newly creative

Tuesday, 26 March 2019

Journal Cover

You may remember that I put together a journal for Word of the Year but didn't put a cover on it.

Valerie is doing a series on her blog called Washi Tape Adventures which gives ideas for using all that lovely washi tape you have squirrelled away. I have such a lot of washi tape so I thought I would use it to decorate the cover of my journal. First I glued wallpaper lining paper onto my journal using Golden Soft Gel Medium.

I put it under a weight while the glue dried and then trimmed the edges. I put an extra wide tape down the spine.

I put stripes of washi tape across the front. I was going to do it with small bits of washi tape - so that there might be 2 or 3 patterns on one line but decided it was too complicated!

I trimmed the edges and put vertical strips. I folded over the tape on the outside edge.

And then I did the back. I deliberately didn't match it to the front.

And here it is. If the tape starts peeling a bit - and it might with handling - I shall Gel Medium over it.

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice

Join Our Inspirational Facebook Group: Living Your Word of the Year

Join Mary Brack, Valerie Sjodin and I in our Facebook group where we are giving participants the opportunity to live out an A-Z of their own word throughout 2019. Mary explains what we are doing in her blog post. We don't like a lot of rules, so we will have suggestions and options to spark creativity, and to help in recording and exploring our word’s meaning in visual and fun ways. We will each blog about our experiences and our art.

Living Your Word of the Year 2019

Hashtags on Instagram: #livingyourword2019

Check out the other blogs:
Mary: www.foundonbrighton.com
Valerie: www.valeriesjodin.com/blog

To ensure you get updates from Valerie, Mary & I why not subscribe to our blogs.

Saturday, 23 March 2019

A new project

I am doing a Seasons based course at Littleheath Barn which I realise I haven't shared here but I will do soon. One of the things that Liske has been suggesting is making a different style of book for each season. Her Winter book has been a Wabi-Sabi book. Whilst this style of book doesn't fit with what I am doing for the four seasons, I loved the idea of making such a book.

I have bought lots of rust dyed fabrics and decided I would use those and I stamped and printed circles onto the fabric. I cut the fabric to the size I wanted them to make a book.

At this point I was just playing with fabric and not really having a plan. And then the light bulb moment!

I wrote about how I played with some ideas at Committed to Cloth in this blog post. At C2C I was working on the theme of Senses and in particular Taste and oranges and lemons. The week of play produced this amongst other pieces.

I could see the influence of the work above on the printing I had done on the rust dyed fabric. Great - I have a theme for the book.

I sorted out the fabrics into pages and was sure I had made 12 pages. However it turned out to be 11 and then decided rather than have one book, I would make 2 books.

I cut circles and wedges from other fabrics I had and bondawebbed them to the pages. I had also realised that the book needed some contrast and bought some hand-dyed fabric from Leah Higgins. I started some free-machining on these pages but soon realised that it's not really my thing - insufficient practise really! So I am now going to hand stitch on the pages for now.

This is the larger book. The photos show both sides of the page. When you sew on one side, the stitching shows up on the other side which is interesting. But as you can see I'm not good at free machining circles!

I'll show you how I get on with these books in later posts.

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice

Tuesday, 19 March 2019

F is for Focus

In our Living Your Word of the Year group we are using a fortnightly (bi-weekly) A-Z challenge throughout the year to help us focus on our word and live it out.

Because of the way I have made my journal it's a case of going with the flow of what background the pages have when I turn to them.

The reason for the A-Z challenge is to help us look at our word of the year through another word. I have chosen focus for F, as it's not really possible to commit to something unless you focus on it. Mary often does a page with sun rays on it and I thought that would be good. I was planning to put the name Jesus as the focus point.

I drew various lines on the back of yellow cardstock - making up the design as I went along as I couldn't find the instructions I had from Mary on how to do it!

I cut along the lines with a scalpel

I stuck it in my journal.

At this point I realised I hadn't taken a photo of the journal pages before I started, so here it is with the right hand page.

I found some large letters in my scrapbooking stash. I printed out most of the words from Be The Centre by Michael Frye and glued them to the page.

As I said, I had planned to put the name Jesus in the centre of the circle, but I found this sticker which says Delight yourself in the Lord. I figure that God must be saying something to me as this is from Psalm 37. This Psalm keeps cropping up.

I decorated the strips of paper with the words on and added a verse from Proverbs. 'Let your eyes look straight ahead, fix your gaze directly before you.' Proverbs 4:25 How focused is that!