Flowers Magic FREE class

Grateful for school holidays which are now at an end for me. I've had a good mix of jobs and play, and one of my joys recently has been participating in another free class called Flowers Magic hosted by Francesca Nunes : July 22-August 10. This is a very photo-heavy post so I can capture my discoveries for you and for me to look back on.

You can still sign up HERE.

I gathered some papers

and made my raw journal

Then I added my floral ingredients - it's Winter here in New Zealand so while I managed to find some Camellias and a couple of old rose blooms as I deadheaded them, I also included red cabbage, onion skins, and leafy fruit teas. One learning is that I decided to use some frozen berries. Unfortunately I didn't defrost them! Luckily they were placed at the back of my book but made it very wet and meant that a few of the end pages and back cover tore away. 

I undid the stitching and this is my collection of pages

All is not lost. Once dry, I mended my torn pages by stitching sari ribbon to repair the outer spine 

and glued some organza ribbon to reinforce the inside

I repaired the last pages by gluing extra handmade papers to make the hinge fold (the green handmade paper showing below) and then re-stitched my book. 

Bonus of re-stitching was that I was also able to include some of the fabric in which I'd wrapped the bundle. The wool didn't transfer any colour, but you can see the fabric only had some cleaned off paint to start, and bottom right you can see how it changed. I had sprinkled some rose petals in at the end.

It's most fun to see the before and after photos for the pages - these are my favourites but I must admit I love them all.

The fabric I used in the centre of my book had water-reactive dye on it so some of that transferred to my binding thread and to other pages and is another addition which I love. 

I think if I ever do this again, I will just do loose papers and bind them together at the end. What a joy this is to me. 

Red cabbage on Tracing paper - so delightfully crinkly ♥

You can see what other people are doing HERE on Insta. And you still have time to join HERE and find out how to do this, even if you don't attempt the other art journal lessons.

I can't wait to start working on the pages and adding my own spin to this book with lots of lovely elements, including some of these bits from my dyeing play in Fodder School with Aimee Bishop.

Hope you have a joyful and creative weekend.