Tag Archives: AJ art journal

Let Your Heart Soar

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Let Your Heart SoarHello friends!

It’s the middle of the week already!  Thank you all for your kind wishes.  I am feeling much better, T is still suffering and the doctor says it is some gastric problem and has prescribed some tablets which will take a while to start working.  In the meantime he feels sick whenever he eats and is having to drastically alter his diet.  Fortunately his mood has improved though.  It is always a worry when he is physically ill as it can trigger a bipolar episode, usually a massive low.

Today I went to our head office at work and met my manager for the first time.  He talks to me on the phone several times a week but today was out first face to face meeting.  I got a good vibe from him.  I spent the rest of the day with one of the team who showed me some of the complexities of the database I use.  Wow!  I was really impressed, what an amazing woman!  It was a good day.

The snow has just about gone now which is good but it’s really cold and wet now (not so good), I’m looking forward to spring and some warm weather.

The spread above is from my 6×6 journal, it’s actually the last page in the book.  I only have the first page and cover to do now and it will be complete. 🙂

I hope you are all keeping well and happy

Big love

AJ 🙂

 

Weird & Wonderful

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Weird & WonderfulHello friends

I hope all is good with you.  We have had a little snow here which meant I struggled to get in to work on Friday.  I called my boss to explain the problems I was having and he agreed I could take the day as annual leave.

I spent the day tidying up my art room and achieved quite a lot, it’s going to take at least another full day though before it has any semblance of being ‘tidy’.  Unfortunately since then we have had sickness in the house, both of us have been quite poorly.  It’s hard to say who has been the worse.  I spent the whole day in bed yesterday being sick everytime I moved, which rates as quite bad in my books.  T, on the other hand, has been feeling poorly for much longer than me and he has now sunk into a very bad depression which is horrible on top of feeling nausious all the time.   I am hoping he will get himself to the doctor tomorrow.  I am feeling a lot better today, I have manged to eat some food and not been sick once, but my head is still feeling a bit odd.  I reckon I will be fit enough for work tomorrow.

I have to go and visit my parents now as I haven’t seen them since before it snowed and they might be in need of provisions.  I am hoping they are just staying in and keeping warm, they are too old and frail to go out on slippery pavements.

So above is another page from my 2nd journal inspired by Teesha Moore I hope you like it.

Take care and I’ll see you soon

Big love

AJ 🙂

Sparkle!

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Sparkle and RadiateHello friends!

Well this is a very strange spread in my 6×6 journal, it was an experiment and I’m not sure it was successful.  I did a background on the pages that I LOVED, and then I did something that ruined it and I HATED it.  I didn’t know what to do with it.  Then I had this crazy idea to try using fusible film on top of the horrible background.  I painted the pages with PVA glue, and cut some fusible film that was bigger than the pages.  I scrunched it up one one side and folded it on the other and tried to stick it on the pages.  Not an easy task!  When it was loosely fixed I used the heat gun to shrink the film and meld it together.  Then I die cut some borders and flourishes and added the quote.  I don’t really like the end result, but it was an interesting process and something I shall try again at some point, probably.

I hope you are all keeping well and happy.  I am feeling good, at last I seem to be getting on top of things at work and I am feeling a lot happier about the situation.  I look at some of my colleagues who have really stressful jobs and are expected to work all hours of the day and night  and I think that actually there are a lot of advantages to having a mundane and repetative role.   So all is good 🙂

That’s all for now, see you soon

Big love

AJ 🙂

Be Audacious!

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Be Audacious!

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO SEE IT FULL SIZE

Hello friends!

Wow it’s a beautiful sunny but cold winter’s day outside, the perfect day for taking a walk and taking photos, but I really have to stay in and do some housework today.  I need to try and get some sort of order into my art room, the chaos is even getting to me now and generally I can put up with quite a lot of chaos!  I think the problem is that I am trying to squeeze too much into too small a space.  I keep trying to use stuff up, but ‘someone’ keeps buying more supplies and starting more projects!

So I hope you are all well and happy and have had a great start to the New Year.  I am doing fine although I have been a bit under the weather.  I had to take Friday off work as I was sick all day.  I was in bed all day, I hate it when that happens it feels like such a waste of a day!  But I needed time to rest and restore and I am sure that my imagination was working overtime.

Yesterday I had to chair a meeting of the Local History group in the morning and I wasn’t sure I was up to it, but once I was up, showered, dressed and prepared I really enjoyed the meeting.  Despite really horrible weather lots of people turned up, everyone was really friendly, our guest speaker was fantastic and we all had a great time.  I LOVE being part Ryde Social Heritage Group it is so rewarding to work with people who are so enthusiastic and helpful.  We make a great team!

Above is the second page of my second journal inspired by the lovely Teesha Moore.  I have that quote printed out and stuck on my phone at work … because sometimes I just need to remind myself.

Have a great week everyone.

Big love

AJ 🙂

 

Circles of Wisdom

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Crcles of WisdomHello friends!

I hope your week is going well, I am doing fine and I have been feeling a bit better about work this week.  I am having problems with my computer at home though, it just seems to be getting slower and slower so everything I do takes double or treble the time I think it should.  I am grateful that it is still working though as I don’t know what I’d do without it.

The image above is made up of 4 pages from my 6×6 journal.  Last year on 21 Secrets I did a workshop with Dion Dior called Circles of Wisdom and I learnt to draw mandalas.  It was a good opportunity for me to practice my doodles and there is definitely something meditative about creating mandalas.  The pages in my journal already had gesso and paint on them and were not ideal backgrounds for the images.  So after I drew these 4 I decided to make a whole book dedicated to Circles of Wisdom.  I recycled a child’s board book which is 5.5″ x 5.5″ and I filled it up with 16 different mandalas, it’s a lovely little book and I will probably share it with you at some point in the future.

***** One of the gorgeous women I met at the Call of the Wild Soul Art Retreat last year, Jeanette House, has set up a new ning site called One Little House  for art and craft e-learning.   I think you should probably check it out, we are bound to have fun and Jeanette is both lovely and talented 🙂 *****

OK that’s all for tonight, I’ve got to print out a batch of cemetery maps for my friend.

See you soon

Big love

AJ 🙂

 

Be of Good Cheer!

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Be of Good CheerHello friends!

It’s Sunday morning and I am trying to catch up with a load of stuff that is really overwhelming me.  What makes it worse is that my workroom is a total mess.  I REALLY need to tidy up in here, I think it is becoming a bit of a Health & Safety issue, trip hazards on the floor and surfaces covered in precarious stacks of things!  Why can’t I be ‘super tidy’ like my husband?

Anyway, even though I am surrounded by chaos and my ‘To Do’ list just grows and grows, I am still of Good Cheer today.  Yesterday T and I completed a big project (well it was big for us).  We relocated the washing machine from the kitchen to the cupboard under the stairs.   We have done a load of washing and (so far) there are no leaks!!!!  That’s stage 1 of the kitchen refurb complete…  At the moment there is a horrible big hole under the worksurface where the machine was.  We were going to put the freezer in there but it won’t fit!  Well it would fit if we forced it past the water pipes that feed the boiler but we are too worried that that will cause a leak.  Just getting the washing machine out of the space was scarey enough.  One thing we have to make sure of when we finally do the kitchen is that that space is made bigger.

I am working on a number of creative projects at the moment – several differend journals and a 16″ x 20″ canvas.

The page is above is the first page from my second Teesha inspired journal.  I LOVE this style of journaling and my collection of lovely pens is growing almost by the day.  I need to find a good way to store pens, does anyone have any ideas about that?  I like to store them flat so I need some sort of boxed racking (cheap).   I think probably I could get something at Ikea but we don’t have a store locally that I can visit.  Oh well I’m sure something will turn up.

Have a good week everyone, I’ve just been summoned to go and help measure the kitchen so we can start planning the next stage of the kitchen!

See you soon

Big love

AJ 🙂

 

 

 

 

 

Revo’lution 2013

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Cover-smallHello friends!

I hope you all had a Merry Christmas and I wish everyone a Happy and Healthy New Year!

I am really enjoying being off work for a few days and I’ve been doing art whenever possible.   We spent Christmas day with my parents and yesterday we had Tony’s friend Nigel come for lunch.  Today we have had a day on our own and tomorrow more family arrive.

When I have had time I have been working on my 2013 Revo’lution book.  Last year the words in my Revo’lution book were: Inspire, change, kindness, authentic, gratitude and abundance.  It is a book I pick up often and think about the intention behind making the book.  All I can tell you is that it’s a fantastic exercise and (for me) much more beneficial than making New Year’s Resolutions, which I can never keep.

This year the words in my Revo’lution book are: connect, grow, focus, share and reflect.  I wanted to have a line running through the book which would connect all the pages together.  There are very few words or explantion of what the book means, that is because producing the book was almost like a meditation.  On each page I gave the word intention in every action of producing the page.  I can look at each page and know exactly what want to attract into my life.

To find out more about this excellent process please go over and visit my friend Gretchen Miller.  Gretchen introduced me to this wonderful process in 2011.  So above is the cover and below are all the pages of my 2013  Revo’lution book, which is a repurposed children’s board book:

Page-1-smallPage-2-small

Page-3-smallPage-4-smallPage-5-smallWishing you success in all your endevours in the coming year.

Big love

AJ

Happy Holidays!

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Finished-journal-cover

Hello friends!

PICT0285Happy Holidays to you!  I don’t have to go back to work until January 2nd and I cannot begin to tell you how happy I am just to have a break!  On Saturday I decided to put up some Christmas decorations and attempt to get myself into the Festive Spirit.  I went out to buy a Christmas Tree, I wanted a real one, and I honestly thought that having left it so late I would be able to get one at a reduced price.  Wrong!   They had sold out!  So I bought the only artificial tree I could find and now that it is decorated I think it looks fine in the corner of the living room.  Christmas TreeThe cats don’t seem to mind it either.  The first Christmas we had the cats they were about 9 months old and they both completely freaked out when a large decorated tree materialised in the living room and until it was removed they refused to come into the room.  Last year we did have a real tree but it was TINY (only about 1 foot tall) and the cats took no notice of it so this year is it in our new dining room.  You can probably just about see it in the corner 🙂  Fortunately this year ‘the boys’ are not at all concerned about the tree in the corner, they haven’t attempted to climb it yet but both of them have had a turn at sitting beneath it.

So my big news is that I have completed my A4 Journal which I started in October 2011.  As always I did the cover last –  I used texture paste in which I embedded some little mirrors, I sewed a big black button on the front to act as a sort of door handle and I used loads of different coloured acrylic paints to give it an ‘aged’ look.  The title letters are from a word game – coloured with distress inks and topped with glossy accents.  Finally I decorated the wire spine (which I have come to hate) with ribbons.  It feels so good to have it completed :-).  My 6×6 journal is also just a few pages away from completion and, because a new year is coming up soon, I have made a start on my 2013 Revo-lution book and I will be sharing both with you soon.

A4 Journal finishedFinished Journal Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy and Healthy New Year.

Big love

AJ 🙂

Operation Sock Monkey and Sock Monkey Swap :-)

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MonkeysHello friends

I recently took part in Operation Sock Monkey and Sock Monkey Swap which was hosted by 6 Degrees of Creativity and my friend Gretchen Miller.  Over 100 Sock Monkeys from 18 states across the US and from New Zealand, Canada, UK, and Italy came together before being sent to their final destination: The Boys and Girls Club in Hoboken, New Jersey. 

If you click on the links you can find out all about the project.

Above are my two sock monkeys, I had to make them before I could commit myself to participating, they were fun to make.  The pink one was sent to Gretchen to be sent to the Boys & Girls Club in Hoboken and the grey one was sent to Katarina Thorsen in Canada.  Katarina is an amazing artist and I recommend you check out all of her blogs :-).  You can find out all about Operation Sock Monkey here.  I love their motto which is ‘Sending smiles across the miles’.

And here is the sweet monkey I received in the swap.  It was made by Katie in Connecticut. Thank You Katie! Once Billy Kat gets used to having ‘a stranger’ on the bed Monkey will fit in nicely and have a good home here 🙂

Monkey-and-Bill

Have a good week and I’ll see you all soon.

Big love

AJ 🙂

Strange Creature

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Imagination is a Strange CreatureHello Friends!

Sorry I missed my mid-week post again this week.  On Wednesday I took the day off work and did my Christmas shopping.  I left home at 10am and didn’t get back until 6pm.  My husband said “What have you been doing all this time?”.  He does all his shopping online or just buys vouchers for people!  Anyway I can’t say I was full of festive spirit, but I bought a lot of stuff and spent a lot of money and now it’s all wrapped up it looks OK.

I am disappointed that this year I haven’t had time to make presents for my friends, but I just didn’t feel up to is in November and then ran out of time to even start in December.

My mood has improved this month and I will be glad once Christmas is out of the way, it’s not really my favourite time of year but at least I am having a long break from work so I’m bound to have time for some art.  I am hoping too that T picked up on those massive hints I dropped for new art supplies.

We have some family coming to stay just after Christmas so yesterday I decided to do some housework, and managed to put my back out within about an hour, I was only bending over to pick something up too and it wasn’t even heavy.  Fortunately it’s not too bad and the painkillers are helping to relieve it so I can carry on with my tasks.  Today’s task is to clean the grout between the tiles in the bathroom.  It has to be done because recently I’ve been standing in the shower looking up at the tiles and thinking ‘Yuk, that looks horrible’!  The truth is I’m not really cut out for domesticity, if I did it more often it wouldn’t have got into such a state, but unfortunately I can always find more interesting things to do than clean and tidy 😦

However I promise you that by the time I finish today it will SPARKLE!

So this page is the last page in my A4 journal which I started in October 2011 and is a page I did for Traci Hanson’s Journal Quest on 21 Secrets.  I found a Big Bird and a Polar Bear cub in my painting.  Strange eh!

Have a great week everyone

Big love

AJ 🙂