Diving into my art journal

I've been doing lots of stitching lately, and missing the art journaling side of me... and it seems when I concentrate on paper arts, I miss the stitching! I need to make time to do both :-)
I did 2 things to get myself back into the art journaling groove. First was a re-organisation of my collage elements

- I took the advice of Barbara Hagerty and now have piles of collage images arranged by size. Along the way I had a good purge of images that no longer make me feel excited, and I couldn't wait to get started with what I had re-discovered.
I also decided to take another online class with Kelly Kilmer - previously I've taken A Prompt A Day and A Life made by Hand with her. This time I'm doing The Journey Within : A Guide to Unlocking your Creativity. I love Kelly's blog - she posts daily and her art journal pages speak to me. She is a great advocate of journaling every day, and is always encouraging. Here's a quote from one of her posts : "the more you play, practice and experiment, the more you learn and evolve. Your pages will grow and change as you do. You won't love every page and that's okay. It's all a part of the process. Don't waste time beating yourself up over pages you don't love. Push yourself until you can't go any farther, then turn the page. You have a whole book to fill!"
I signed up for her class on the weekend, read the class material, and that was enough to get myself over my 'block' about 2 pages in my FTB journal.

I like the interplay of black & white on the above page which is part of the "Anna Karenina" movie if you've seen it. LOVE chandeliers and butterflies so happy to have included both.
I hadn't been able to start the below page for the longest time - the base page had the flower faces which I wanted to include but wasn't sure how. Decided that I would just start laying down some paper, and then found the image of the paint covered baby in my newly-sorted pile of images. That inspired me to add some colouring with inktense pencils and a neocolor crayon.

And after that the page just came together.

They're not the best pages I've ever made, but now they're done and I can move onto the next spread knowing I've beaten the blocks.
Will show you more as I actually get to work on the lessons! Finished something else on the weekend

...full reveal on Friday

Mystery solved

I've been doing Susan Claire's latest Mystery Quilt - over 6 months she's been posting instructions free for that month, and August is the last month. Last time I showed you what we had from the first 5 parts

August was the 6th part and final piecing instructions. Here's the completed top without borders

...for me this is the top "so far". I feel like the gaps need something....probably some sort of applique. So I've added some plain borders and am thinking about some ideas

Go HERE to see Susan Claire's video blog post about this final part. Her completed quilt looks like this

I wanted to show you how completely different the same pattern looks in a different colourway!

More Pieces for the Indian Wall-hanging

Last time you saw a full view of my progress the wall-hanging looked like this.

Although I didn't start my wall-hanging until this year, I was thinking about doing an indian-inspired piece back in May 2012. In this post I showed some modelling paste experiments. At the end of that day I had some pieces which I have since transformed. This was the modelling paste through a stencil onto sheet music

I first painted the page with green metallic paint, then gold, and cut it into circles.

They've become the base for pile of punched paper, sequins and beads.

On that original playday, we also added paper castings to a treated Pelmet Vilene background

More recently I added some more gold metallic rubbing to highlight the shape and then stitched it to the background with a sari ribbon edging

I pulled out some metal embellishments the other day

I coloured the triangle shapes with alcohol inks - they look really cool if you click on the photo below to see the detail.

And you may recognise the butterflies from a purchase in Taupo

Hopefully next time I post about this project it will be to show it finished...As you can see there are only a couple of gaps left to fill!

Hope you get some creative time this weekend