Butterfly cross stitch finished

I'm done with cross stitching butterflies  - I bought some lovely coloured linen and thread on our South Island holiday last year

I wanted to be inspired by this pattern but not create it exactly the same

I aimed for completion in November and worked on it sporadically....last school holidays (April) I was able to share a little more, but my interest was decreasing and I decided that if I was going to get it done, I had to limit my expectations, so I bought a smaller 8"x10" canvas for mounting it.

Now the stitching is finished, but it doesn't make my heart sing

I wondered if I would like it better on the canvas so I attached it

but I don't, even though I like the effect of the wings coming around the edge

So I took it off the canvas again and I'm left looking at this and wondering what next

I still love the colour of the linen and the variegated thread, and I always love butterflies, but I'm not sure where this is going to end up. I suspect that what will make me happiest is to cut out individual butterflies and incorporate them into other mixed media projects....

Do you have any creative ideas for this? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Chilling....

Hello - how are you? We are in Winter here in NZ, and this week at my house we've had white frosty mornings and only making a top temperature averaging 8 degrees celsius (that's around 46 degrees fahrenheit) during our day. 

I don't mind a crisp day like today when the sun is shining, but grey days make me feel blah, and rain means we haven't been able to get out and have holiday outings. 

Have to say though, I love living where I get to have distinct seasons. Winter means snuggling by the fire, having a good excuse to make art or stitch because it's too cold to be in the garden, reading, watching DVDs and appreciating hot coffee and lovely roast vegies for dinner.

This is the shape made by the soot in my fireplace

- honestly not altered in any way ♥

I'd been a bit concerned this week that with the extra time holidays bring, I haven't felt much like creating. Then I thought I'd look back and see how I was feeling in previous years....2014 I returned to blogging 9th July after I thought I'd stopped blogging altogether in May. 2014 was also the year I started my new job so I needed to learn to balance new expectations. 2013 I was at Taupo quilt symposium - which was hugely inspiring, but in June I was grieving for my Grandmother, and reminding myself that downtime is still part of the creative process. 2012 I needed to get to the beach to recharge.
I've now realised that mid-year is my time to rest, absorb inspiration, think, and try and get to the beach for an hour when possible. I'm going to just chill and be kind to myself.

Of course I've been catching up on a few blogs while I'm on holiday. Until I've got some finished art to share (it's still happening, just slowly), here's some online inspiration for you :
Julie Fei-Fan Balzer recently produced a video where she was testing out a new product Exploring Ken Oliver's Color Burst Powders. I'm not recommending the link because you need to see the new product, but rather because of the interesting ways she played and used the powders as watercolours, turned them into sprays (a good reminder) and also how she made them permanent.... applicable to any of your watercolours. This is one of her tag examples - delicious

I follow Roben-Marie Smith's blog, and through her found out about Quirky Dutch Summer. 

Starting June 15th, Marit has 10 weeks of fun detailed tutorials by herself and some guest artists. You can treat it as a free "summer art school" so I've also added it to my list of cheap and free online artful classes that you can always get to on the top of my right side bar. I'm sure there's something there for winter inspiration too ;-) Read the introduction about it here or go HERE to get all her listings about this project - she also did it in 2012.
Today Alisa Burke shared a tutorial about how to make VERY lovely turquoise rings out of rocks

And if you are in New Zealand and visit Gordon Harris in Wellington (highly recommended for fabulous art supplies), you need to know they've moved

Did you know I also have a link to online and NZ sources of where I shop for supplies in the right hand bar of my blog?  Hope your weekend contains whatever you most need....

Week 26 : DLP 2015

Information about the FREE weekly Dcoumented Life Project is HERE. We're half way through the year! Here's our first 6 months of challenges :

and here's what 26 weekly challenges look like in the front of my journal

Each background to the challenge information is a bit of how I started each page.
This week's challenge :

For this week, the quote "A picture is worth a thousand words" made me decide to focus on a photo for each of my daily journal spots. This made the spread set-up quite different from my usual. I started with lovely Dylusions sprays and stencil

I sprayed on the left hand page (stencil still in place here) and then folded the right hand page over and pressed to take the print off the stencil. Here's the spread with the stencil removed and pages dry :

My usual habit is to do the spread, and rule off a daily journaling space on one side. Usually this includes photos on at least some of the days - 

I liked Lorraine Bell's take on this week's challenge. She did image transfers of printed photos onto watercolour paper, and they are the main feature of the spread. Here I am trying out how the space might look if I had 7 photos - one for each day of the week.

Then I realised that there were 4 days left of June, and 3 for July this week, so I rearranged my pieces of paper and added the months and some initial doodles - the challenge is "photos and words" so that fits nicely.

Next challenge - to have a photo a day. Some days it's easy - had coffee with Wendy from Late Start Studio and she gifted me one of her beautiful handmade kete. Feel very blessed with that. Other days I had to be a bit more creative and I decided to capture some of my currrent routine - it will be fun to look back on this in years to come (the basketball practice which we have early Tuesday mornings). I liked the idea of image transfers, but didn't have the time/energy this week for that, so decided to take an easier option which was to print the photos directly onto watercolour paper through my home printer.

I like the texture of the watercolour paper. I tore them apart, dated and wrote on them, then glued them on the page. The sizes and shapes are much less regular than my initial squares and I like that a lot better. This also gave me more room for adding tape and more doodles between

And here is this week's spread all done

Click on the photo to enjoy it larger or see it in the Flickr album I've created for all my Documented Life 2015 spreads HERE. You can see all my posts about this project HERE. Can't wait to see what our new theme for July will be...