CHILDREN'S SONG BOOK

Although I've altered other types of books, I had not yet taken a shot at a children's board book. This is my first attempt, and it turned out to be a children's song book. I found some great vintage children's book photos and put a picture on the left and a song on the right for each 2-page spread. Below are photos of the inside and back. I was really proud of this one. The photos are a bit dark, but I think you can see them enough to get the idea.













The color around the edges is a metallic gold, almost like a liquid gold leafing. I did that on every page of the book. It reminded me of those miniature "Golden Books".

EASTER FROM SWEDEN

I had the best day today, and to top it off, I get home and there is a package in the mail from Sweden. I immediately realized it had to be from Elisabeth of Lev Livet Leende (http://levaleende.blogg.se/ because I'm not familiar with anyone else in Sweden), from the Easter Bunny's Chicks' Easter Swap (see link on left panel), and it was. She sent me the most beautiful wall hanger, made from cloth with a satiny ribbon adorning the top of it, and the word "Amour" written across sheet music and ironed onto the fabric. It's just gorgeous. AND inside was a package of marshmallowy goodness: pink, white and yellow chicks, bunnies and birds, that taste like those giant, orange marshmallows shaped like peanuts. They are SOOOO good. I am going to hang this beautiful piece on my wall next to my bed with my favorite potpourri inside. Thank you Elisabeth. You have much talent and exquisite taste.

HANGING UP SPRING TIME SWAP ITEMS

Woo hoo. I just got home and opened the mailbox and my swap items from Sarah's (at GypsyMermaidLife) Hanging Up Springtime Swap were there. I was SO stoked.

Look how adorable. The clothesline is such a pretty piece of ribbon with these cute miniature clothes pins in varied pastel spring colors. I hung it right up on my wall.

Sarah put a slip in our packages that listed who created which item. Mine were as follows, from left to right: The gorgeous gloves with the piece of ribbon linking them together were made by Lori at Flickr:goodygoodygumdrops, and the beautiful hat covered in lace was made by Trish at mydistressingjourney.blogpot.com/.

The sweet butterfly was made by Rhonda at rhondamum.blogspot.com/, and the awesome bloomers were made by Dawn at artistreborne.typepad.com/:

Look how cute the bird is, with its large tail plume. It was made by Nerissa at creativerantsfromnerissa.blogspot.com/, and the gorgeous dress with its delicate lace and ribbon, was made by Priscilla at asweetremembrance.blogspot.com/. Many thanks to Sarah at Gypsy Mermaid Life for hosting this fun swap and to the unique talents of everyone who participated. This was so much fun.

BOLD AND FREE SCAVENGER HUNT

I just finished participating in the Bold and Free Scavenger Hunt located at http://janparrish.blogspot.com/(or click on the title above). This was really fun and a chance to get to know some awesome bloggers. Check it out, but hurry, it ends on March 30th.

SPRING COLOR

I found the most beautiful flowers in my garden yesterday so I just had to post them. Thank you God for the beauty of Spring!!!!!
(Oh, and my tree is budding - woo hoo!)

INTERACTIVE WALL ART - ALTERED BOOK

My second altered book is finally finished. I've been working on it for approximately 2 months, but that's because I only picked it up about three times since before last week. I think I was looking at it and pondering about what I wanted to do with it, and this is what it turned out to be. It's interactive wall art. I have many old hard-cover books that I got for free from the library's free bin. It took me two days to finish just the front cover (love that gel medium). I think the pictures kind of captured how shiny it turned out. I put about 4 coats of lacquer on it. I love shiny. On the spine, I put the new title of my book - I call it "Swing", and you'll see why in a minute. As you open the book there is a torn page in between the cover and the next page:


The view as you open the book reveals that is was all glued together in the middle, carved out and used as a shadow box. As you can see from my post of February 17, 2008, I love making shadow box art. Voila - the final product: I found some chain in my metal box and different hooks and links. I glued a piece of driftwood up at the top of the piece and attached the chain on either side of the top driftwood and also to a small piece of driftwood for the swing seat.
Attached to the seat is a picture of my son. I had to bend him a bit to get him to sit right and then I glued his hands to the chains. I added some more wood and some rocks to the bottom to blend in with the scenery. He swings from front to back and side to side, quite freely. I forgot to take a picture of the back, but to hang the picture on the wall, I anchored a piece of hemp across the back with two wood screws. When I hung the book on the wall, I noticed that the front cover swayed open just a bit too far, so I rigged a hook out of a couple of jump rings and the ear piece of a hanging earring. It's just light enough to allow people to open it and keep it from falling off the wall. I'm so proud of this one. It was truly a labor of love. This is my first piece of interactive art hanging in my home, and now that I see it on the wall, the first of many to come.

COASTER TILES

I found the coolest leaf stamp at Big Lots the other day, for only $.60, and it's huge. It barely fit on these 4x4 ceramic tiles, which I turned into coasters. I will be adding felt to the bottoms of each tile for furniture protection soon. As you may or may not know, ink of any kind does not stick well to any type of ceramic surface, so I first treated each tile with gel medium and then stamped the image over that. I used black acrylic paint around the leaf. I then (so far) sprayed about 8 coats of clear lacquer over each tile. I'm still adding coats of lacquer to see just how tough I can get them, surface wise. This was a really fun and inexpensive project.

EASTER BUNNY'S CHICKS' EASTER SWAP

I finally finished my swap items for my two partners for the Easter Bunny's Chicks' Easter Swap. I have to say, I thought they were so cute, I had a hard time mailing them out. I put a LOT of work into them and was very proud of the finished product. I am going to post pictures of them, but not until my swap buddies let me know they have received them. This could be a while as one of them is in Sweden. So, forCRYeye and Lev Livit Leende, please post a comment here when you have recieved your items so I know you have them.

Post edited 03/21/2008 - -- - - --

Okay so tomorrow the items are going to be posted on the Easter Bunny's Chicks' site, so I thought I would go ahead and post the pictures of the items I made for my two swap partners. They are tea light holders that double as candy dishes. I did a vintage decoupage on them and a couple of layers of varnish. One was for Paula at forCRYeye and one for Elisabeth at Lev Livet Leende. Here they are:

I filled each one with chocolate Nestle Crunch
easter eggs, and tea light candles, intermixed. I was so excited that Paula really liked hers (see comment). I haven't yet heard from Elisabeth though.

PHOTO DICE

This idea came to me last week while sitting at my desk at work. I made these dice cubes and put pictures on them, one white and one black. They are 1 x 1 on each side. Tomorrow I will bring them to work and put them on my desk. When I tire of looking at those pictures, I will just roll the dice and whatever combination comes up, that's what I'll look at for another period of time. I might do it daily, just to see the possibilities that happen. Some of ithe pictures are of my son and I together, of him when he was young and of my photography. This was fun. I'm so happy with myself that I'm finally opening up enough to get original ideas (I usually get them from books).

BOSS' BIRTHDAY CARD

My bosses birthday is tomorrow and I had the idea for this "humorous" card. He usually has a great sense of humor, I hope it doesn't change when he reads this. I have a program that allows you to put your pohotographs into different templates. One of my favorites is the Titanic template. The top says he was "Titanic Survivor #112". He is an attorney, so I put a caption by his business sign that reads "He'll help you keep your head above water, too." The inside of the card looks like this:

The picture to the right is another template and it has Dwight D. Eisenhower in the middle and my boss seated to his left. He served in the military for many years. I thought this came out reall cute, so I wanted to share it.

CREATIVE SUNDAY - WOO HOO

I've had the best day today, putting together all of the craft ideas that "craftily" made their way into the front of the creative lobe of my brain all week long - making it very difficult to concentrate on work. The first project I did was a:

SEED PACKET CARRIER

I had this idea because whenever I go out to plant my seeds, either using the potting bench or straight into the ground, I always wind up with seeds packets everywhere and rifling through the piles to find the ones I want. What I did was to take one of those small 4x6 photo albums (holds like 12 pages), and then I painted black enamel paint over the front and back cover. After I embellished the covers with various ephemera, I put the words "Organic Seeds" on the inside cover and added tabs to the sides of some of the pages. I have three categories in this one - Herbs, Fruits and Veggies, and Flowers. I found that I could get about 24 packets of seeds in one of these little books and it not only categorizes them, but also keeps the packets from getting lost or going bad after they've been opened. I now use the resealable packets from Seeds of Change, but the paper packets now have a tight space to live in where they won't come unsealed after I've used them once. The middle of the carrier looks something like this:

So you can see how well everything fits inside. Of course, the more seeds packets you put in the less likely it will close all the way, but that was not even a concern because of the next feature I added ~ a way to carry the carrier:

I added a belt loop hook. It is one of those hooks that open and close in the middle and they are very strong. I found that when I put it on my beltloop on my hip, it was the perfect location:

I can't wait to get out in the garden and try it out. What am I saying? I can't wait to get out into the garden, period!

If any of my gardening friends wants one of these, I can get you one, cheap!!

ACCORDION BOOK

I had so much fun over the weekend making this 4"x5" accordion book. I also discovered the coolest cardboard to use when making front and back covers, because I wanted it to be extremely durable. I had some old 3-ring binders and I took the vinyl off of the back and front covers which revealed a 1/4" thick piece of cardboard on each one. I used a large paper cutter to cut through the thick cardboard. It made super strong covers on my accordion books.



This is the back cover, which I used an Air Mail stamp to write my name and "created by" on, along with the date.

The middle holds accordion pages made from parchment paper, which are glued to the front and back cover. I think this would make a nice "Grandma's Brag Book" for pictures of her grandchildren or even a "Mother's Brag Book."

MEMORY MONDAY - FIRST BOYFRIEND

Well, this is an odd one for sure, but mostly because it makes me remember how naive I was, and because the whole thing was just weird. His name was Charles (Chuck) Snyder. Not only were we in the 5th grade together (this is his yearbook picture for that year), but he also lived a couple of trailers up from us in the trailer park. I remember when I was 11, I was really into my girlfriends and didn't really give a crap about boys, but I had a kind of a "crush" on Chuck. He always wanted to play "grown ups" with me (that should have been my first clue) at the trailer park and when my best friend Julie Spencer wasn't allowed outside, I acquiesced to play with him, for lack of anyone else around. Coincidentally, my friend Julie also lived in the trailer park. Well one day we were at the swings or something like that, and Chuck wanted to play "grown ups." He asked me if I knew what sex was and if I had ever done it before. Now, you have to understand that at this time in my life I was painfully shy and lied about everything just to fit in, so I told him I knew what it was (lie number 1) and that I had done it lots of times (lie number 2). It's true what they say about lies getting you into trouble, because what followed surely would have led me down a path that I could never have escaped, had it continued. Okay, enough digression. He then asked me if I wanted to "do sex" with him. I said, sure, whatever. He told me to meet him in the woods (behind the trailer park) at the fort (a spot by a tree with some rotten old boards). I agreed and went on my merry way. Not having known what sex was, I wasn't worried, I mean, how bad could it be, right? So the next day after school, I go to the fort and meet up with Chuck. He tells me we should kiss first. I didn't think anything about that. I kissed my brother and my parents, nothing weird about that. So I kissed him, you know, a little peck on the lips. He then tried to hug me. I hugged him back because friends can hug, at least I hugged my girlfriends. Then he tells me we have to lay down, so we did. Just as he touched my arm, we hear his mom yelling for him to come home. He made me promise to meet him again tomorrow. I said I would. So the next day, we meet again, but this time there are all kinds of kids hanging out at the fort. I told him we could go under our trailer because we didn't have a trailer skirt and it was fun under there. He agreed. We shimmied under the trailer and we kissed again. He told me you were supposed to take your shirt off for this. I didn't understand why, so I didn't do it. He took his shirt off and it freaked me out. I had a pretty good view of the trailer park from under the trailer and right when Chuck was about to undo his pants, I saw my friend Julie's mom drive up with her in the car. I got so excited I told Chuck I didn't want to play with him anymore, and ran up to Julie's house. I left Chuck in the dirt--literally. After that day, Chuck wasn't very nice to me anymore and he never asked me to play again (the lech).

I love the fact that I can remember this stuff. These Memory Mondays are good exercises in memory strengthening. At my age, I find it hard to just remember my childhood in general, but when I actually stop an think about a particular moment or event like this, I find I can recall so many details. It's really a great idea!!

TRIP TO REID PARK ZOO

We recently made a trip to the Reid Park Zoon in Tucson, and I fell in love with this one Giraffe. I always wanted to have one as a pet, but I just don't have the acreage (or trees). She kept trying to get close to me so I could rub her nose, but they have it fenced so that you can't touch them (of course). Isn't she beautiful? Her eyes are so soulful.