Open Up

Wanderlust 2016 Book had another prompt for us last week and it was: "What opened you up in 2016". I had to think long and hard about it as it was such an eventful year, in both a good and a bad sense. Going to New York and the arrival of Flora were definite highlights, while losing Rueben and all the political turmoil both here and abroad had a deep effect on me as far as opening up was concerned.

I choose though to concentrate on the good. I didn't want you all to read my words about it all so I wrote and kept on writing on top of the previous writing there on the right hand page until the writing became more of a pattern than readable words. On the left hand page I added the following quotation: "And one day her heart just opened up and she knew exactly everything she was searching for had always been inside". (Jane Lee Logan)

I started the spread by glueing on pages from Cassell's Technical Educator, a vintage book dating back to the 1890s. It has wonderful technical drawings and I made sure you can still see them peeking through.

 Techniques used: collage, rubber stamping, stencilling.

Materials used: collage (with vintage pages, magazine image and postage stamps). rubber stamps (with a barcode stamp of unknown provenance, and with stamps designed by Everything Art for PaperArtsy set. EEA04). I also used the TCW2024 Rubber Bands Frags stencil by The Crafters' Workshop. Rub-ons from 7Gypsies were added too. I also used mainly Golden Fluid Acrylics on these pages with the addition of pink pearlescent acrylic ink.