Tazo Tea

I loved the way the Tazo tea box looked when I opened it. They really know how to package tea. I couldn't get a decent photo, so I put it on my scanner/copier. The orange tea was pretty good too, but I don't like black tea and most of the teas included that.

Collaborative Journal

I made this spread in the journal I am working on with Maya. You can see the wonderful pages that she has done in it on her blog.

After church services Christmas Eve and Christmas morning, I finally felt like doing something Christmassy and used bits and pieces from my mail this month.

Not Quite in a Christmas mood

It's a good thing the family party isn't at my house this year. I haven't taken out one of my decorations. First it was a dumb cold and then we've had bad news about my mom's health. I'm just not in the mood. I haven't bought any presents either. We just have a few that we got earlier in the fall and the ones that I knit for Madelyn. I almost have the hat remade. I think I'm going to listen to the rest of the Number One Detective Agency and finish that at least. I made these journal pages last night out of bits and pieces that I've been saving for the last week. That and lots of whining.

Back to the needles

Knitting needles that is. I couldn't wait til Christmas and we tried Madelyn's hat, scarf and mitten (only one completely finished) on her today. The scarf is perfect and she likes it. The hat is a bit short. I'll have to try again. The mitten is short too, but she wore it for over half an hour in the house. I think she really liked it. Sheep's hat and scarf fit. I had made a smaller hat and it fits on his hoof as a mitten, so I'll have to make another one of those too. They looked cute,cute together. Madelyn was wearing an orange sherbert colored sweater and the light and dark pink looked awesome with it.

My First Mitten

Little bears seem to follow me home. I can't pass one up when they are sitting lonely at a thrift store or yard sale. This one is holding Madelyn's mitten (my first people mitten, I've made lots of doll ones) and modeling her Sheep's new hat and scarf. I also made Madelyn a matching hat and scarf.

That's Bay Creek in the background. The bear is posing in our bathroom window.

Cover for current journal

I got inspired last night when I saw this journal cover on Flickr. I am always amazed at how different mine turns out even when I think I am copying an idea. I glued a page from one of the books I made into an altered book to the front and back covers before I painted them. The paint stuck a lot better than it usually does to the composition book covers.

The flowers on the front of this are special to me because they were on a fabric bulletin board/collage that hung in my bedroom for years. I took it apart when we changed colors in the room and saved the things that were on it. These were so old and brittle that the paper sort of broke apart as I was cutting it in places.



The back has more of the flowers and some bits cut from old sheet music books. I just bought the blue duct tape at Wal-mart. I like the way it looks on the spine.

Snow Day and Tutu

The doodles are from last Thursday when I was waiting by the phone to see if we would have school called off for the snow. Here in Arkansas if we get any at all we miss school. The area below the date is a tracing from the pattern for the petals around the tutu I'm making my granddaughter. I have it gathered and the petals sewn up. I just need to turn them and sew it all to the waist band. I had no idea how to make a tutu, so I looked at the directions in a Simplicity pattern. I didn't actually buy the pattern because it was over $6 and it was in sizes 7-14 and I need a two.

This is the first page I've done in eight days. I wasn't very happy with it when I finished it, but I went on to do the covers of my newest journal which I liked a lot. I guess I needed a warm-up. Now that I look back at it, it's not so bad, just kind of plain.

Christmas cards

I put off making my Christmas cards about as long as I could because I didn't know how I wanted to do them. I did know I didn't want something that took as long as they did last year. I browsed online and found the three pine trees on a card. After cutting the stamp from fun foam, I played around with layering different papers that I had on hand. I had bought a package of green card stock from Big Lots to use in my Christmas scrapbook which doesn't seem about to materialize any time soon.

The cards are done now and mailed out. I always address them using Winvelope, but I lost both that program and my old Windows 3.1 cardfile program after my hard drive crashed last spring. They were both on the backup CD that doesn't work (bah!) I spent about an hour finding and installing Winvelope and finding a replacement for the cardfile that would read my address book created on the old one. After I finally found a good program, I had to download and install WinZip to unzip it. Still it was better than doing them all by hand.

First spread in the new journal

Working on my Christmas cards put me into a bit of a winter wonderland mood. I cut the Christmas tree stamp from fun foam.

Volume Five

I decided to try something a bit different with this journal. Inspired by the journal I made for my collaborative journal with Maya (see the August archives), I dismantled a compo book and replaced several of the pages with vintage papers. I made the book about 70 pages long instead of 100 since that's about how many I usually have in mine when I'm through with them. I used vintage music, brown paper from a bag, part of a cross word puzzle book, and a page from an old encyclopedia. I restitched the book using button thread.

I didn't get it exactly lined up and I'm really not sure it was worth the effort. It would have been easier to just glue in the pages. We'll see as I work in it if I do it again.

Volume Four Cover

I did the cover for the journal I just finished finally. I used copper metallic paint, mulberry paper, vintage sheet music and magazine cutouts. I still haven't done the cover on Volume Three for some reason. When I do, I'll take a photo of all of them together.

Last spread of Volume Four

This was the last spread of my fourth painted pages composition journal! I wanted to leave room here for postcrossing notes so it would be easy to find. I haven't been keeping up with my postcards that I send out and I wanted to know which ones I had sent where and when. This is the first spread I've done where I didn't paint all the way to the edges of the page. I kind of like the look.

Oriental mood I guess

I'm not sure why the cow wound up with this mix of oriental images except that the image has been laying on my craft table for ages. I helped Johnny to put up some calves and the meat-cow into the lot right before I did the spread too. Maybe that had something to do with it.



The image that I stamped only about 1/3 of it turned out, so I had to find something to cover it up with. I like the lady that I found in my oriental images folder better anyway.

My journal is back from Maya

The collaborative journal that Maya and I are doing arrived back the day I did this spread. I love the pages that she did in it. I finally sent hers back on Friday. I had planned to send it earlier, but I had a cold and stayed home Wednesday and then we had a snow day on Thursday.

Thanksgiving

I totally forgot to have everyone do a sketch this Thanksgiving like I did last year. I remembered when over half the guests were gone and I hadn't prepped a page. I found the little drawig on the left-hand page in the bathroom after everyone was gone. I have no idea which of the kids made it.

On the other page are some notes for a new altered book. I'm wanting to do a red/black/white one motivated by this.