LB2016 : With praise for the present

I ♥♥♥♥ stencils HUGELY. They appear often in my work, so when I saw the lesson by Mary Beth Shaw (a la Stencil Girl) in Life Book 2016 I couldn't wait to get started. Mary Beth shared a lot of techniques and focused on 2 meanings of present : "being present in this moment" and "this gift that is life". She talked about not rushing the process, but enjoying the steps and being "in the creative zone". I love being there :-) This was our background : click on the photo to see it larger

It was really fun to find words I liked in the random text background. I gathered some lovely stencils

then started layering stencil patterns with colour - tried to go a bit different with my colour choices this time, but not loving it at this stage. I don't like brown....

Feel a bit better once I create some drippage with some brighter "me" colours

I need more colour contrast, so moved to adding a word with large stencilled letters as Mary Beth had demonstrated

Quite like this, but I know I need to create some more focal interest, and decide that since I'm in my daily journal I'm just going to work with the left side now to complete the project, and use the right for daily journaling. 

I chose this page because there's quite a lot of variety and interest here already, and I decide that a lovely serviette is my answer for my focal

Used a white pen to further define the seed heads once top layer of torn serviette glued down

and this page is now complete

Click on the photo to see it larger, or go HERE to see it in my Flickr album of all my Life Book 2016 projects. You can see all my posts about Life Book this year HERE.
And here's how it all looked when I added my daily jouranling for this past week : 

After being really unsure about the spread when I layered my first colours, I really like how this ended up. You can see my Flickr album with all my daily journaling spreads HERE.
As a wee aside, my mother-in-law loves garage sales and markets, and found these 2 books for me over a couple of visits. They were published in 1989 and 1992.

They are designs for quilting and applique, and although the covers are dated, the patterns are still beautiful

Fantails are my favourite New Zealand bird

Looking at these patterns today, I think they would make wonderful stencil designs

Go check out your old quilting books with new eyes...Hope the sun's been shining and you've had a lovely creative weekend.