A Giant Adventure

I'm so happy to be back this month as Guest Designer for Stencilgirl Products. I made this 9 x 12" page before I left on my trip to New York but of course I had spend a lot of time already peering at maps and images of the city before hand and that was what inspired this spread. Looking at it now I'm amazed how much that grid in the background resonates with the many pictures I took of the skyscrapers when I was there. The quilter in me just loved it all. You can find a full tutorial with step by step instruction on how to make this page here.

The map in the diagonal lines has some personal significance for me and contains places I have been to and I like the intermingling of that very higgledy piggely landscape with the geometric grid lines in the background.

The quotation is by Angelina Jolie and reads: "Any time I feel lost, I pull out a map and stare. I stare until I have reminded myself that life is a giant adventure, so much to do, to see". 
I used the new metallic paints by Finnabair for this page and they have a lovely shine to them. Hopefully you can see a bit of this on the pictures.

And finally guess what we woke up to this morning?! It looks lovely but I'm more than ready for this to be over with now, and so are the daffodils who are looking sadly bedraggled. 

The Long Way Home Spread

The latest Documented Life Project 2015 challenge hit a bit too close to home (pun definitely intended!) for complete comfort as far as I was concerned. We are sticking with our travel journalling theme for June. The art challenge however was: home town inspiration and the journalling prompt: There is no place like home. For me and many migrants that raises the question: Where is home?

I was born in the place circled above but my parents moved from there when I was 11. Had they stayed I have the strong suspicion I would still be there although, of course, we will never know that for sure. It took a lot of years and many more moves including several international ones before I came to the realization that we carry our home inside our heart so home is always with us. Wherever we go we have ourselves inside us, we are always at home with us. And it is only when we come to terms with who we are, that we are truly home not just within ourselves but wherever we happen to find ourselves. It helps when you find yourself there with a deeply loved fellow human and two adored canines! I  sometimes find it almost impossible to imagine that once I used to live somewhere else entirely. Home is not a place, it's a state of mind.

My hoarding habit came in very handy this week as I have a large box with images cut or torn from a wide variety of magazines, including several Dutch ones. And this image of the province of The Netherlands in which I was born was one of them together with the Dutch texts and the image of skating people and a windmill (don't be deceived into thinking I love skating. I don't! with a vengeance). The spread was started in the normal way. I used colours that are sort of related to the Documented Life spread I made last week (see it here) but added more brighter colours. I used 3 different stencils from the Stencilgirl Club: one from the Oct. 2014, one from August 2014 and one from February 2015. Then the images and texts were glued on with matte medium and outlined with black and white markers.

The text The Long Way Home was inspired by one of the Inspector Gamache novels by Louise Penny. I recently made a quilt too with the same name.

The hunt was then on for suitable postage stamps to add. They had to be Dutch of course, and ideally I would have wanted to find one with the year I left the country but that wasn't to be. I did however find one that represented the province Limburg as you can see above. As shown this province is not just Dutch. There is also a province called Limburg in Belgium. Needless to say there were once one!

So there it is. My tribute to the place I was born, and thanks are owed to The Documented Life Project for briefly transporting me back there.

Upon Unseen Wings

It is so lovely to do another project for Stencilgirl Products as a Guest Designer. You can also find this tutorial on Stencilgirl Talk. This piece has been on the cards since I received the Blueprints of Archeological Treasures stencil. My first thought on seeing it was how well it would work with postage stamps in some of the spaces. And of course, postage stamps themselves have a whole history incased in them and thus are very archeaological material in their own right.

I'm not a traditional stamp collector but I love stamps and buy them by the bagful in a delicious little shop in Edinburgh. I also indulge by buying stamp albums on Ebay. I have many more postage stamps than I'll ever be able to use but I love looking through them and selecting just the right one for any given project. The butterfly ones I'm using here are among my favourites.

Here are the full instructions on how I made this page:

1. Using 9 x 12 hot press 140lb watercolour paper, collage it completely with vintage map pieces using matte medium

2. Scrape on a thin layer of white gesso using an old credit card or a dry brush.

3. Spread thin layers of craft acrylics in your preferred colours over the surface, using your fingers (or a brush, if you prefer) and the credit card.

4. Spray through circular map stencil (from Stencilgirl Club October 2014) with Liquitex spray inks (or any other permanent spray ink). I used pink and green. Remember if you join the Stencilgirl Club now you can still order these back issues!

5. Using L326 Blueprints of Archeological Treasures stencil, tape it securely to the page with masking tape on all 4 sides, and outline all the shapes with a black marker.

6. Fill in the spaces with black (I used a medium point black Sharpie paint pen).

7. With a glue stick glue on 3 butterfly postage stamps.
8. Glue on vintage text, antiquing the edges with Vintage Sepia Versafine ink pad. I like to make poems out of text cut from vintage books. This one reads:

we know not where we are

upon unseen wings

In a dream thou mayst live a lifetime

so soon perisheth its memory

forgotten in the morning

Thy time is not yet come.

9. Outline each shape with white markers and do the same around all the outside edges.

Here are some detailed pictures:

 

 

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