I have been confined to resting my back with my feet up for the past couple of weeks and as the most comfortable place for me to do that is on my bed, that is where I have been spending most of my days.
In order not to spontaneously combust as a result of utter boredom or sink into oblivion from inertia, I have been rootling though many of my crafty bins of "essential" supplies, (read retained refuse), in order to sort them out and organise the things I really need to keep.
I really did manage to discard a scary amount of things that some undisclosed person has been adding to my burgeoning collection of papers, pages, discarded odds and sods over the past few months...I am perfectly sure I would not have decided to keep partial die cuts, wonky ephemera attempts and all the other collected rubbish I found. All this was extremely disheartening...for the past couple of years I have had a strict "nil purchasing" ban in place for myself and apart from absolute essentials such as adhesives an an extremely occasional special purchase of a stamp, die or paint, I was feeling pretty chuffed that I had managed to use so much of my existing supplies in journals, boxes, cards etc...now I find I have barely scratched the surface!
One thing about having a lovely collection of plastic bins in my metal shelving units is that they tend to simply get filled over time. Nature abhors a vacuum as we all know, so I can only assume there is an obscure law of physics operating here...probably in direct counterpoint with Murphy's Law...
Regarding used envelopes, just for example...I did ask the boys to save them for me, as they usually open the post. Laura Denison had an envelope journal tutorial on her Website many years ago that I had intended to emulate at some point...so one does need a few envies for that, I think fifteen or twenty was the number used...I found had several, (MANY), times that number, and as Tim always forgets and rips envelopes open instead of cutting them neatly, most of the hundreds I found were useless for this purpose anyway. I needn't go on, one gets the picture I am sure...
During this period of enforced rest I also watched a few YT videos between sorting jobs, one of which was by Creationsceecee (YT), titled "Quick and Easy Mixed Media Cards"...this was a way of using up "failed" water colour pieces that had no better purpose in life...these were converted by the simple application of Gesso and some paint, ink and a modicum of doodles into delightfully simple little cards.
These delights really caught my eye. I was in a mood to be distracted...and I was! This is NOT a new process by any means, as similar things were done in Cat Hands MMM's last year, and I have seen many others using similar processes. It is funny how you can see a project or technique quite a few times before something about another similar tutorial really catches your eye and inspires you to try it.
I decided I needed to have a go...anything to get me out of any more sorting and organising...besides, I needed a few cards...don't we always?
For the card above, I used a piece of heavily coffee stained copy paper, left over from making some envelopes...gessoing on the swirly circles to give definition and texture worked better than I thought it would. The gesso picked up some of the coffee colour and became a lovely latte colour, then I added a swirl of Payne's Grey for contrast which has a delightful blue-grey hue to my eye, a few gold acrylic paint dots and grey fine liner squiggly lines... adhere them onto a white card base and it's done. A lot of fun. I really did emulate Ceecee's process for this trial, in regard to placement etc. All I did differently was to use different papers. I was going to video the project but decided not to upload it as I really didn't do anything different to the original...
Once the painting, inking and leaving overnight to dry processes I applied to my selected papers, I spent another happy few hours cutting them all out, adding little leaves from the scraps and edge pieces and putting each of the different colours and papers in small sealable bags.
Mission accomplished! Instead of having large questionable paper scraps cluttering up my space, I have managed to create many hundreds of small ones. At least though, the little bags are all tucked away in a small box...
I suppose there is a logic in there somewhere. I guess it is difficult to defy the laws of science however much we might kid ourselves...
She also has a second video on doodling on coloured (no gesso, no paint or ink) papers which produces a much softer, cleaner look and I am keen to try that also...that is if I have left any coloured scraps in my boxes! Again, by now means a new process, but just this time it appealed to me to try again.
Bye now, I will be back when I have some more to show.
Dixx