orange!

One of the current MMSA swaps is the color orange. Your postcards have to be predominantly orange, altho they can have bits of other colors on them. 

I made a few collage cards but became disenchanted with them while adding some doodles. Two of them went in the trash, which left me a few short for the swap so I got out the washi tape - something I tend to hoard instead of USE - and made 3 cards.

I paired 4 various orange tapes with a turquoise stripe, birds on a wire, graph paper with math, and gears. It was fun taping up the cards, overlapping and butting tapes to get various effects. I think there's more washi tape cards in my future.


I added the word 'washi' in ransom  letters cut from a magazine, then gave them a coat of Liquitex Gloss Medium and Varnish to make sure the tapes wouldn't peel up.

Added a bit of stitching and called them done. They'll be in the mail to Karen on Tuesday. 

SOC week 2

The colors for week 2 of Summer of Color are orange and hot pink. Perfectly good colors which pack a big punch when used together. I had absolutely nothing to work with in those colors so I got out the gelli plate for this one. I may do something more with them before the next colors come out, but for now, this is it. 

Actually I drew the first image with Neocolor IIs and oil pastels. Vaguely inspired by various Mary Ann Moss blog posts featuring this design. The others are gelli prints using stencils, a comb, large bubble wrap, various circle making things, etc. Each has 3 or 4 pulls on it, enough to be interesting without starting to cover up the first layers.

As usual, I like the one on the telephone book page. It'll become a couple postcards I think. Maybe wake up those postal workers a bit.

On a side note - it's been major windy here for like 3 days now and I'm in such a vile mood because of it. I can totally see how those poor Kansas housewives lost their freaking minds from the ceaseless prairie winds. Unripe fruit is being blown from my trees, my hair looks like crap constantly, everyone's allergies are killing them. We live in a wind tunnel here and I hate it! Calgon, take me away......

(rant over)

now that's orange

Just a quickie today. I was dropping packages at the Fed-X Kinkos place yesterday and as I was pulling out of the lot, these beds of flowers caught my eye. The sun was full on them and they just glowed. I pulled in next to them, hauled out my camera and squatted in the flowers to get some real closeups. These are the best of the lot. Stunning color, isn't it? And I don't even like orange...

two roads

two roads diverged in a yellow wood

and sorry I could not travel both 

and be one traveler, long I stood 

and looked down one as far as I could

to where it bent in the undergrowth

...Robert Frost

There's more and it's one of the first poems I ever memorized, mostly because my mother loved it and passed that love along to me. I suppose most people look back on their lives at various points and think about those roads not taken. It does make you wonder, doesn't it?

She also loved autumn, as do I, and every year around this time, I get nostalgic for the autumns of my childhood. Long hikes in the woods with my cousin and a dog or two, hot chocolate made with milk and Hershey's cocoa, kicking leaves in the gutter walking home from school.

I saw the background picture of the autumn woods when looking thru a magazine for a turkey. An hour later, the turkey was long forgotten and this was finished. Tough to get a good pic with the reflection from the glass. On the left is another woods image, sideways so that the trunks echo the horizontal lines of the words, layered over a thin strip of brown polka dot paper. 

On the right, I used the packing tape transfer method for the words - works like a charm, who knew? Beneath them is several torn layers of the Starbucks bag that my scone came in a couple weeks ago. I crumpled it, lightly rubbed a brown ink pad over it, then darkened the edges a bit.

the road not taken