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? :)