Tempus Fugit

Sheesh, and I'm not even having that much fun!

My lovelies, please forgive the lack of posts lately. As you may know, I am the primary caregiver for my elderly mother aka Nana or The Little Troublemaker. One morning last week, I came out of my room to discover that sometime between when the Sports Fan left for work and I got up, she had gotten up and somehow managed to fall. She was conscious but said she didn't feel well. So I called 911 and we were off to the hospital where they kept her far longer than I expected, not only throwing that day into chaos but all the ones after that. She's home now and in the kitchen up to no good as I type. She now has a walker that she's using to terrorize the Golden goofy boys. (She nudges Cody with it to make him move out of her way.) I did manage to get a couple of days of relative rest while she was there, so that's good. And she doesn't call me the Wicked Witch of the West, which is what she said she dreamed she called the night nurse. The night nurse said it really happened! They had to have someone sit in her room to keep an eye on her every minute to make sure she didn't get into trouble. Whew! It isn't just me who thinks she needs to be watched like a hawk!

What's bad is that I started cleaning my art space. Oy! I've been cleaning and cleaning and organizing for a week and I'm still not done. The stuff piled up on the top of the work table is no longer way above my head when I am seated in my chair, but I was sidetracked into digging out the under table area yesterday. I've found some good stuff. And I'd show photos if I could dig out the camera from where I left it on the work table!

So I'll share some photos of stuff I did before the cleaning started.

As you know, Michelle Ward is urging her Street Team peeps to stretch their wings creatively and here are more of the recent challenges. I decided to use some of them in a Calendar Journal I was working on as part of the CalendarGirlz Round Robin. These are full sized Calendar Journals with a page and a facing art page for every week of the month. Another group within the larger group is working on Mini Calendar Journals.

This paper casting was done with TP (yes, toilet paper!) dampened and brushed randomly with watered down Perfect Paper Adhesive (PPA, my favorite adhesive) to hold the layers together after drying. I think it's three layers. After the casting dried, I spray painted it with Merlot Glimmer Mists. The stamp used is a Tim Holtz lion rampant from his collection for Stampers Anonymous. I inked the stamp with black ink before I put the paper on it. It really doesn't show up well in this photo and I didn't take another. :( The background is pink acrylic over gesso and the green on the left is deli wrap that I used to catch the excess when I painted something else. I'm sure that the paints on that are Outside the Margins' Color Mist spray paints. I love clear stamps, especially alphabets, so that's what I used for the lettering. This set of mis-matched upper case letters is Scratchy Alphabet by Magenta.

You can tell that I like the lime Adirondack Acrylic Dauber, right? Yep, I like lots of those colors which is probably why I buy and use them when I could easily mix the paint myself. Sheesh, I am a spoiled art girl! Tooooooo lazy to mix some paint! I used one of my favorite stamps, the Marquette Bible stamp negative from Ma Vinci's Reliquary to stamp black ink on some plain ol' white paper twice. I cut it out and glued it to a CJ page I edged in lime paint.

Then I used a stencil I cut with my new electric stencil cutter from an old inkjet transparency. I made sure that the dauber was really juicy so that this 11 has lots of texture. By the way, the transparencies are not the best choice for use with the stencil cutter as they are either a bit thick or a bit too heat resistant and it takes a lot more effort than it should to cut through. The result is not exactly the straight lines I was looking for, but in this case I liked the result. Not so appreciated in other stencils I tried cutting. I made the text to cut out with my computer on Corel Draw so I could size the text any way I wanted.

Another lime acrylic over gesso page. Another rubber stamp I love. This one is by Christine Adolph for Somerset Studios and is one of four stamps on a sort of squared off rolling pin. I turned it upside down and stamped again, eyeballing the lineup to make the stem really long and cover the entire length of the page. I put five more of the flower heads along the bottom. I'm learning to appreciate that they slope a little!

I really have been enjoying using the Sharpie poster paint pens for everything, though I mainly use them for journaling. The page truly was very elegant-looking until I started writing on it! I didn't notice that I hadn't filled in the M until after I started writing below it, then decided that I liked it that way. I wish I would be less caught up in thoughts of writing and would pay more attention to keeping what I write in better order. My writing runs uphill too much for my liking and I do wish that I could mind the margins better.

So there's a bit of what I did in May in Lizbeth's CJ.