mom in fur and lace

I like this picture of my mother. She has a fur coat on (beaver?) and it's snowing. I suspect it was taken in Dayton OH where she lived after high school, working at a newspaper, and she's maybe 20 years old. Hard to tell and it's not dated.

I've been admiring the wonderful lacy fabric journal pages done by this artist and this one for quite a while now. I have all the stuff to do this - fabric, lace, buttons, old photos - just needed to wait for the right moment to come along, I guess.


This afternoon, after the dog park, after two loads of laundry, after baking gingerbread cupcakes and chocolate chip craisin oatmeal cookies, I finally felt like giving it a go.

I used a page from an old book that I'd painted green, then played around layering tea-dyed fabrics and bits of lace until I liked the look. I stuck each piece down with little dots of Tacky Glue so that the whole thing wouldn't shift around while I was sewing.

The image of my mom was printed onto really thin fabric years ago, literally, and I didn't bother trying to peel the paper off the back, or she would have been too transparent.

The lace that's sewn around her is from a big old ball that I bought probably ten years ago and have used steadily ever since. I never measured how much was in the ball but it had to be twenty yards cause I've been using it forever. And I paid a buck for it. I remember cause it was the day I bought home a big old bag of stuff, none of which I paid more than a dollar for. Don't find deals like that much any more.

Added a few mother of pearl buttons and called it done. It'll be the right side page of a spread in the journal I started for the 4 Artists 4 Ways class, which you can see here, here, and here. It features me, my mother and her mother, and I did multiple spreads using each of the four artists' techniques. This will be the first spread using Lisa's lessons. I'm quite happy with how it turned out and will be doing more of these soon.

I have to admit that while looking thru my laces, at first I had the thought, 'oh, this is too good to use.'

Really??

No, not really. As soon as I thought that, I grabbed the piece and used it. I absolutely refuse to die with all this wonderfulness and have someone pawing thru it at a yard sale going, 'I wonder why in the hell she didn't use this stuff when she had the chance?'

4A4W lesson 3 - weight

The background for this one is a page from an old copy of Treasure Island. It's brown and brittle and perfect for collaging, and I paid a quarter for it at the thrift shop out at the edge of town. They have an entire wall of books - all $0.25 each. I staggered out to the car with an entire box of them a few months ago and they'll keep me going for ages - all for around $9.

I put a piece of torn paper across the top to get my green fix in. Another book strip down the right side to fill in where the first page wasn't quite long enough. The wrinkly bit on top is the tightly twisted paper handle from a gift bag. I had to work at untwisting it, but there were 3 different types of paper in there, different shades of tan, and I love them as accents. You really can't throw ANYTHING away once you start collaging...

Another mom image, this time on an old car. I tried positioning it here and there, but the cut-off right edge and bottom just looked weird, so I put it in the corner and worked from there. It was taken around 1925-26, I'd guess. She looks about 3 there, no?

The address book page is the real McCoy, from Theresa's little leather booklet. I just grabbed a page randomly, turned out to be the Rs. The fine fountain pen script is so appealing, all the more so because my own handwriting is so poor. It was just lost on the book page, color-wise, so I matted it, per Mary's technique, on part of a wine label we collected in Napa years ago. Just the right green to give it some weight.

The green car is obviously a new piece, and too white around the edges, so I colored it first by wiping some blending chalk over it.

This spread will get beefed up with some journaling. Meanwhile, it has a vintagey feel to me.

4A4W lesson 2 - color and pattern

For this one I used another image of my mother. She's maybe 4 years old and obviously has to go potty. The high strappy shoes are very cool but she's still got that hair cut. Not sure why her mother didn't let it grow long since pictures of her sisters all show long hair.

For the background I used a piece in pinks and browns with a big lacy flower - maybe a gone-to-seed dandelion or something. Used three narrow torn strips of other papers on the left edge to lessen the weighty impact of the dark photo and to give it some interest. I cut the image into 3 pieces and staggered their placement when I glued them down.

The card on the left obviously has my name on it, not my mother's, but the colors and feel were perfect and I'll either paint over it later or just leave it. Added a couple thin strips of sparkly paper and a ticket to get a bit more color and pattern on the page.

I like this spread a lot. The colors are mostly what grabs me, I think.

4 Artists 4 Ways - glue book class 1 work

A few weeks ago I signed up for a neat class - Artful Pages, 4 Artists 4 Ways - which started yesterday. Four journaling artists with different styles of work got together and offered a class consisting of 3 lessons per week  from each person.

I'm using a small journal, about 5" x 7", so my spreads are 9" wide by not quite 7" tall. A good size for me, not too big nor too small, and I'm gluing together every two pages to give each spread some heft. I'll be using images of my mother and her mother, scanned and printed in various sizes and with occasional Photoshop treatments. (one note about gluing pages together - I had a terrible time with this in a previous attempt - wrinkles all over the place, warping, etc. Since then I bought a rubber brayer and brayer the hell out of stuff after I glue it down. Works great.)

First up is Mary of Green Paper and her glue books. The concept couldn't be simpler - glue and paper. But you still must consider layout, balance of components, color scheme, etc, so she covered the basics in the first lesson and off I went.

In considering how I wanted to handle 4 different types of journaling, I decided to do one glue page spread, then leave spreads for the next 3 teachers, then do another glue page, etc, throughout the journal, so that I'll have a mix of styles all the way thru. I'm also going to mix the teachers on any given page, so that I'll be doing some writing on some of the glue book pages, for example, so that this will end up being a mixed media journal from beginning to end.

For the first one, I used a black and white background, which ended up being sort of a harsh choice, so I covered most of it with other elements. Now I actually like the softer images against the graphic b/w. Some of the papers are from classes Mary's given in the past, so they'll look familiar to some people. This page is mostly greens of various hues. Even the old notebook page on the left is greenish in real life. I'll be writing on it during Hope's week of the class. The image is my maternal grandmother Teresa, dead at 36 from breast cancer.


The second spread is my mother at about a year old. She's sitting in an ornately carved chair with her goofy bowl haircut and her pudgy little legs sticking straight out. I used an old piece of sheet music for the background. I scored a good pile of it during a visit to San Diego in January. I framed the photo with a couple different sheets of fancy paper and filled in here and there with various items from the rest of the sheet music. 'The Little Damozel' was the name of the music and it fit a little girl, so I used it, plus a couple other bits. This spread is quite heavy on the right, but I'll do some painting or something later, maybe during Lenna's week of class, to balance it out.

All in all, I'm pleased with my work from the first class. Now if I can just keep up cause the next class posts on Wednesday, then Friday, and then the following Sunday the next teacher starts, etc.