I've been sharing a lot of yarny things lately and I thought I might switch it up a bit. These were part of a birthday swap package I sent out a year ago, so it's high time they got their moment in the sun. My partner and I both really like Placebo, so I thought I'd do some playing with GIMP and glue.

This is a large magnet, made from a photo print and glued onto large slabs of magnet (the center of one of those magnetic photo frames actually). The image is the lyrics of one of her favourite songs, and the album cover the song came off. The album art only shows up on the text itself, the spaces are black.

This is a small notebook I made with rainbow paper. The cover just has a picture of the band blowing bubbles, with quotes and little doodles on it. The same image is on the back cover. I left the spine black. I scored it along the inside, on either side of the spine, smeared glue along the inner spine, added the paper and voila. Simple, but effective, and one of a kind notebook.

Yes, Every woman and her dog have made one of these lately, I'm sure decks of cards sold like hotcakes back near Valentine's Day, but nonetheless, I'm sharing mine anyway. Plain deck of cards, a glue stick, and a few hours with GIMP and Google image search is all you need to make this thoughtful gift. I thought it might have been a bit moosy for my undemonstrative DP, but he seemed really touched when I gave it to him on our 9th anniversary morning. He sat down straight away and went through every single card. And he didn't even mind that some were streaky from our misbehaving printer. I won't share every card here with you, but these are some of my favourites.

Just to prove I'm not all about the yarn craft, here is a simple thing we did at Master Four's recent birthday party. I wanted to have something open-ended, that could be dragged out to last a while, and that kids could jump into at any time, as an ice breaker, and also while waiting to see if anyone else was going to turn up (don't you just hate non-RSVPers?) This was fairly simple to set up, and mostly done before time too.

I cut out circles of cardboard, edged them with silver duct tape. That's it. Oh, well, I also cut out handle sized strips of cardboard, and taped along the longs sides of each, so they would be smooth for four year old hands to hold. Then I furnished the room of children with crayons and pencils, and let them draw their emblems on the blank side. (The one pictured above is Miss Six's Toothless shield, isn't she a great artist for a little kid?)
Then I taped a handle to the back. That way the young'uns could draw freely without their shields wobbling all over the place. Best part - it was all free, from the giant crayon collection my three kids have, to the cardboard from the sides of nappy boxes, to the duct tape I already had. And boy, did the kids love them!

I'd seen this on Pinterest, and thought they would make the perfect Mother's Day activity. I photocopied my hand and then wrote the text by hand in purple metallic texta. One is scanned because we couldn't get the photocopier to work at first, but I like the black and white photocopies better.

The text says
"Need a pat on the back?
Stand here ---->
Happy Mothers Day!"

I put about 8 of them up around my kids school, and I noticed at least one teacher smiling at the sight of them, and trying one out.

Have a pat on the back mums, and know your hard work is noticed and appreciated, even if it's by total strangers on the internet in Australia.

A long ago craft, from one of my first swaps. I took 6 stills from the movie Dracula, edited them to allow for the the gaps between squares, and printed them out on photo paper. Then I painstakingly cut them out, and superglued them to an old Rubik's Cube that had had all it's stickers removed. I was quite proud of this piece actually, though I can't remember what my partner thought of it.

Finally, we add colour to our neighbourhood. Now it all comes together. What do you think of my finished spread? The sky feels a little empty still, and it needs more depth, it's got a very flat cartoony look to it that I'm not entirely sure I like, but I'm not sure what it needs, so I'm calling it done for now, and I'll come back to it in a few days/weeks and see what I think with a bit of curing time.

This week we had to collage over parts of our neighbourhood picture, and then redraw our outlines over the top. I like this effect. I used a little bit of house from a picture book on horses, and the rest was words from a page of The Hobbit. And before you say anything, the page was already loose, and it was an old, beat-up, broken spined, copy I got from the op shop for 50 cents, specifically for papercrafting.

This weeks task (now that I've finally gotten around to it again!) was to draw our home, make a pocket, and draw our "outside world". It's mostly outlines and simple shapes at this point. More next week.

Yes, I am aware I skipped day 8. Day 8's task was to sand down the tapes page, but since I did a zentangle instead, it wasn't really possible.

Task number nine was to go back to our inchies pages and give them a light colour wash, then embellish with a pen when the wash was dry.

Write 8 words describing your pictures.
Circle one picture
Draw a messy square around four
Draw a dotted line around two
Draw a broken “stitch” line around one

Now I wish I'd stuck to the grid, and either used more pages or less inchies, because it did feel a little overdone/crammed once I'd done all of that. Too many words, and I really don't like the circle amongst all the squares. I really like the broken "stitch" line though, and I'll be using that more often I think!

Today was supposed to be more hidden writing, this lot hidden under as many different tapes as you have in the house. Well all I have is clear, and that kind of defeats the purpose. So while I go shopping for coloured and zany sticky tapes, I'm sharing a zentangle spread I did instead.

Now it was time to trim the images from last week's scavenger hunt down to form inchies, and place them on the prepped background pages. It was supposed to be in a grid layout, but grid seemed too stilted, so I just put them where it felt right.

Today's assignment was to do a colour wash to prep the background and then do a scavenger hunt for some images out of magazines.

I'm really happy with the "A" I got especially - you can see it at the start of Art on the blue pamphlet on top.

Because the soul armor I showed you last week was a two day assignment, technically there is no day 4 page. But I had an idea for a painting come upon me, while driving home one night, looking at how the night seemed to eat up all the lights. So I did this double page spread. It's my first painting in over a decade, and while it's got a few niggly bits that annoy me, I'm still pretty proud of it.

The text says "Sometimes a light in the dark only serve to illustrate the depths of the blackness"

This week was all about our soul armour. What does our creative spirit need to protect us from outside and inner criticism? Sarah encouraged us to write a list of words that nourish our artistic temperment, and then use them to embellish a drawing/painting/print-out of a suit of armour which would become our soul armour.

Here is mine:

Once again I've overdosed on the shiny, but around the armour, and on it in some places, I've written in gold: unconditional acceptance, permission to be messy/silly/"wrong", belief, memory of strength, best friend, motivation, guilt eraser, self worth, courage.
I couldn't find a picture of armour that "fit" me, so I drew my own based on a few different pictures I found, and what I thought it should look like :)

So the full page spread is now:

So day two's next step was to cover all that writing up with gesso. I don't have any gesso, so I used watered down white paint, which was a pain because it took a few coats to get any coverage. I went ahead and did white over all four pages of writing since I skipped ahead and saw I'd have to do those pages too, so I may as well do it all in one(ish) go. I used purple and gold on my front page, though. I painted over the large dragon in the middle of the page to give it more definition, and gave it a glitter glue "shadow". I'm pretty happy with it.

After the 'gesso' had dried it was time to claim my journal. Specifically, filling the space up with my name and making it quite clear this was my journal. I wrote my name over as many times as it comfortably fit, then decorated the edges. I think I went a little overboard with that step, but it is perfect for this, because I do that, and this step was all about me. (hence the prevalence of rainbows)

I'd love to see your pages, if you'd like to share. Post in the comments your links and I'll visit them all. Fun, isn't it?

I bought myself a tiny little journal in an art shop a while back. I wanted something to put random art inspiration into, drawing, paintings etc. It's an awesome journal - really thick, stiff covers, spiral bound, heavy weight paper (watercolour weight in fact) and only cost me $10. It's also A6, so it fits in my handbag, and not just in the big backpack that doubles as a shopping carrier/handbag/nappy bag.

But I hadn't done anything with it. And that saddened me, because I used to need to haul around a sketch pad/book everywhere. Mind you, I used to get out and do more inspiring stuff back when I was a 19yo living on my own. Still, it remained that these blank pages shamed me.

Then I saw a journal-along at Craftster and thought it looked like just the thing to get me started, so here I go! The prompts and ideas all come from Soul Journaling.com

Day one's prompt was to cover 3 pages with pages from a dictionary, and then write over them starting with the prompt "today i feel..." Luckily I had an old, yellowed dictionary I'd picked up at the op shop to craft with, that only cost me 50c. (It's well out of date and missing lots of words, so I don't feel guilty about destroying it at all). Sarah had started with a double page spread, so I did too, but that left me with a blank spot.

I then went back and filled the "title" page with a freehanded dragon over and over (it's the tattoo I just got).

This is all just prep work, background if you will - next week I'll be covering these pages with a final layer.

I wanted to get into ATC making, so typical me, I jumped straight into the deep end, with July's round of the Ongoing ATC swap on Craftster. All of my sent cards have been received, so I thought I'd share them here with you.

My very first card, the clouds says "Dreams"


A "maps" theme card.

The quote says "I travel not to go anywhere
But to go.
I travel for travel's sake" RL Stevenson

A Pirate themed card


A Poisonous Apple


"This card cannot contain me"

and Scissors


And lastly, a "Farnsworth" card from Syfy's Warehouse 13, that has a door and swappable faces. I raised the back of the card so Artie's face could be swapped with Claudia. The knobs etc are foam shapes and a metal brad.


In the ongoing swap, the card themes are chosen by the recipient, so it was a new challenge to make art to assigned themes. I made a bunch of cards just because once I got into the swing of it, which I will put up in a post soon.