A Tea Party

I was recently invited to join a Moley swap.  This would be my first swap of this kind. The moley we are using in this swap is an according style Moleskin journal and are 3.5 x 5.5.  My group has eight participating artists including myself.  Each one of us picked their own personal theme and each of the eight artist will add a layout featuring that theme.  The interpretation of that theme is left up to the artist with some guidance from the owner of the Moley.  My theme is Tea Party.  I picked this theme because I love my tea.  But more importantly, during the recent Hurricane Irene, we lost all power and because of that all our appliances including the stove.  My husband knowing how much I love tea stood outside on the porch and made me my cup of tea on the grill.  Just loved that! My guidelines were hopefully simple in that I didn't care who was having the tea party including aliens or animals, just that it not be an inanimate object like dolls and bears.  I've seen so many of those, that I just didn't want them included in my journal.  Before my journal went on its journey, I decorated the cover, the inside cover and the first three pages of the according pages.  Here's to the start of my moley's journey!

Thanh's Destash Challenge

Thanh is doing a great monthly challenge.  She's destashing her craft room and every month she'll be sending out a kit to four people. I received this kit from her which was in pinks, greens and browns.  When I first saw this kit, the flowers on the brown background paper reminded of dragonfly wings and the big brown circles on the green paper reminded me of the centers of sunflowers.  I created these two cards during Hurricane Irene in a power outage with the light of a lantern.  It was a surreal kind of night with the thunder and the crashing of the trees, and the wind blowing.  My cards definitely reflect my out of this world kind of mood!  For the floral card, I cut sections out of the striped paper and used it as grass.  It was such a fun looking grass that I added pink prima flowers and punched out the brown circles to use for the center.  For the leaves, I used the green ribbon, but the reverse of the printed side.  The texture was perfect for the leaves.  I punched out the little flowers from the argyle print.  The print shows up more like line patterns on the flowers.  The butterfly is from the striped paper and the big flower is from the pink polka dot paper.  I really thought it came out pretty fun, but the dragonfly is my favorite.  I cut the petals off the flowers and used them as wings.  Punched circles from the brown part of the paper and used it for its body. The background paper is the one with the large brown circles, but it looked bare to me.  So I added orange flowers on each dot and added the green ribbon.  I used all the stuff, except for the pink ribbon.  Thanh thanks for a really fun challenge.  Hope you like what I created.

 

Helping Hands for Japan

I know it's been a long time posting.  It took me a while to get myself together and create after the oldest left.  I think I was a bit depressed.  But then the holidays showed up and all was well.  However, on January 1st, I messed up my knee and between the meds, the doctor visits and therapy, it has been a bit draining.  I have been creating some though and I'll update my blog here very soon.

One of the artworks I did do was this hand.  Robbygirl on Atcsforall has organized a silent auction to help the people of Japan.  She asked for donations of "helping hands".  We used our own hand as a template and then decorated the front and back.  The front of the hand I did has an Indian woman's image and the words on the fingers say
Little Finger: Faith
Ring Finger: Love
Middle Finger: Strength
Index Finger: Peace
Thumb:  Happiness
Wrist:  Om (the sound of the universe)

The back of the hand is done in a traditional henna design.

The hands will go up for auction on May 6th from 5-7 Pacific time.  All proceeds will then be donated.  I'm so thrilled and honored to be able to use my art in such a fantastic way.  Here's a link to all the hands.  Mine is #76 on page 5.