An Artful Weekend

This weekend was the perfect balance between me being my usual hermit self, spending hours alone making some creative messes, and getting out to a) breathe some fresh and much warmer air and b) spend a few hours with two of my dearest friends in art.

Saturday was hermit day, and I worked on another Journal of Dreams....Sarah's, which arrived on Thursday after making several stops in North America after leaving home in Australia.

As usual with me, I sat down not knowing where I was headed, but looked around at what was on my work table.  I made good use of my new Tim Holtz stamps and some of the new distress ink colors.

 

I start out with a collage of many papers, some music, some text, some leftovers from other projects.  I bring them all together as a background with color.  This time some oil pastels and distress inks in blues and greens.

Then stamping, more color, more stamping, and the addition of the Eiffel Tower....cut from a die on grungeboard,  and embellished with KAT's awesome drunken scotch technique, which I also used on the real key sitting atop the tower (more about drunken scotch later).

We're only doing one page in this journal group, so I did minimal work on the back:

More Tim Holtz stamps, and I used the grungeboard from which I cut the Eiffel Tower as a stencil to make the tower shadows on the right.

Sunday was my day to share art with friends.  Once a month I get together with whoever is available, usually Heidi and Pat, and we each bring a project or two to share with the others, and all the supplies needed for them to make their own.  

I brought this card:

And I showed Heidi and Pat how to do KAT's fabulous drunken scotch technique.   These keys are grungeboard, but don't they look like real rusted metal?   Thanks, KAT!

These are the cards I made from Heidi's designs:

  

Pat, also sometimes known as the Queen of Tools or the Guru of Gadgets, is not only a wonderful artist, but a woman with a wicked sense of humor.  She claims she bought the Stampin' Up chocolate bunny stamp with the thought in mind of creating this card:

When we were finished laughing, we tried our hands at decorating some actual eggs that Pat brought (empty and cleaned out, of course) with paint, ink, rubons, etc.  I have not finished mine, but wanted to show you the cute little holders Pat fashioned for us out of pieces of toilet paper rolls.

Pretty good weekend, huh?