Doilies are great to incorporate into baby projects. Here is a quick collage project I made with doilies, using pictures of my boys right after they were born:
One of the biggest craft trends right now is decorative tapes. It is amazing all the colors and designs that tape comes in. Check out some of the projects I found on the web:
So cute and so easy! I took a couple of glass vases (purchased for a dollar at Goodwill) and a couple of candles and jazzed them up with some decorative tapes.
The great thing about this project is you can change the colors/designs easily. Think how cute a grouping of vases and candles done with red & green tape for Christmas, or black & orange at Halloween. The tapes come right off.
If you would like to play with some of these tapes, check out the shoppes!
I am excited and honored to announce that I have been invited to join the design team at Creative Therapy. If you are unfamiliar with the site, here's what Karen, the owner, has to say about the creation of the blog:
When I was little, I hung out with this group of kids who were my parents’ friends’ children. They were really mean to me and didn’t really want me around. So, I’ve always had this idea that I didn’t belong and people didn’t like being around me. Even though, over the years, a lot happened to show me otherwise, I was just stuck with those ideas in my head.
About two weeks ago, I found a box of photos from my childhood and teenage years. I looked at the photos over and over again and realized that I was smiling in all of them. Even laughing in some. I had people around me, with their arms on my shoulder. Suddenly it hit me that I was all wrong. I had belonged and I was loved. I had hundreds of photos to prove it. (I can’t really put into words the fundamental shift this caused.)
So I grabbed a minibook I had, glued the photos all over it and journaled all around it. I journaled for 7 hours. I wanted to capture this moment of revelation and have something for my future self to revisit if I got delusional again. It was energizing and life-changing.
I wanted to couple that experience with my wish to create more often and to have more fun with creating, so I thought….why not do a weekly challenge? Yes, I know there are thousands of them. But the idea of this one would be using art, scrapbooking, photography, or whatever your creative outlet is as a form of self-therapy. It doesn’t have to be revealing. It can be with colors, a specific technique, lots of journaling, or very few words. It can be art journaling. It can be anything you want as long as it’s therapeutic to you. Creative therapy.
My hope was to have a team of scrappers and mixed media artists. Many of us, so that we don’t all have to do one each week. Since this is emotional at the core, I want to make sure it’s authentic.
I hope you’re as excited about this idea as we are. I am honored and humbled to be in the company of these amazing artists and I hope that their work will inspire you as much as it awes me.
I don’t want to call this a challenge site since challenge and creative therapy don’t go together in my opinion. So, we’re going to call them catalysts, since our goal is for the work to be the catalyst for our life and a catalyst for you to feel inspired to create your own piece of creative therapy.
So, come on over. Pull up a chair and create your own therapeutic art.
- Karen Grunberg
So, here is my first contribution to Creative Therapy:
Catalyst #105: "Tell a random childhood memory"
I don’t have a lot of memories of my childhood-most are just bits and pieces. One of the few memories of my early childhood is watching the annual balloon races. We would climb up on the roof of our house, and watch all the novelty balloons take to the sky. When I look back on it, it seemed as though the sky just filled with color-like a make believe world. It was magical.
Oh how I love paper! The colors, the patterns, the texture. Vintage papers hold a special place in my heart. There is just something special about these old papers-they have a life of their own; a story to tell.
I enjoy looking for and collecting (okay, hoarding) ephemera. As much as I love it, more often than not, it ends up in a pile, on a shelf, or in a drawer. I want not only to use it more in my art, but to also use it in a way that I can appreciate it and see it in my daily environment. Here is a simple project that accomplished both of these goals.
This is a fun, easy, and inexpensive project. First, cover plain manila file folders with papers. I used ledger paper, sheet music, dress pattern tissue, and a book page on the outside and patterned paper on the inside. Since my paper wasn't quite large enough, I also used patterned paper along the bottom on the front. Next, grab any papers you want to use for your collage. This is a great way to use up scraps and bits that have been sitting around. I also used some old stickers and rub ons. Since I was going for a more vintage look, I used some sandpaper to distress the collage and then dry brushed with gesso.
Of course, if you are not into the "vintage" style, you can use different papers to get a completely different look. I know we all have papers, stickers, stamps, paint, rub ons, etc. to use. The hardest part is not adding too much! Honestly, I kept having to stop myself from adding "one more thing". Have fun and enjoy making your collages!
The boys are home on spring break, so we took the opportunity to do a little "gardening". Connor has been very interested in planting seeds lately, and Logan just loves anything that has to do with dirt and water. On Thursday, we went and bought our gardening supplies (the kids gardening stuff is so cute). We bought a lot of seeds-mostly because the boys kept throwing more and more into the cart! On Friday, Connor and Logan each planted a pot of flowers and one bigger container of carrots (Connor really wanted to plant carrots). I really don't know much about container gardening, so we will have to wait and see how our "garden" grows!
I am a mixed media and paper artist with a BFA from Northern Arizona University. I enjoy creating projects using a mix of elements- especially non traditional ones. I have a passion for paper and altered art. I also enjoy baking for fun, and trying out new recipes.
