Playing with wire

On Sunday afternoon I felt the urge to make some earrings. I took some silver wire and bent it before hammering with a jeweller's hammer to give it texture. They lasted in my ears for about half an hour before my teenage daughter saw them. Now they are in her jewellery box...

Hope

Anyone who plants a seed - of any kind - has hope. Hope that it will germinate, grow, and prove fruitful.

Whether that seed is mustard and cress, producing a crop in a few days, or a tree that doesn't reach maturity for decades, there is hope in the planter. No-one plants a seed and rejoices if it doesn't grow.

So what sort of seeds are you planting, both literal and metaphorical? Do they all anticipate a quick yield, or are you planting things that you hope will prove fruitful way in the future? Are you prepared to nurture the seedlings for as long as it takes?

The effects of the past

This page was a long time in the making. It went through an awful lot of layers before ending up like this. Whatever I did, I didn't like it. It was looking messy, bitty, not of a piece. So I gessoed over the whole lot, but the colours were showing through and I just wasn't happy with it.

Enter the gelli-print. I stuck this in the middle and that covered most of the problems. A little stamping to blend the edges and I was starting to feel better about it.

A spray of red ink and it looked wounded.

Oh dear.

But as I thought about the page and what it had been through, it started to come together. The blue border peeking through, the 'bloodstain', the transfer of paint from one part of the print to another, all spoke to me about the past leaking through to the present.

No matter how much you paper over something, the effects of the past will show up in your life, even if you have been fully healed. There is a residue that has affected your thinking, your habits, your way of dealing with situations. Everything you have lived through has left its mark. The person you are today is because of what happened to you in the past and how you dealt with it.

All the frustration I had with this page resulted in something that I am actually pleased with now.

How many boxes?

As our move looms closer, we are getting quotes for removals. People are moving through our home and working out how much space will be needed to move all of our belongings, totting up how many boxes will be needed to pack up our life and move it across the city.

It's strange to think that five years ago we packed everything into a sea container and moved it halfway round the world. When everything you have is packed into one compact space you realise just how small a life is if you only count it in terms of possessions.

But I am thankful for all those things in my life that cannot be put into a box - love, faith, hope, grace, mercy. These things cannot be contained.

Pianola book

Several months ago my husband bought a couple of pianola rolls for me. They have sat in my art room since then while I have thought about how I wanted to use them. This week I decided to turn them into a book. 

I wanted to make a square book as I find that format pleasing. So I cut the pianola rolls into double-page lengths. As you can imagine, the pieces immediately curled up into tight rolls, having been rolled up for I don't know how long. To combat this, I stuck the lengths together in pairs, back-to-back, which had the added advantage of covering most of the holes, too, and strengthening the fragile paper.

Now I'm having fun working on backgrounds, gelli-printing, stamping, and sticking however the whim takes me.

Having fun

I spent yesterday afternoon having fun just playing. I was carving some stamps for Becky Wentworth, who I met in the Colourful Playground google+ community set up by Carolyn Dube. She's going to swap me some papers made from National Geographic magazine images manipulated with Citra-solv. Anyway, after I'd finished stamps for Becky, I was on a roll, so I did the ones above for myself. The circle was inspired by a bubble-wrap print.

One of the great things about moving is that you have a jolly good clear-out. I found some glossy black card and some Lumiere paints tucked away in a drawer. So I pulled them out to play with as well. I did a couple where I just mushed two pieces of card together and then pulled them apart, and then some with clingfilm (plastic wrap/ saran wrap). When I peeled off the clingfilm there was still a lot of paint on it, so I printed off it on to some more card. Such fun!

I'm thinking that I might turn some of them into tags.

And here are some close-ups:

The one above was a print off the clingfilm from the one below.

2 finished pages

So, in the last post I was waiting for words for these two pages. The one above was sitting open on my table and I walked in to the room, saw it, and suddenly knew what I wanted to write. I suddenly saw connections between the circles and there it was.

I thought about how, whenever we've moved house before, it has meant a move to a new city - and last time to the other side of the world - and so a whole round of making new friends. This time we're only moving to the other side of the city. I am so grateful that, although we will be making new connections in our new church, we'll still be able to keep up with our friends easily.

The words for this page came when I became frustrated at the disorganisation of a certain institution. What seems like common sense to me obviously isn't. The page was very busy and seemed to be a bit disorganised. It fit perfectly with what I was feeling.

And a gelli-print I was particularly pleased with, made using large bubble-wrap.

Waiting for words

Sometimes, when I blog about a page, it can look as if it is worked through from beginning to end before another is started. But here are a couple of pages that I'm working on that I just don't have the words for yet.

Sometimes you just need to put down colour and pattern. The busywork of your fingers lets your mind wander, and at the moment my mind needs to sift through things. So the words aren't clear - yet - but backgrounds are ready and waiting.

The page with red circles started out as a gelli-print. I've added stamping, gelli-printed greaseproof paper (that's what those blue concentric circles are above and the black at the right of the photo below), and washi-tape.

The green and yellow page is built up with layers of acrylic paint, water-soluble graphite, gelli-printed greaseproof paper, sequin-waste used as a stencil and a stamp, and splashes of white ink. There's even a little tag in the base layer.

Do you work on multiple pages at once?

On the threshold

In that awkward space -

standing on the threshold, 

but not quite there yet. 

One foot in each place 

but not wholly in either. 

Planting good stuff

I spent a little time this morning clearing weeds from the small bed that runs down the fence-line at the side of the house. This is something I have to do on a regular basis, because there is no deliberate planting in it. I like to grow things I can eat, but because of car fumes I haven't planted anything in that bed.

As I cleared it of the myriad of weeds I thought about how, when we get rid of bad habits, we need to replace them with good ones, rather than leaving a space. If we leave a space, anything can move in. We have to be deliberate about planting something else in the space to keep out the stuff we don't want.  If I planted some flowers in that bed, yes, I would still have to do some weeding, but there would be a lot less of it because there would be less space for things to grow in.

So deliberately plant some flowers in your life to keep out the weeds.