Tag Archives: Altered Bits

Good Old Days?

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Good Old Days?Hello friends!

It’s a wet, windy and dismal day here on the Isle of Wight and I’ve been struggling with a low mood, actually been on the verge of tears a couple of times, and I have no idea why.  I’m not normally a depressive person but I let things at work get to me today.  Two days of having computers not working hasn’t helped because it has put me behind with stuff. I have let other stupid little things get to me too.

Coming home, doing some art and stroking Billy Kat has helped a lot.  Cats are such good therapy 🙂  There is a big meeting at work on Friday with a lot of senior managers, and I really need to get a positive head on for that.  Today if anyone had asked me how things are I’d have struggled to say anything positive and that’s not good.  Sometimes I just get days like this and hopefully I can turn it around tomorrow – I must remember I can make a choice to be happy, breath and smile 🙂

This spread is from my 6×6 journal.  I started with a smooth gesso’d background, painted it with a brown acrylic then collaged some ripped vintage pages (that Alicia from Altered Bits sent me) and some scraps of old maps of my town.  I don’t actually use the real maps, but scan them, print them on photographic paper and age them with tea so they look like the real thing.  Then I used some blue acrylic paint and some white ink dabbed through punchinella and wrote the quote (in my poor handwriting) in white ink and highlighted (or do I mean lowlighted it) with black.

I have become aware recently how much people look at the past through rose tinted glasses.  Especially at work, things were always better back then, in the Good Old Days, although when that time was differs from person to person.   I also know that rather than aching for the past and what was, we should all try and live more in the present.  As Oprah says, “this moment is the only one you know you have for sure”.  So we’d better enjoy it.

Thanks for listening, just putting this all down has helped me to lift my mood, I think tomorrow is going to be fine.

Enjoy the rest of your week.

Big love

AJ 🙂

 

Revo-lution 2012 – Authentic

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AuthenticHello friends!

Hope all is good with you, and those of you that are engulfed by snow – I hope you are keeping warm.

Here is another spread from my Revo-lution board book.  Check out Gretchen Miller’s blog, Creativity in Motion, for more information about the thinking behind the Revolution book, plus lots of other fabulous arty ideas!

This is a fairly simple spread about finding and being my authentic self.  I just used acrylic paints on the pages.  I started with green, then a dark blue around the edges and to create the lines down the pages, then red also around the edges, then a metallic bronze paint over the red.  I cut the swirls with my Big Shot from some thick dark textured paper and printed the three words with white ink.  Finally I outlined the letters of Authentic with dots using my white gel pen.  It was then I realised that instead of using the letter U I had in fact used an upside-down N, doh!  🙂

I had some good news yesterday, I won the Vintage Papers giveawy on Alicia’s Altered Bits blog.  Yeah!  That made me HAPPY!  I am also going to participate in her Tallest Handmade Book in the World Project and I hope that some of you will too.  It’s for a really good cause Alicia is starting a nonprofit art group for children with Asperger’s and Autism.  Click on the link on my sidebar (Yes I finally figured out how to add a button to the sidebar, it’s taken me almost a year to do that!) and find out the details of the project.  The end date of the project is 27 April 2012 which is her son Finn’s 9th Birthday, so there is still time to make some pages and get them to her.  I’m sure she could do with some more pages, and I am sure the end result will be an awesome book we can all be proud of.

That’s all for now, see you soon

Big love

AJ