Mixed Media Love!

My art life has taken a turn! I'm thoroughly enjoying my mixed media journeys. Here is a start to a colorful and energetic book that I will be teaching. Stay tuned for more........

White upon White upon White

It is a very HOT and WINDY day here in San Diego and it has taken the sweet spring mood away like a bomb! So it's great that I am finished with my Spring swap cards.

The theme for the monthly card and tag swap with A Swap For All Seasons is white for May, and I knew immediately what I wanted to create.  I have been having so much fun making little dresses out of paper, and a wedding dress would be so perfect for the theme! I was assigned Joyce to send my creations to so I was hoping that they would be special. Joyce is the first person that sent me cards in this group and they were so lovely.

Here are the cards that I got from Wendy Wirth:

Linking with Pink Saturday.

Spread Your Wings! Altered Peat Pot

Spring is soooo here in Southern CA. Actually it's almost like summer! It is supposed to be in the 90s this weekend. I am so lucky to live here. I find it so much easier and inspiring to be creative on beautiful sunny days and this week is full of them.

So how perfect is it that the theme for my monthly art club is a birdie altered peat pot. I have been experimenting with tea dying and knew that I wanted to incorporate some of the dyed fabrics, papers and ribbons in to this piece. I covered the peat pot with dyed burlap and lace. I then shredded some tea dyed French text to create the nest. I dipped the bird in a cup of tea, but if I had that to do over again I would paint the tea dye on. The bird took forever to dry and the glues holding him together started to fail. After adding some flowers and the laser cut frame I finished it off with some tea dyed seam binding and adhered a tea dyed doily with chipboard to the bottom of the pot to add some stability.

All this while I listened to the birdie outside my window sing while she was sitting on her eggs in a nest she made in my patio light fixture!

Linking with Pink Saturday.

A Swap for All Seasons March

Where oh where oh where is Spring? Hopefully it is right around the corner. Now I know I shouldn't complain since I live in San Diego but we have had a week of well needed rain and it is just enough to remind us how lucky we are that it is almost always sunny here! I know my Midwest and east coast friends are really ready for Spring. It has been a tough winter for you guys!

Our them this month for the Swap for All Seasons theme is Spring and Yellow.  These are the cards that I sent to Joy. It's always fun to work with Spring colors but I don't typically choose yellow. So I added purple to my combo and loved the way the French Perfume Labels worked in the color scheme.

Art Joy Stuff Vintage Paper ATC Swap

This month I decided to join an ATC swap  hosted by Kimberly of ArtJoyStuff.  She hosts a different theme monthly and this time around it was Vintage Paper. I thought "that sounds pretty easy, I can handle that," and so I joined in.  Well this was NOT easy! The rules were that everything on the ATC had to be vintage. EVERYTHING! I guess I didn't think it would be that big of a deal until I tried to make the card with my limited supply of vintage items.

I had a bunch of pages from an old Mother Goose Nursery Rhyme book and I started with that. Then I found a beautiful piece of flocked metallic vintage wall paper. It still looked so plain! So I went to bed and started again in the morning and came up with millinery flowers and a roll of vintage seam binding. In the end it was fun and challenging to use all vintage materials.

Linking with Pink Saturday.

                  

New Grandma Baby Shower

Last week we hosted a shower for my dear friend Lorraine who is about to be a grandma for the first time. The shower was part of our monthly art group, Paper Soirée, which is held at Paper Tales. The ladies were all excited to shower Lorraine with scrapbook supplies for her new Grandma Brag Book. Each month this group hosts a swap so we continued with this tradition and swapped paper baby shoes. We all made two and traded one and we each gave one to Lorraine.  My girlfriend Pam and I made all of the decorations and my daughter Cassidy helped by folding Origami boats for party favors.  We all had so much fun and Lorraine was so surprised!

A Swap For All Seasons Valentines

This was my first month in a wonderful swap group called A Swap For All Seasons.  I love this group because you can choose to participate each month and you create a card and a tag to send to your partner. This is pretty easy and not overwhelming if I run out of time because I have overcommitted myself (yes, we ALL do this!). The group is managed by a sweet and very organized woman, Linda.

I created this stitched Valentine and tag for Debi:

And I was the lucky recipient of a beautiful package from Joyce. She is so sweet. After visiting my blog she learned that I love Marie Antoinette. She used this as her inspiration to create a card and tag for me. Visit her blog to see the beautiful pieces!

Linking with Pink Saturday.