Progress on my sorting. Major progress!

Remember the pile of bins I showed? Well.

I now have a series of fairly well organized boxes and bins, divided up by … type I guess. Let me share.

Most of what I have are gel prints in some form. I have those divided mostly by size. I have what I call true scraps, A5 or smaller but not true scraps, and A4 sheets, fully covered or partially covered.

And some of those A4s are quite nice, including the one on the top of that box (above right) and this one – really love it.

I also have bins that are plain white, black, shades of cream papers and one that is my stash of various dyed papers. Coffee and tea are very usable, some of the colours might not be colourfast, due to how I dyed them.

I also have a bin that is full of more translucent items, deli paper, tissue and tracing paper or vellum. AND one that is mostly commercial tissue papers and napkins of mulberry style paper. I adore that tissue with the big foiled gold dots. I looked for it again recently and wasn’t able to easily find it. Oh dear!

I have quite a bin of magazine pages – I often rip out pages I come across that have beautiful images or just pretty colours, and always have a plan that rarely comes to fruition.

I have a good sized collection of colourful paper towels, baby wipes, and the like, mop-up pieces mostly but some where I printed intentionally.

Lastly, for today anyway, I have a 12×12 box that has all my colour combo experiments from the artist group I am part of, and the gel-print scraps masterboards I made maybe last year. All these have been scanned so I can use them without using them, IYKWIM. Really hard to cut into those 12x12s.

There was one I simply adored, and I cut it before thinking to scan it and now it’s gone. So sad.

So there we go. Now I am ready to fill a collage journal. At this point I have no idea if dividing the stuff by type of paper is the right call, but trying to divide it my colour would be impossible, and I feel like when reaching for stuff I am going to look for a small piece, or a sheer piece or a full-page cover piece, right? And having them divided this way is going to force me to riffle thru a whole bin maybe, to really assess what I have. We shall see.

Off to the hospital tomorrow for an appointment. Not looking forward to what they will recommend, as all the options suck. At least I made it thru Christmas without a serious relapse. Oh wait, No. I got Covid. DOH!

Another challenge! Shades of White?

So another member of the art group I am on issued another challenge… using White and Shades of White. She says:

Colour combination: White and shades of white .

Allowed:

• 1. One additional metallic colour (gold, copper, silver etc).
• 2. You can use dark papers to pull the prints.
• 3. There must be an end use of at least one print (so cards, tags, decorations etc).

Tricky!

After mulling it over for a while, I decided I would begin with book papers. I like the idea of that rather than the dark paper background. I created an overlapping grid from a few different books, so different text, different colours, etc and tied it all together with a watered down Gesso wash.

I collected up a handful of whites and what I think are shades of white – titanium buff and a pale grey. I dithered about using other close to white shades, like a very pale blue or pink or very pale green or coral. I felt like keeping to neutrals was more in keeping with the challenge. Gold was my metallic, although generally, silver would likely be the “obvious” choice. I did add white to those shades to make them even paler.

I did a swipe of the titanium+white and then the grey+white thru a stencil

I was a little stymied as to the way forward, but I tried adding some paint pen circles thru a stencil.

It proved my point, which was that adding the bright white over the shades made it pop nicely. But where to go from here? It feels too early to add the gold, but I feel like I can mix the gold in with some of the other shades to alter it and give a different tone. So I might try that. And to be honest, I am kinda loving this as is – I mean it isn’t a finished piece, not yet, but it feels like it is going in the right direction!

After the catastrophe of the Navy + Red attempts (and no-one will convince me they were anything but fails, so don’t even try! Although try two was less awful than One was…) this is a huge relief. I don’t feel like I have to work hard to “bring it back” but I do need to be careful not to let this go off the rails!

I’ll take a breath before moving on…

Scraps on a roll

I have been seeing something called a snippet roll around the internet, and I decided to have a go making one. The ones I’ve seen tend towards the shabby chic and/or vintage style and also often includes fabric and lace and ribbon. I wanted to create something more in keeping with my slightly chaotic gel prints. My idea is to see if I can bring it to play in my journaling project, as a quick sort of page embellishment.

Basically it’s just a collage on a long thin strip. One of the first ones I saw was on old adding machine paper rolls. I used the same amazon packaging paper for mine. I gathered up a load of colourful scraps, paper-weight or deli paper, nothing too thick, and collaged it along a 2 or 3 metre strip.

I used a glue stick to adhere the scraps, but not working too hard to cover every bit with adhesive cause the next step is some wavy, zig-zaggy sewing.

Then, you can embellish with whatever you like. Labels seem popular (hence my making labels last week) but again, too vintage. I uses some stamping and embossing and adhered some little punched elements (or their negative spaces)

In the end I rather liked it, but how well it will work in my junk journals I do not know. The whole thing is an experiment but I hope I’ll find a way to make it work!

And yes, thank you, I did have a lovely birthday!

🙂

Paper, transformed…

(10 days to Son+Cat)

I have SUCH a stash of scrapbooking papers. I have seen about a million videos for how to transform them into something I will use NOW. So I decided that is was something I can squeeze in on my still mostly clean desk, and try to solidify my muscle memory of where stuff is NOW. It is also something that, amidst the chaos of my life at the moment, I can do in tiny sips, every time I have 5 minutes.

I began with some REALLY ugly and useless papers. Well at least they were to me. They all started with a layer of some crappy white acrylic I just want to use up.

The next day, when dry, each one got a bit more colour rolled, scraped or gel plate kissed. No pattern, not stencils, just the coverage to get a solid base:

Some of these were better covered than others

but the next layer, more colour, more paint, really showed them closer to my goal

They had to sit another day and where I am now

is more where I want to be. the blue-y purple-y ones allow more of the backgrounds to show thru and I am still undecided if they need more hiding layers or if allowing the original patterns to show thru is a layer that I can live with. But I am not as twitchy as I expected I might be, leaving these out, and in progress, for like three full days.

I think I will look at adding the next layers using all those newly reorganized stamps and stencils, and look to shake up the colours a little with some real pops or something snazzy.

I have a bit of a plan for my tags for the swap, based on an old pair of ATCs that I really loved. They won’t be exactly the same, but they will share elements. Will these papers appear in those tags? Time will tell.

Gee, I do say that a lot, don’t I? 😀

Scrappy gel prints make a rainbow

I have been looking a this bin that houses old, unloved gel prints for a long time. Sometimes I drag one out and stamp something on to and cut it, or use it to cut letters, or any number of other not very interesting things. Well, I decided I was going to make something and use them up if I could.

I took them all out and sorted them by colour, I trimmed off the white bits, where I pulled a print from a plate smaller than the paper, and ended up with this:

Weird, really cause I have more green than anything else and I would always say with the exception of lime and sage, I don’t really like green much. This is all the trimmings and thus, all the proper rubbish to be recycled. Some got binned because they were made with water reactive things and smeared when brushed over, some bits got lost to the squaring up process

In truth, I ended up pulling out a few bits that had usable areas from the bin, but not many. Then I stuck them down to large pieces of heavy cardstock. I aimed to keep the sticking to an area that finished a block, so some smaller pieces got stuck on the top, masking any white space or covering a join, just for extra interest or to balance the composition (if you can call it that!) and make the overall piece “better.”

I didn’t have an equal amount, but the red and the orange seemed to often have both red AND orange in them so it made sense to combine

I didn’t have a tom on yellow either but still managed a decent piece – my camera did NOT like the yellow against the pink mat. See how different the mat looks above vs below? Yellow is also not a favourite colour but I love this piece – it is lovely in real life.

I made a mistake on the green – i use the leftover from cutting the yellow piece from the A3 card and I had WAY too much green. I have a handful of that leftover. I could have filled the whole A3 sheet had I started with one.

I did not make the same mistake with the blue! I began with a full sheet.

and with the pinks. I had lager pieces that were so similar, and same paint so not as much diversity in this one as I would have liked

And then I had some browns, a a single sheet of black on white. The brown & red bits were a small scrap but they really were the pop of colour this needed

And lastly, purple.

A nice shot of them all together, mostly to show the variation in size

Now, what the heck am I going to do with them??

Day 40! Excited that in 10 days I will be in Book two!