.

And the other is the smaller PL size cards:

And you can download that one here.

Hopefully this will give you a chance to get started on some Christmas gifts! Thanks, Kristi, for the nudge.  {wink}

As requested – 2018 Banner calendar

I haven’t been doing the Project Life printables like I once did, but there are loads of them available in the drop-down menu at the top.  Most of them are not year-specific, but the calendar ones are.  If possible, I do try to update ones when people request them.  Myranda asked that the banner calendar be updated, and she did so in such a nice way, how could I say no?

I left the same font, in the interest of speed, but I may try to change that if I do a 2019 version! Here is a reminder:

And here is the download!

Make sure you check out the calendar projects page.  There are some ways to use 3×4 cards that you may not have seen.  Hopefully they will increase the usefulness of these, even if you don’t do PLT

Already? Yep. some 2018 calendars.

Just something I was playing with.  I’ve had gradients on my mind.  So there is the pretty standard B&W version:

which you can download by clicking this link

And there is a pretty, colourful version:

that you can download by clicking this link.

Because I’ve done them as five blocks per page, you get three blank frames at the end for journaling if you want.

Been a while since I made any calendars so this was a bit of fun for me.