A Huge Thank You

to all the lovely people who made such supportive comments on my last post.  I really do appreciate your kind thoughts and words and it has made me feel all soppy and mushy.  Thank you sincerely, I am truly touched.
I have been meaning to get into this art journal lark for a while now, and finally decided to actually do something about it.  I followed various links and trails and discovered Sarah Whitmire's Soul Journaling prompts here which have the advantage of being free so I thought I would give them a try before taking the plunge and paying for an online course.  I have now built my "soul armor" and here it is:

I seem to have made it more of a soul barrier with a bit of armor hiding behind it, but I guess that says a lot about me.                                                                                                  I'm not sure how much further I will go with Soul Journaling as I feel I want to explore a different direction from the one that the prompts are taking me.  I have enjoyed making this page though, and I am feeling like taking a paid course could be worth it.  First I have to read through the digi version of the first Somerset Studio Art Journaling magazine and see where I end up after that.

I've also done this weeks prompt for Scrapdolly's 52 in 10 project, so after a week of doing nothing very much creative I seem to have got my mojo back, YAY!!!

The prompt was to list your resolutions for this year.  This year I am trying the One Little Word concept and my word is TIME, so this paper fit perfectly.  It's a Tim Holtz paper, apparently, but I have no idea where or how I got it! The challenge was to add some stitching.... no way! So I cheated and used ribbon with stitching already on it for the tag, and stamped some faux stitching underneath the opening for the tag pocket.  The reason for the introduction of the shades of orange was, I was merrily working away in green and ecru when I discovered I didn't have any green dymo tape, or even any black!  Bummer! So I settled on orange and incorporated an orange flower and edged the tag with some spiced marmalade distress ink.

Another year over

In fact, a whole decade.  I was thinking about this last night and, all in all, it's been a pretty lousy 10 years really.  

In 2000 things got bad and then went downhill from there.  Won't bore anyone with all the gory details but a few highlights were losing my grandmother, my father and my mother and getting cancer.

Anyway, here we are at the dawn of a new decade and hopefully the teens will be a darn sight better than the noughties!

I am now 50 (and a half) so when I saw Scrapdolly's new project I thought "that's for me" so I'm joining in the 52 in 10 adventure which you can check out here  

I'm also intrigued by Ali Edward's One Little Word (details here ) so I'm going to give that try too.  It sounds pretty much like an affirmation but with a crafty twist so it should be good for me.  I just need to decide on a word.... better make sure it isn't procrastinate I guess! lol.  I'm thinking along the lines of relax/chill/let go/let it be/peace.  Better make my mind up soon!!

Right, enough of the navel gazing!  Back on the craft front, a first for me for Christmas 2009 was making a card.  I don't make cards, never done one, but DDs wanted me to make one for them.  To get some inspiration I hopped on over to Hels blog because I just love her stuff and I rummaged around in her old postings.  I found this and thought "I have that stamp, I'll give it a go" so I did.  Not as good as Hels, but it'll pass:

I brayered a background with a Twighlight brilliance ink pad then stamped the reindeer on in black archival ink.  I masked him and stamped the snowflakes with embossing ink then embossed in silver.  I gave him a bit of a glitz with some rock candy stickles and matted (badly I know, I am dyscutlic) onto black cardstock then stuck it onto a white glittery card blank.  The reason I did the greeting separately was because I didn't think about it properly and had no room for it on the main bit - either that or it was for artistic reasons, you decide!  Anyway, I stamped the greeting and embossed with holographic embossing powder to make it all sparkly then used some cut & dry foam with the Twighlight pad to match the main background.  There was a bit of a big space at the bottom where the greeting should have gone but, because of the above stated reason, there wasn't enough room for it.  So, I dug out a cute ickle polar bear felt thingy and stuck that on and a bit of tinsely holly stuff went on the reindeer itself because you can never have enough tat or tinsel at Christmas is my motto.

Happy New Year everyone x