i love this photo

from northern NY where it is sunny and 35 degrees (supposed to 40+, yahoo

well, as you can see i still am bad about blogging. i admire those of you who do it every day. so, as i was surfing around this morning i happened upon this site lorik art where she hosts a mandarin orange monday post. while looking at the links there i realized i had the perfect photo for this. it is a photo that my daughter took from the ferry where she works.

pretty dark photo so i played with it some and this is what i got:

 

 

i love this photo of the sun coming up over lake champlain between new york and vermont. hope you enjoy.

 

eta, okay my daughter said the sun was actually going down. i have no sense of direction since we moved to ny.

 

looks can be decieving

hi from northern ny where it is partly sunny and 45 degrees (we're having a heat wave, a tropical heat wave.....)

over the weekend i had the urge to put together a new book. i wanted to use a new binding stitch on this one and decided i liked the cross stitch look.

after studying it a bit i thought "that looks simple enough, just basic cross stitches, right?" i was eager to be stitching and just through together a basic cover (still needs detail work) and that is another story. i found a basic diagram and got started. oops...... didn't work, pulled a couple of stitches loose and tried again. still didn't work. took it all out and started completely over. still had problems. the column were numbered on the diagram and all the stitches were numbered in the order to sew them. i finally figured out that the diagram was looking at the stitches from what would be the outside of the cover and i was trying to sew them from the inside. took it completely out and started over again. it went better.

the stitching looks a little wonky. i marked my stitching holes on the inside of the cover. but because the two fabrics shifted while i was sewing, the stitches really need to be marked on the outside to get them to perfectly lined up. gotta get a new blue disappearing fabric marker.

when i was gelli printing i used everything i could lay my hands on from my work table. that included some half pages of a manila folder (the larger, back half was used to cut stencils. worked great. was able to make an 8x10 window with my stencil pattern in it. fits perfectly over my gelli plate and is easy to file). i used the printed half folder in half again for small journal covers (ended up to be 6 x almost 9 when folded). here is a picture of that journal cover and a pic of one of my stencils i made.

any way, there are a few pictures of the inside pages on my flickr site. mjkcreations flickr photos.

still cutting and pasting

hi from northern ny where it is cloudy and 41 degrees.

OMG! i am still stuck on cutting and pasting all these little pieces of swap papers and leftover scraps. it is an obsession. i get that way, i get stuck on one thing whether it is crafting, food, tv or whatever and i just have to keep doing it until it naturally wears off. this may take a while as quilts and paper are two of my favorite things.

any way, i was in my own little world yesterday, cutting and pasting. when i was working up close on the text ones i was not totally happy with them. i thought they were blah looking and there wasn't enough variation in the colors. today when i got home from work and looked at them laying in the floor and were more of a distance away i was much happier with them. tomorrow is my day off and i think i have some ideas of what i want to do with these. for now here is what i did yesterday.

i'll let you know tomorrow what i come up with. ;)

good morning

happy sunday morning everyone. just a quick post before i get started for the day. it has been so longed since i blogged that you can see that i forgot how to insert a picture in a post. hmmm, there is a little icon up there for a picture, duh. note to self, use that instead of the "link" option.

yesterday i found a new blog. http://tofuart.com/ i immediately fell in love with it. just my kind of art (no drawing required, lol). the collages are to die for. love the map art, love the quilt designs, love the stamp mandalas.

soooo, immediately my mind began going. i had this pile of scraps left over from the latest ROD journal i am working on.

small strips, but not small enough. so i cut them down into smaller slivers and got this.

then came the fun/messy part. out came the mod podge and an 11x14 drawing sheet and the 4x6 index cards. i spent the rest of the afternoon creating these.

 

 

and these

 

 



i'm not sure where i will go with them from here, but will let you know what i decide. now i'm off to collage some more.