Give Me Time

For our penultimate week of The Documented Life Project 2015 we are continuing with our theme of: Storytelling with the Written Word. Our art challenge this week is: hidden journalling, and the journalling prompt: the greatest gift I give myself.  It didn't take long for me to know what such a gift would be in my case: more time!  If you have been following my blog, you will know all about my time issues. I try to squeeze too much into my life with the inevitable result that I'm always short of time. No doubt 2016 won't be an exception to that rule. You only have to look in the sidebar to see that I have lots of activities already lined up for next year. As Stuart R Levine said it so well:

"We give our time away all day long, to emotions that gain us no advantages, to people who do not value our time, to inefficient habits. If you want to take back this time, you need to cut to the chase".

I will try! 

In the meantime I spend time making this page. I started by writing some journalling about time on the pages and then covered that up as per our challenge with 2 pages from a vintage encyclopaedia from the 19th century. These were gessoed and then painted over using Liquitex Glossies and a stencil from The Crafter's Workshop. I wanted the bars as a representation of how time keeps us prisoner all our lives and then kills us off in the end. The crosses (from the same stencil) also refer to that as does the skull.  Then I added the pink clocks (also a Crafter's Workshop stencil) with spray ink.  I found the face in a Sunday newspaper magazine and filled it with stop watches. They as well as the skull, the black birds and the wings all come from a Alpha Stamps collage sheet.

I used my Time Flies stamp (it features heavily in my Dylusions art journal!), designed by Rebekka Erikson for StampWorld and the Life is not measured.... stamp by Stampers Anonymous. The clocks came from a newspaper. The Give Me Time letters were rub-ons.

There are several quotations handwritten on the spread. Along the head it says: "Time is what we want most, but what we use worst (William Penn) and by the right hand side it reads; "I hear the heartthrob of time in my veins" (Terri Guillemets).

I used quite a bit of glitter mica spray to make the pages sparkle and I've tried to capture it on the photographs. The effect is better than the picture! As for the answer to the question: Want to live for ever? No, definitely not. I simply want to make more of my time and fit in as much as possible. I'm cutting to the chase!