I usually send the last page of a spread first so that when you look at it on the blog you see the first page at the top of the page. I forgot this time. Oh well, that's the way I usually look at magazines and my journal anyway, from the back to the front.

I have no idea what La Vaca means in Dutch, but it's The Cow in Spanish which I teach. Since we have cattle, I thought it was appropriate for my journal. I also found it interesting that the very same DMC floss that I've used for years was in the little inspiration packet from Sarah in the Netherlands. I guess the world over, lots of things are the same.

Middle pages of my Jan 28 spread. I wanted to use the post card without covering any of it up. I wound up splitting the cardboard and gluing the paper between the parts. I'll be using this technique again. 

I received my Blue Glue Cards from Sarah in the Netherlands yesterday. She also sent this great envelope and a small packet of magazine clippings. I decided to use it to make my page last night. I wound up staying up till 2:00 AM working on the pages. Of course I didn't start until nearly midnight. I love the way the colors go from red to purple to blue with a touch of green on these pages. 

More bits and pieces laying around my art table. The little girl is me at four years old. The H was cut from the foil lid of a peanut can. I was going to use it in an altered book project, but it didn't work out. I like the texture that it ads here. 

I had been using PhotoShop to clean up this picture when I decided to do a journal page. This was one of my test prints. I need to change the ink in my printer. I love the fact that the photo shows how much my husband's grandfather Atha looks like my father-in-law did. I knew and loved Atha when he was in his eighties. His wife Fye died before I became a member of the family. I would have loved knowing her too. 

My Jan. 22 page included bits and pieces of things that were laying around the house and some from a magazine that my daughter-in-law saved for me because it had nice paper.  

Making Art From Bits and Pieces

The New York Times > Arts > Art & Design > Making Art From Bits and PiecesI enjoyed reading about John Evans who made a daily collage in his art journal for 36 years using ephemera that he found in New York.

I painted this background with a credit card and then had a hard time finding something to put on the page. I was wanting to journal about holding my sweet granddaughter at our Sunday church service, so that is what I wound up getting started with. Sometime the words and art flow better than at other times. I keep telling myself to just present myself to the page. If I don't, nothing gets on the paper. 

I started my sketch grid for the second half of January. I've already missed a day though. So much for a sketch a day all year! I fell asleep at 7:00 last night, something I never do. Of course when I woke up this morning it was no longer the 18th. Oh well, I'll get back on track tonight. I'm hoping to try and color these sketches with water colors. I'll post again when it's filled which may or may not be the end of January. 

For some reason I've had chickens on my mind lately. We used to have them and I always enjoyed the fresh eggs and watching the hens peck around in the yard. 

I copied the background for this one from a painting in a magazine. The yellows show up too bright in the photo. I noticed that the baby in the photo would have been the same age as my grandma. 

Here is my finished sketch grid for the first two weeks of January. I'm pretty pleased that I stayed with it. It would be a lot easier to do the sketches every day if I would start earlier. Several of them were done the last ten to fifteen minutes before bed. It's hard to do your best under those conditions. 

I finally followed one of the gluebook list January prompts. As I was slicing the picture with my paper cutter I laid the strips on my journal. Somehow I got them backward, but decided that I liked it better that way. 

I've been singing the post-holiday diet blues around here lately. I was doing pretty well until yesterday when I finished off the rest of the Christmas cookies. Oh well, at least they aren't there to tempt me any more. I thought maybe these plump cookie ladies would motivate me, not that I'll ever look like the shapely one. 

I'm knitting again after an extended hiatus. I love to knit, so I'm pretty excited about it. I'm also pretty pleased with the way my drawing is coming along. I would have never dreamed last year that I would be able to draw something and make it look this much like the real thing. Not that I think this is a wonderful drawing (don't look too closely at the knitting needle.), but for me it's a real improvement. This is the first time I've tried water color over the acrylic paint background. It worked great. 

I have no sense of time... 

It took three days to get this spread done. In the mean time we saw eleven deer in our field on our way home one evening. The red squares are rasberry tea bags. I was hoping they would be in individual bags that I could use in my journal, but they weren't. When I spotted sheet music with the title Muddy River, I knew it had to go in my journal. We had been having lots of rain and Bay Creek was up and muddy. 

I love the idea of adding a calendar to my journal every month. I didn't have large number stamps, so I used the O's from my letter set to make the zeros, and cut a stencil for the two and the five. The two came out lots better than the five. 

I spotted these photos in an ad for videos and knew I had to put them onto a journal page. So many of these actors images are burned indelibly onto my memory along with many other details of the shows. Ironically just a couple of days after I made this spread, my husband is talking about getting satellite TV. 

Occasionally I like to remove a few pages of my journal to keep the bulk down. I usually tear out about 5 pages and then tear the inner three down to nearly nothing and glue a page of some sort or an envelope between the stubs. 

My first ATC's. These were for the gluebook list Blue GTC swap. These are actually a photo copy of the cards that I made to put in my journal. 

I've been wanting to try ATC's, but somehow never seemed to get around to it. I think I was intimidated by them for some reason. Maybe because they are so much smaller than I have gotten used to working. There was so much talk on the gluebooks list about glue cards that I had to try them. These area actually my second set of three. The first ones are for a swap and I don't want to post until my swap partner sees them. They were lots of fun to do. I'm having a hard time sending them off. For some reason I really like the feel (touch kind of feel) of them. I guess I must be the tactile type. I made them on playing cards and used a glue stick. I tried my regular Mod Podge, but it didn't work nearly as well for these. It may be because the cards are non-porous. 

Gluebook page? Maybe not. I started out to paint a background for the Jan 2, blue prompt on Yahoo! Groups : gluebooks. When it came to glueing, I only got to this one photo. I've been wanting to try extending a photo with drawing. If you look closely you can see the birds on the wire in the picture. 

January Daily Sketch Grid. I didn't think I could get 31 decent sized boxes on the pages, so I went with half the month. I wanted to leave room for some notes on the drawings too. While painting the next exuberant blue page, I got a little wild and got some paint on this side. It went right past the wax paper. I used baby wipes to get most of it off, but you can still see the residue. Oh well. 

Every year I am determined not to make resolutions. Every year I do it again. 

I started this spread on Dec. 31 and finished on Jan. 1. It includes another great mailart envelope from Salena. Around the edges in brown it reads: Oh why can't I get in the habbit of painting pages ahead? I get to a point where I *need* to journal or journal more and there is no place ready for my words. This was in response to the page of journaling I did on printer paper and included in the envelope.