Romeo, Romeo

Yesterday we had a visit from the sweetest little puppy. Romeo is his name and he's a Pugalier. A Pug crossed with a Cavalier. So sweet it almost made me want to go out and get one. But then my sanity prevailed and I started thinking about vet bills, heart worm, flea stuff, walkies and picking up doggy do and dug up gardens and I quickly changed my mind. He can just come and visit me every so often.

Carmen and Brighita..............eat your hearts out!

Book Making Experiment

I was in Art Shed in the other day and picked up this really great book called Painted Paper by Alisa Golden. All kinds of beauftiful things in it with lots of fairly easy to follow instructions, so I decided to have a go at making a book. It's about 10.5 cm by 15 cm and I have painted all the pages using Panpastels and FW acrylic artist inks and Daler Rowney Pearlescent liquid acrylics. Love those paints. On the cover is a small picture behind a microscope slide bound with copper tape. It was supposed to go on an ATC but I never got around to attaching it so decided it would look good on the cover. I also bound a chipboard frame with Silk ribbons that I bought from Vivian and glued that to the cover as well. I tried some of the techniques from the book on the inner pages hoping they would look as good as Alisa's, but alas, it's a bit like cooking really, it never looks like the recipe in the cook book.

I didn't have any linen thread to bind the book with so just used some embroidary thread. The photos don't really show the colours to the best advantage but for all you Journal Junkies I'll bring it with me next week so you can have a look.

I seriously need some photography lessons !.

Op Shop Treasures

I was out cruisin' the Op shops a couple of weeks ago and came across these photo stands. Two about 15 cm high and one about 25cm. I looked at them for a while and thought naaah! bit too glitzy, bit too ornate, bit too GOLD, so I wandered off down the other aisles to see what other treasures there were for me to buy. But I kept going back to these stands. Then I had an "arty" brain explosion and the possibilities for transforming these glitzy stands started up. They only cost a few dollars so I thought what the heck, if my ideas don't turn out then not huge waste.

So here is the stand after it's transformation. I painted it with black gesso and then highlited all the raised parts with silver Rubb & Buff, looks so much better now I think than it did before.

I had a workshop last Saturday with the very talented Kelsey and we painted a small canvas and then made 9 "inchies" which were then attached to the canvas. The inchies were decorated with paint, various images and bits and bobs and my re-vamped photo stand is the perfect size to display my inchie canvas on. What do you think?