A new concertina

This week with the Free Up Your Sketchbook course we are reviewing, researching and preparing.  So I reviewed my sketchbook and there are bits I like but it's all too dark.  Karen did an interview with Debbie Mackinnon where Debbie showed the small concertina books that she makes.

Which gave me an idea!

I suspect Debbie starts with an A1 sheet of paper.  The largest I have is A2 so that's what I used.  Rather than making the book first, I started by putting pieces of masking tape on the paper, drawing lines with a grey Stabilo crayon and then scraping gesso on.  It was all very random.

When the gesso had dried I added very watered down turquoise and copper acrylic inks.

And when that was dry I added bits of collage using Gel medium as the glue.

Then I folded the paper and cut it. You can watch this video if you want to make one yourself.  I folded up the paper which makes a concertina book that is A6 size or opened out to A5 as in these photos.

Some of these double pages are lovely already.  However I will still add more layers to all of them.

Doing the mark making before the folding has meant that I have much more random layouts.  I would probably have put more effort into thinking about placement if I'd made the book first.

AND I am back in my comfort zone with the limited palette.

I'll continue to photograph my journey in this sketchbook.  Watch this space!

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice

Framed

The theme for February's Snapshot Girls was Framed.  It took me a while to think about what I could do.  These are the photos I came up with.

The first three are new photos.

Paper collage grid

Me

A snowy day through the bedroom window

Now we move to much older photos from my vast archive!

Sydney Opera House from the inside

The garden through the arched doorway

A cat on a narrowboat

Framed by a tunnel

A narrowboat framed by a tunnel

Thanks for joining me today
Bernice

Too many tabs open

I love this meme

And my craft space and table feel the same way when I have too many projects on the go!

As you can see, the table is covered with various projects in progress.

Before I put the gel plates away I needed to clean the one at the bottom right.  Yeates Makes recommended baby oil to clean the newspaper ink.  But I didn't have any so I tried the vegetable oil I cook with.  And it worked!

Then I took all the bits and pieces from all over the table and piled them up according to which project they belonged.  I was going to buy some plastic wallets but when I rummaged in a cupboard I found 5 that someone had given me.

I even labelled the wallets.  Woohoo.  It does help!  But it defeats the object of tidying up if they take up room on the table.  So what to do?

They all fitted into one large bag-for-life.

Well done me!

And here it is ready for the next thing!

I wonder how long this will last!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice