Moments Page

There have been daily posts here this past week,  but in all honesty I was mainly absent from most of my life while machine quilting a large quilt. I tend to get a bit obsessional (okay, a lot!) when I get to the end of such a stage and though I have been wandering around our garden and finding the photographs every day, I haven't taken time to properly write posts and spend time online. Not a bad thing, as sometimes a break is as good as a rest. But I couldn't help feeling a bit guilty about it, so today you're getting a proper art post, in the shape of one of the spreads I did in my Dylusions art journal back when we had those gloriously sunny days in April. As you can see this spread was done on the 9th of that month. And the sunshine definitely had it's effect on this page.

No step by step instructions as this was a spread purely done for my own pleasure and thus produced without stopping to take pictures of the process or writing down what I was doing, and as a result even I have problems reconstructing the various steps. It started with paint and stencilling using stencils from Stencilgirl. The next step was to adhere some patterned wrapping papers as well as pieces of paper napkins. I used 3 different napkins, one with the loungers and tennis racket, one of flowers and the last one with vintage postcard imagery.

 I couldn't resist adding some of my most favourite postage stamps as well, as you can see above.

And there was a lot of mark making, doodling, and outlining towards the end. The yellow flower is a vintage image from a book. A vintage quotation from Wordsworth was also glued on at top right. It comes from his Intimations of Immortality and reads:

There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,

The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light.

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore; -

Turn wheresoe'er I may,

By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more. 

So despite the sunny look of this page it also does have a darker side (like most of my work) but I'm journalling about it in a oblique way so that I will always remember what I wanted to capture in this page while at the same time it will also remind me of those gloriously sunny April days.