October

One of the things I like about doing the calendar challenge is that even those months when everything is CRAZY, you will still have completed SOMETHING. :) Sometimes weeks go by where the only pages that I touched were the calendar pages.
It also means I have to blog at least once a month to share them! :)

I had my October finished on time, but evidently I forgot to take a pic before I started filling it in... >.> hmm....

The background is black & charcoal paint applied with a babywipe over coloured cardstock.
When I made this journal I used a whole pack of bright cardstock.. which I unfortunately got sick of about halfway thru (I'm fickle like that). I like just the little bit of colour showing thru the black however. :)

This is a little ink & water doodle I did after drooling over Daniel Torrente's stamps all day.

Notice the missing 26th? Yeah? It disappeared somewhere between the cutting & glueing... I'm still hoping it turns up lol

September

Yes,  I know, I haven't posted anything since LAST month's calendar... :(
I blame the heat lol
It's been over 100 °F for a good portion of this past month... and some days, when we were lucky it was only in the high 90s!  It makes me lazy, all this heat.

Here is my August all filled out.. with lots of whining about the heat. lol

And September ready & waiting. 
The colour combo is because of this set of letter stickers I had.  I never would have thought of using aqua & red together otherwise, but it's very pretty. 

I was out of glue when I made this month's calendar, so instead of cutting out squares for the dates I just masked them out with painter's tape. 

August

It's that time again! :)
My July calendar all filled in:

And rere is my calendar for August ready to go!

There is a lot of different ideas pulled from various places.. Originally I wanted these label stickers from October Afternoon's 9 to 5 collection.. or some "back to school" themed paper (since I am a substitute teacher & the school year starts up in August). I couldn't manage to get ahold of either of those however, but I incorporated some of the elements I liked. The colour scheme is pulled from the 9 to 5 (i never would have thought of using the orange!) as well as the type-writter & the clock. And I have the ABC, 123 school theme :)

I really like Kate Crane's layered, textured background & wanted to do one like that... except I don't have Dylusions or stencil's or anything, so I did a lot of experimenting!

The first layer is some black acrylic swiped on w/ a credit card. I used some cheap alpha stickers I don't like much, as well as the left-over negative space as stencils & masks. (If you stick it to something like a tee-shirt first it makes it less sticky & repositionable so it won't tear your paper)

Next layer: watercolours in various blue/green shades!

Some stamping using acrylics & random objects: pencil erasers, glue-stick lids & empty tape rolls.

And lastly, some stamping using my make-shift stencils.

Finished Flip Thru

My last journal is officially retired & I am only working in my Princess journal now.  So I thought I would share some of my favourite pages and do a little flip thru as a way of saying goodbye :) lol

My "travel" page... the left page is an awesome Paris notecard a penpal sent me.. and some other little bits & pieces from happy mail. On the right is a postcard my best friend's mum brought back from Las Vegas.

On the back of the postcard, I've collected all the stamps from mail I've gotten.
And of course- there is my lonely little girl page, which I believe I shared previously, but she is still one of my favourites. :)

A page with quotes from one of my favourite Youtube shows.

The poor little bumble bee girl, wishing for rain!

A pretty page with no real meaning or purpose other than to experiment & use pretty colours!!  (The hand opens up to a pop-up heart)

If you want to see more, here is a flip thru video :)
(fair warning- it is NOT fancy! I have an ancient camera, my hands are shaky & I have an unexpected visitor at one point!)

 

Youtube 

Journal Pages

I have been playing with lots of different styles in my new journal :)

The girl on this one was a little drawing experiment.. I wanted to draw something kinda stylized & cutesy. I liked how she came out, so I cut her out & used her on a journal page.

Playing around with cheap stickers & painters tape, using them as masks...

A kind of Kelly Kilmer inspired page...



I got some prints of several of my drawings & did a little scrapbook page of Morbid Little Girl & her Shadow Monster boyfriend!

 

The Chillingsworth Manor paper pack had these little tickets for things like graveyard tours.. which I thought would be exactly the type of thing a zombie girl & her monster boyfriend would do on a date ;)

Just drawing & lettering in ink... going for a kind of story book feel :)

Simple but pretty page- magazine cut-outs, paint & patterned paper

But I had the most fun making these kind of pages:

Just scraps, stickers, sticker waste & a bit of washi tape collaged together to make a super pretty page! :)

Another one, featuring a lovely ACEO I got from  Jessica Grundy's Etsy shop

July's Calendar: Happy Birthday to Me!

July is my birthday month (and it's actually a major one this year lol) I also have 4 family members who have their birthdays in July. So I wanted to do something fun & festive.

Here's the background before I added the date squares. I drew a fun little amusement park using all my favourite  "happy" colours & painted a clear blue sky.

I rummaged thru my bag of scraps & found all the different shades of pink for the dates.
I really like how it turned out! :) I wish I could spend my b-day at my little carnival >.> lol

Small Spooky Book

I am still working on my big, Halloweeny journal >.>   And in the process I have accumulated a lot of spooky scraps & several pages that I had doubles of. So rather than waste them, I decided to make another, smaller journal out of them.

I put a thin layer of gesso over the 2 pieces of cardboard that were going to be the cover.  Then using an old credit card, I scraped across grey & black acrylic paint so that there were all three layers showing thru. It made a nice textured effect that I like a lot :)

The two pieces of cardboard were slightly different widths. I was going to trim the wider one, but instead decided to use alternating black & white tabbed pages to fill the space :)

The saying is from a Halloween paper pack. It orginally said "A Night Filled with Fright.. etc etc" but I trimmed off the first part so that it now refers to the contents of the book! :)

Here are some of the fun pages inside:

 

This one is an illustration from one of the A Series of Unfortunate Events books..  The arch behind the girl reads "memento mori" so I thought it would be appropriate. 

And a pocket made from the envelope my Walgreens photo prints came in :)

This book is for sale in my Etsy if anyone's interested. 

Now I just have to finish this books "big brother" lol 

Notebooks- One for me, One for Sale

Hello!

I finished two notebooks this week :)

The first one has been one of my long-term notebook projects (in case your curious, I am currently in the middle of making 3 other long term projects lol)

I had collected a lot of these full pages that I didn't want to cut up or fold in half but still wanted to use in a journal. So I decided to try making a ring bound notebook.

Mickey here was the cover of a school notebook that was too cute to chuck when the term was over.

I included several photos from an old calendar I'd hoarded (I am always asking people if I can have their calendars when the year's over!!!)

I found a pack of  cardstock on clearance ("watercolour painted rainbow") that has  faux-painted backgrounds in pretty colours

They are good, thick cardstock & the opposite sides are white! Which is perfect for me, because as much as I like using pretty coloured page when I am making notebooks- when I actually get around to USING them I always wish there was more plain white pages. White pages & black pages actually..

Anyway, here are a few more pages in my ring notebook.

Some fancy stationery.

and an image from an alumni newsletter sent to the previous occupant at my address.

The other book I made was this pretty one for my shop.

The cover is made from the same cardstock, and the pages are made from K & Co's "Jubilee" paper- which is SO pretty!

It is sewn by hand & the binding is tied off on the inside.  Since my knots tend to be big & obvious- I used a little butterfly cut out to camouflage it.

knot camouflage!

I added a few other butterflies too. And even gave this creepy looking bug a makeover!

I did one of my fold up pocket pages, but instead of closing the ends up with tape I used some of the scraps from trimming down the page.


What do you think? :)