Finally, what I need – Ladies birthday

Interesting. I had three small envelopes that were the same width but two different heights (as I have them laid out)

and I was pretty sure that the three-cut method would work, to some degree. Please do keep in mind these are not meant to be award winning cards LOL! These are for my stash. For special people, I would be more inclined to take some time making a special card – not always, cause life gets crazy sometimes, but at least I want to have a handmade card handy if I need it.

I also had these tiny cute paper doll-like stickers from ages ago, so I tried to use some of them – I thought colour-wise they worked with the papers

That is the tallest of the cards. The other two were the same size, smaller than this one by an inch or so

So far as stash cards go, these work for me. At this point that is as much as I can expect! Maybe over the weekend I will manage a few more thought-out ones. I did find an old card from a workshop that I want to try to … recreate? be inspired by? Not sure but that one is most def on my list. Then I will have to go back to some pushed-aside projects. Maybe.

Poor poor Poppy had SEVEN teeth pulled! I wonder if the vet wasn’t a bit aggressive in the treatment, but it’s done now and she is slowly recovering (as am I from the stress of it all) and hopefully will be happier for it. Fingers crossed!

Card – can flowers be masculine?

Scheduled this, as we will be taking Poppy to the vet bright and early for her tooth cleaning and perhaps extraction. Poor kitty.

I was mostly messing about with one of maybe two stamp&die sets I have and testing them on some scraps of brown paper bag I had near my desk, I thought the turned out nice so decided to use them on a card base.

I know how not-great I can be with my stamping so the order of assembly really matters. I figure I can stamp the sentiment on the card front and if I mess it up I have a few options for covering it, including covering the entire card front!

But I think it turned out great – the letters are “distressed” so that image is a very crisp impression of the stamp. The dilemma is that this is a blue-striped paper, brown card base, but has flowers on it. My gut tells me this is a card for a man, but…flowers, so maybe not?

I do like it, and to be fair many of the men I would send cards to are not going to think too long and hard about this sort of thing. The colours, the sentiment font, and the brown kraft card base – it certainly isn’t feminine, is it? This is where not-a-natural-cardmaker struggles. I made a card. I think a cute card. But who is it FOR? Not a clue.

Thing is, what I really need is cards for ladies – THAT is what I am seriously short of. In fact, after sorting and tidying, that really is the only thing I am seriously short of. So I think I really need to focus on that for a bit. I may re-visit that trio of cards idea from a few days ago and whip out a set of those. Then I can consider what else I really need.

WOYWW 777

Happy WOYWW to all! If you did not grab the ATC backs I made for the 15th anniversary swap and want to, pop back to last week’s WOYWW and grab them. No, my ATCs (12 made!) do not follow a theme – a lot of people asked, but one has not been announced, and I was anxious to get them sorted, life being as challenging as it is. I have had the design in mind for a long time, and Julia usually suggests a theme but it is never do this or don’t take part but do this theme if you want to. I figure I’m safe.

My desk is in a state again, but only cause I have a ton of my cardmaking stuff scattered all around.

My side desk is quite tidy tho’

I have been experimenting with the coloured carbon paper I have to test out how the type looks on different papers.

The best discovery was white carbon paper on black – the yellow works OK too

Really happy about that discovery! What I am not happy about is that my poor Poppy had her vet visit – she just turned 10, which I guess is when stuff starts going wrong. Turns out she has tooth decay and needs a cleaning and possibly a tooth pulled. Ugh. She was VERY unhappy with her visit, they took blood too, and I am guessing it is going to be quite difficult to get her into that cat carrier again. And I will have to do it for tomorrow – no food after midnight, water taken up in the morning. Not going to be a fun day for sure. Really hoping nothing bad turns up in the blood test, and wish we had thought to get pet insurance at any point last year. Inexperienced cat owners for sure. She may never forgive me – just look at that face! Best news is all her bloods came back just fine, nothing of concern, so we sorted pet insurance for the future. No help for dental, but hey ho….

Not feeling up to knitting today, and a ton of phone calls to make and stuff to sort, so expect me early and then depending on the vet visit, perhaps not again till Friday! But happy WOYWW.

Making Cards – warming up

I have been saying I really need to make a stash of cards, and I decided to “warm up” a bit by trying a technique I saw … somewhere, for making a trio of cards kinda all at once. Now, these are more men’s cards in style, as well as colour, but that’s OK with me. One thing I set aside when sorting was a stash of envelopes that have no pre-made cards with them. These are either very old or odd sizes, or the dregs of a cardmaking pack where maybe I medded up a card, or whatever.

For the technique, you simply stack the three paper or cardstock choices, and slice them into three sections. That part is at your own discretion, so the angles can vary.I am coming down to the last few paper in this paper pack, so am keen to kill it!

Then you just shuffle the colours between the three cards and stick them down.

Trim the edges and done. I added some scrap from the envelope I stored the paper pad in to add a little something to ground the sentiments. For all three I went to my stash of sentiments and picked out two of these long generic die cuts

and I figure these will be hand because I can add any specific occasion sentiment to the front or the inside as needed. Handy!

The last one became an actual birthday card

I expect I will make more of these, because it was just a fast (and cute) way to make a few cards quickly. AND I paired three otherwise wasted envelopes to cards. Big win.

AJ – Page 23 and the re-cap

First, the page. This is page 23, but side 28, accounting for double page spreads.

Transitions journal, and as I have said, the backgrounds of the pages are so nicely decorated already, most of them need very little. I feel like this is the perfect journal to work in when you either have very little time, or are not feeling super inspired, but still want to be creative. In some ways I feel like the Recipe Card journal is a bit like that, as the pages are really almost complete, needing just a topper, some text and tying it all together. Anyway, I am still using the Teesha collage sheets

and I found the perfect images, colourwise.

All she needed was a bit of ink-dusting to get rid of that white paper core and then a few mark-making stamps just to add a bit more to the page. I love the small stamps that come with larger sets for this sort of stamping

And done!

OK, I have had a look back and collected the info on the pages I’ve made since 18th March 2024, when I began this idea of working in my four partially filled journals.

Since then I have gone back and forth between counting PAGES (which includes two-page spreads and one page) and SIDES. I guess the number of pages is true, but the empty pages left could be a single page or a double, and no one (including me!) knows which until I am done. Confusing. So maybe in the interest of being consistent I should count sides, finished and not finished. It feels more accurate. That explains how I have more sides than “pages.”

1. The Paper Bag Journal is now complete, with 36 sides, five completed for this challenge.
2. Life Book Journal has 19 completed sides with five sides completed for this challenge and 12 sides left.
3. Doodle Journal has 16 completed sides, with six sides completed for this challenge and 15 sides left.
4. Health Journal has 16 completed sides, with six sides completed for this challenge and 12 sides left.
5. Transitions has 38 (!) completed sides, six sides completed for this challenge, with 25 (!) sides left.

That is 125 completed sides, with 65 sides to complete. If I were to carry on, creating a page each weekday, it will take me 13 more weeks to fill all four journals (assuming I am making only single side pages, which is unlikely. I reckon a solid 10 weeks for sure. And that assumes, too that I am not doing anything else.

At this point it feels like a better plan to have my journals available, and work in them as and when I want to, and not worry about working in rotation, or giving equal time to each one. And that frees me up to do something else, whatever that may be. We have the WOYWW crop coming up and there are my ATCs to finish for trading, I am still terribly low on card stash, and those things need addressing. I am 97% thru with knitting a jumper, which now won’t get worn till the cold weather comes back, and I want to finish that. I got some sock yarn fro my birthday and need to knit that up, and the list goes on and on.

AJ – Page 22

Completing the rotation with my Health journal. Another sample (Distress Ink on tracing paper, with Vaseline to bring out the colour) that fit darn near perfect. I only had to cut off the jagged edge of the deli paper to make it fit.

I dragged out my trio of Collage Collective books

and auditioned a few images – I felt the one on the right was a great colour match, although I did like them both

Once I printed the text on the blue side of the page and trimmed her down to fit, it all started to come together nicely.

I ended up removing the halo of dots and liked it better in the end.

I will be doing one more page in the Transitions journal (because I already planned it) then a recap and we’ll see what’s next!

AJ – Page 21 & Last Paper Bag Journal page!

Well this IS cause to celebrate. For me, anyway. I finished the last page in my Paper Bag Journal! Woo Hoo!

I did, of course, dither a lot about what to use. I had two possible options. The first was a painted piece of DW tissue, combined with a tag (yes, I know, another tag!) and the other was a circular gel print from a decade ago.

Both kinda fit the space, but both would need some background work to really work well.

In the end I preferred the face, because of the quote I cobbled together. I delved into my collage paper stash – this set of freebie downloads seemed to work, and I had enough of them to fill the page.

You can see that jar at the top? Another success! I had just a bit of my extra thick matte medium that I had thinned slightly with water, to make it better for thin paper collage, and I was also able to use THAT up on this page.

After that it was just sticking it all down, adding the tag, and a few splatters.

I am still wondering if I should have torn away more of the right side of the face tissue background, but the tag looks better on that shade of blue than on the blue of the collage papers. Done, done, DONE!

Tomorrow I plan to do a page in my Health Journal. I do need a plan for moving forward, now I am down to only FOUR partially finished journals.

We won’t talk about the two or three partially made ones that I hope to begin working in…

WOYWW 776 – Tidy reveal

Happy WOYWW! Time to share my tidy up. Desks first:

Main desk is not much different than last week, although I do have a few piles of things set aside that I felt “went together” and could form the basis of an art journal page. The side desk has all my gel plate tools (stencils in binders on the rack, handmade stamps in the blue drawers, mark-making stamps in the tall rainbow drawers plus more in the bulging binder on top of that. Hard to see but my brayer bin is there and the green bin has Poppy’s brush, comb and nail clippers (as if she’d let me clip them. HA!)

Computer desk, with my April daily journal sitting just under my monitor, right were I can see it every day!

I moved a shelf to a more accessible place and it has already proved useful to keep stuff where I can see it! Poppy’s access board to her Cat TV (window) is still in place.

The big pre-cursor to a Kallax unit (same size squares but without sides) is where my new magazine boxes (matching!) house all my letter stickers, divided by colour. Also at the top all my collage fodder:

And that catastrophe of a shelf that had my cardmaking stuff? Still looks a mess to the untrained eye but to me, it is way organized!

Pretty happy with it and annotating the photos will (I hope) help solidify in my mind where all the things that moved, moved TO. We’ll see.

Looks like (baring any unforeseen issues) I will be able to make the crop, and my ATCs are very nearly done. As I do most every year, I have a set of ATC backs for you, and these will replace the usual Poppy photo this week. Sorry kitty lovers! Multiple versions for you so be sure to click the ones you want! I like the smaller ones when I am not building the ATC on the back, but attaching the printed back to an ATC. But hey, you do you!

• A4 options: Smaller (3″ height) and True 2.5 x 3.5 inch
• US Letter options: Smaller (3″ height) and True 2.5 x 3.5 inch

See you round yours – I am really good about getting to the early responders first thing, but once I step away from my desk, all bets are off!

AJ – Page 20

Another dithering one. I had this old piece, can’t even recall what I made it for. I suspect it might be something for my Big Cards project, where I made pieces on each of the massive cards in a deck I had. Seriously – they were like 8 x 10 inches. I used to have a page in the top menu of my blog that collected them all, but I think I deleted it when I was trying to claw back some space. If you search for Big Cards (or tick the tag) I think many will pop up. Anyway, I used the … Queen of Hearts, I think, to make a Stampotique project so made THIS as the topper for that. I always thought I might find another deck and get a 2nd Queen of Hearts but I never did. It might have fit in one of two journals, the Life Book one (left) or the Health one.

Maybe you can see that in the LB one, there is a lot of space left uncovered and in the Health one it would work to strengthen the deli paper page, but I would also have to lose a lot of the piece. Dilemma!

In the end I fell back on what is becoming quite common, adding a border to fill the empty part. This is from some Teesha Moore collage sheets. It was a much different feel that the background.

I felt adding more of the playful collage elements would make that difference less of an issue so I did that. I mean I have had these sheets for a long long time and never cut in to them. Now was the time!

As usual I spent a lot of time pushing stuff about to see what spoke to me. I found this quote on a different collage sheet, and it kinda summed up where my head was so I added it and called it done.

I’m not sure if the borders is a style or if it is just because my journals are not standard sizes and neither are my samples! Nothing fits perfectly but a lot of things fit nearly. Rather than leave these pieces scattered around my room, in bins and boxes, drawers and cupboards, it makes me much happier to find a way, any way, to put them in an art journal, where I know they will be safe and I can see them any time I do a flip thru!

Tomorrow, a bit about my tidy …

AJ – Page 19

This one is in the Doodle Journal. Carrying on with my rotation and I will assess at the end of the week. I’ll save the share of my tidy-up for WOYWW.

As part of that, I collected up items that were either able to be used as full (or nearly) page backgrounds. These might be pieces of art that I created at some point in the past then set aside for some lost-to-time reason or things that were samples of techniques I tried. The background for this page, a near perfect fit, was a sample of the gel plate packing tape pull, but done on contact paper for a much bigger surface.

I also had an envelope of collage bits, some cut out, some just printed but uncut. I found two close matches

I had the text, created from some quotes already printed as well. Man, I am loving this using-up-stuff. In the end I opted for one of the collage pieces from…Crafty Hodges. She doesn’t seem to post stuff and this was from a very old YouTube video link. I added some doodley bits and pen work to amp up the printout

and when paired with the text, it works! I tipped it to reduce the glare from the shiny contact paper surface. It’s quite metallic and glittery IRL.

Really, I should have worked in the Paper Bag journal over the weekend – I like to do the larger and maybe more arty, less collage-y pages when I have more time. But honestly I was still sorting out the final bits of my studio (really trying to retrain myself to accept this is no longer an “office” – even if the work studio makes me feel I am putting on airs LOL!) over the weekend so that consumed all the time. This go-slow crap is getting on my nerves. I long to be stronger, and soon. Anyway, that may wait for a day when I know I can devote the time to it!

And still decisions to make on Friday, after I assess my progress…