November 30, 2007

Ten Two Studios Countdown Calendar

Here is a great site for anyone needing almost free Christmas images. (After you post a link back to the site somewhere on the net you can download the images free of charge). These are nice images and you can get new ones everyday for a total of 46 images. Check the site sometime during each day from the 1st through the 25th and you could come away with images to use in your crafts. Last years images were great.

Starts tomorrow: http://countdown.tentwostudios.com/

Yesterday I took my Christmas Journal to be bound at Staples and the girls there did not make me feel good about leaving it in their charge. First she didn't even look at it and was going to bind it across the top breaking into the words. I made her draw a picture of the journal on the envelope and show where the binding was supposed to be. But even with that I wasn't sure it was going to be done right. I walked around the store and as I was leaving it was spread across the binding machine and the girl was off doing something else. I'm sure it's going to be a mess when I pick it up but I will gladly say I was wrong if it's not. Keeping my fingers crossed that I am. Good thing is, if it is a mess, I bought some binding rings while I was there so I won't have to take it back if I have to redo it.

November 27, 2007

Christmas Journal 2007- The Cover

Here is the cover of my new Christmas Journal. It still needs some work but I thought I'd get the picture posted before I got started on the pages. It's a journaling class through shimelle.com Yes, the theme of the cover is a little outdated but I still love it. The red background is printed from a fabric design because I couldn't find paper I liked and I didn't think the binding machine would like it if I used real fabric. The journal will be spiral bound if I ever make it over to Staples. The size is 6" X 9" and the pages will be made of watercolor paper.

Xmas Journal cover

November 23, 2007

The Christmas Spirit is in Me

Thanksgiving was a quiet one this year. It was just My Guy and me for dinner. We went to the Firehouse resturant in Old Sacramento and it was delicious. I was so stuffed I couldn't believe it. I did get a chance to talk to My girl and mom but not seeing them is so hard. I concentrated on the many, many things I have to be thankful for and didn't dwell on what I was missing. It helped me get through the day. I hope you had a wonderful day as well.

Now Thanksgiving is over and I'm finally allowing myself to get excited over Christmas. I expect Christmas will be a very good one. I've always said anticipation is what makes Christmas so exciting but the anticipation is going to kill me this year. I just can't wait for Dec 21st as we'll be flying to NM to see My Girl and her new husband. yay! It's been too long since I've laid eyes on my baby girl. :)

I signed up for the Christmas Journaling class at http://www.shimelle.co.uk/classes and it looks to be a lot of fun. We get started with the journaling prompts on December 1st and I've been looking for images to use for the individual pages. I found this in old CD from a image editor I used ages ago. I just love it.

November 19, 2007

Cindi Lou is stuck in the 50's

Like the hairstyle? I'm not sure it's done but there's not much to say about this one other than that it's painted on newspaper coated with gesso as described below.

FaceOnNews

What would you do?

What would you do for a cup of coffee and a sweet? This journal page describes my journey all over town looking for a Starbucks. Yahoo Local was wrong, there is no Starbuck's on the corner of West and Main Street....argh!

Starbucks

Veteran's Day Journal Page

In honor of all Veterans but specifically for my dad who not only served in WWII but passed away on Veteran's Day in 2006, and for my husband who served during Desert Storm.

VetsDayDad

Have I been lazy or busy?

OK yes I confess, I've been a bit of both. I haven't blogged because I've been too lazy to take pictures of my art efforts but I have been creating. I'll post them in the order they were created:

CollageOnNews

This picture was inspired by both Judy Wise and by Paulette Insall.

Judy's post concerning making journal pages from newspaper coated with house primer freed up my creative side. I figure it's just newspaper not paper I paid for. That's amazingly freeing. I felt I could experiment and if I didn't like it, I could just toss it. No loss in using paper that was going to be recycled anyway.

The other inspiration came from Paulette Insall's videos on Youtube. The videos show her amazing layering techniques and beautiful paintings.

November 11, 2007

Wall Art or Caulk Art?

My task this morning is to finally record my favorite craft shows on DVR to the DVD. I've had some these shows on DVR for over a year and I've been after my dear guy to please hook up the DVD recorder so I can get these wonderful shows recorded. We've been having problems with the DVR and I was afraid I was going to lose them. It's happened before and I didn't want it to happen again. It's not that I'm a technophobe, I can usually do it myself but this set up is way more complicated than I wanted to mess around with when my guy could do it in minutes. He put it together so he knew the whole wiring setup and it would have taken me hours to figure out. (I like to do it from the start or not at all) Although thinking about it now, I should have figured it out and I wouldn't be sitting here now recording hours and hours worth of shows. The bright side of this is that I have some new inspirations...or should I say old inspirations renewed.

Thanks to HGTV's B/Original program, my renewed inspiration came this morning in the form of wall art. Yes, there are many, many styles of wall art but this morning I fell back in love with words written directly on the wall. What?

Here's what you do: think up some great words, write them out on paper very large, or print them out on your computer if you don't like your handwriting. Then trace the words on the wall using graphite pencil, outline only. Host, Michele Beschen, says regular carbon paper will bleed on the wall. I'll talk about that more later. Then using acrylic caulk fill in the letters. It's like frosting a cake, except you can't eat this frosting (damn, I love frosting). After it's dry you'll primer it and paint. You can paint using the same color to create a very subtle look or use a different color to make it stand out.

So after recording for a few hours, My Guy comes to me and says he's going to Home Depot, do I want to go? Ah, do I ever say no to the hardware store? No. I love the hardware store. So when we got everything he went there to get and he says 'what do you want to look at?' Calking and copper was my response. Caulking for my renewed inspiration project and copper just because I love copper and I want to fondle it. :) First up, white acrylic caulk. I didn't know how much to buy but My Guy says buy as many as you want because I can always use what you don't. So I picked up three tubes, which turned out to be two too many. By the way, no specific brand is required so I choose the cheapest.

paperdreamI came home and printed out the word Dream. That's a good word for a bedroom isn't it? I tried using a word processing program but I found the 72 point letters didn't come close to what I needed. The word Dream in 72 points, the largest point size available for the font I wanted, was only 5 inches wide. I'd need a magnifying glass for that so I used my scrapbook software to create large letters. The D was the largest at 8" tall and about 5' wide. I taped it all together and went to look for some tracing paper. The picture shows the scale of the word as compared to the wall plug in.

PartialFillandOutline Now I know I said Michele said to use Graphite paper but I didn't have any and the nearest art store is 25 miles away so I used my carbon paper. I found a few sheets of red carbon paper from my home sewing days (ages ago.) and laser level to make sure it goes up straight. I taped the Dream letters to the wall using blue painters tape so I don't mess up the existing paint. OK so now it's time to trace the letters. Place the carbon paper behind the printed sheets so that the letter has carbon all the way around it. Using a pen, pencil or stylus, trace the outline of the letter. Press hard because you are going through two, sometimes three layers of paper.

Time to fill in the letters with caulk. I used a caulk gun to make it go quickly and worked for about an hour. At the end of that hour it looked like this:

dreamfilled

At this point it's dull but I'll go over it with primer and then with regular paint, then the letters will be highlighted with a pearlescent white paint. I'm happy with how it's turning out. I'll post pictures of the finished product later.

November 6, 2007

If You Obey All The Rules

Wow 2 posts in one day. This is the journal page I started last night. It has a variety of scraps of paper glued to the base sheet. I added a deep yellow watercolor wash that was too transparent, and it showed too much of the text in my little papers. So I used a acrylic wash and it looks much better.



I also wanted to try using some of the calligraphy that I've been learning. This is a fun set but I was still too chicken to do it right on the page. I wrote it out on a seperate sheet and then cut it up and glued it down. The woman's image was printed on a laser printer and I used contact paper to make it transparent.

Flowers in November

If there is only one thing about California that I love, it's that the flowers are still blooming in November. Here are a couple of photos from my back yard.



I'm particularily happy about the last one, which is the dwarf orange tree. The reason is that's it growing in a pot and it hasn't been very happy since we moved. But I guess my little baby is finally getting accustomed to it's surroundings.

Ahh my flowers make me happy.

November 5, 2007

Recap of the weekend

Friday night was our usual dinner night out. Where did we eat? Oh yes it was Bella Bru in Natomas shopping center. We had the same thing as is per usual these days (the low carb diet), which was crab cakes and salad and drinks. Did you know drinks don't count in the low carb diet? OK they do. We just tell ourselves that because there are just somethings we won't give up.

After dinner we went to Fry's in my quest to find some way to hook up my laptop to the laser printer. I have to print from the laptop more often now that Vista crapped all over my older programs on the desktop. Vista messed up so many of my "useful programs" (read business programs) that I wanted to scream. It's cost me more to upgrade my computer to be Vista ready that I could have gotten a brand new computer for same price. ARGH...

Saturday night we drove to Fairfield to meet the Snows and see their home. They had Erik and Karen there for hors d'oeuvres and wine. Nice home, with a very industrial utilitarian front. Corragated metal that looks much better than it sounds. After a few glasses of wine we drove over to the Vintage cafe for dinner. It's just a few blocks from the Snows. I had the sea bass which was wonderful but My Guy didn't like his fish dish, said it was too dry.

Today I went to Office Depot and found a Waterman Phileas Red Fountain Pen. It writes so smoothly. Very different from the scrubby point on the quill pen I used yesterday. That one was almost painful to use because it was so scratchy. I've also ordered some speedball nibs to practice some calligraphy. I want to use these pens for my journal entries.

I started a new journal page today by gluing down some bits of various types of paper to a page. tomorrow after it dries I will cover it with a tan transparent wash to unify the page. We'll see what happens after that.

November 1, 2007

Newest ATC's

Here are some of the ATC's I've been working on recently. These three are for me:

These are available for trade.



These three are for a swap at ATCards.com called Finding Your Voice




They are titled I want to be heard, Love Unconditionally, and End War.

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