J is for Journey

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.

Today I have chosen J is for Journey.

I was going to choose Joy as the word for J especially as today is our 36th Wedding Anniversary.  And an extra dose of joy is that today we get to spend the day with our friends Keith & Valerie who are visiting the UK from the US.

May 14th, 1983

This is when they visited us in the Midlands in 2014.  We had such fun.

Black Country Museum, September 2014

We saw them in 2017 when we went to stay with them during our grand trip around the US and Canada.

But back to my journal page and JOURNEY.  The point of this A-Z is to choose a word and look at the word of the year through the lens of the alphabetical word.  When I was looking for verses about journey, I found three that were about God's commitment to me.

I glued some tissue to the journal pages.

I printed out the verses and tried them out in various places.  I like making travel journals so I have lots of stickers about journeys and I went a bit mad with them.  In my defence I am trying to use them up - but possibly not all of them on the same page!

I stuck the verses down.

Here are the pages together.

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.

Recording the black & white walk

Last time you will remember that I showed the photos from the walk I did from Kingswood Junction to Lowsonford.

The aim of this sketchbook exercise is to draw what you saw as you walked.  I didn't particularly want to draw things so I filled the pages with text and stencilling. I own a lot of stencils and I thought this would be a great way to use some of them.

The next activity was to isolate areas within the drawings to make 'tiles' which can then be made into stamps.  To be honest using the stencils made this part of the syllabus a bit difficult.

I was reading Jean Draper's book, Stitch and Pattern, where she suggested drawing a stylised leaf and making patterns using that.  I drew a stylised Hawthorn leaf as I had seen Hawthorn  hedges all along the side of the canal.

I made a sponge leaf, 2 funky foam leaves and 2 lino cut leaves.  These are the stamped images.

I made these into digital stamps and spent quite a lot of time producing pages of various versions of repeat patterns.

The spaces between the printed leaves interested me and I traced that and made another set of digital stamps and printed out repeat patterns for my sketchbook.

I also made yet another set of funky foam stamps using this shape.  I printed with a variety of the stamps on fabric.

The first set or prints are with Formusol - a discharge paste - which removes the colour from black fabric.

The formusol was spread on some plastic and then pressed onto the fabric.

White acrylic fabric paint on black fabric

Black acrylic fabric paint on white fabric

I have lots of ideas whirling around in my head but need to settle down to making 12 samples as a way of working to my final piece.

In the meantime I have a Jean Draper 3 day workshop to attend at Bobby Britnell's studio and a one day with Caroline Merrell.  This is on experimental inkjet printing learning how to transfer my favourite images that I have taken onto silk and then proceed to add fibres to nuno felt.  I will of course be using a photo from my canal walk, to use as one of my samples.

There will of course be blog posts to let you know how I get on.

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice

Walking in black & white

The theme for my photography group this month is black and white photos taken on a walk.  This fitted well with my Master Practitioner course where I had to use photos of a walk.  I'll show you my sketchbook next time.

I walked from Kingswood Junction to Lowsonford where I met Roger.  We had a pub lunch and then he walked back to Kingswood Junction and I picked him up.

The South Stratford canal is renowned for its barrel-roofed lock keeper's cottages.

It also has split bridges so that the rope from the horse could go through the middle and not interrupt the journey of the horse-drawn barges.

 

I really enjoyed the walk.  I took a great many photographs and it is interesting to compare these black & white ones to the numerous colour ones I have of the same walk.  We walk it quite often!

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice