No room for me!

My craft room has been taken over by my cats!

Here is Arwen, giving me the 'evil eye' because I keep taking her off my chair so I can sit down!

And on the right is Baggins, who sits as close to me as he can get, which usually means on my current work. My family are used to paw prints and hair on their greetings cards.

Incidently. This is what they looked like when I took them in six months ago. They were neglected, half starved and frightened of their own shadows. I suppose I should be pleased that they now want to stay close by me, but sometimes I would like a little bit of space to work in.












Luna has the sense to lay along my window sill and soak up the spring time sunshine. She's no trouble at all.


Still, I have managed to do a bit of crafting around my furry friends. A friend on GG has asked us all to help her compile an Art journal, to share with the children she teaches. We are each making one or two pages to mail to her, so she can bind them together to make the journal. The theme is 'Time'.


I have never done any Art Journal pages before but I decided to give it a go. First I cut two pieces of medium weight watercolour card and painted them with gesso. For this one I used Sticky fingers yellow and Making memories gold and pale ale, dye sprays. When this was dry I stamped a variety of clock faces from a Crafty individuals plate, around one corner. Lower down I stamped the Grandfather clock and hand-wrote the words of the song, which I always loved when they played it on the radio programme Children's Choice, many moons ago! A few personal thoughts in the top right-hand corner, and some additional 'Tick Tocks' finished it off.



Because of a second marriage, and a rather late second family, for twenty six years I had a child, or children under ten years at home, and for twenty years there was at least one teenager, so when the last ones had 'flown the nest' we took the decision to retire to Spain, and have some time for ourselves, to do whatever we wanted. This was the inspiration for my second page. To colour my gessoed page I chose a range of sticky fingers sprays from their spring and summer colours, and added some gold. I was in rather a mess by then so I blotted the page with a sheet of plain copy paper, giving me some pretty background paper for another project, and then used a heat gun to dry the page. This blew some of the excess ink around, and I was quite pleased with the end result.

I hand wrote 'My time is NOW, and I'm going to enjoy it' in the page centre. Then I collected together a selection of text stamps that covered some of the things that I aim for and/or hope to do with my life, and placed them randomly around the page. I also stamped a few complimentary images. The overall effect is perhaps a bit messy, but that is how I work, and I guess, if nothing else, an art journel should reflect your true self.

I enjoyed this project more than I had expected to, and I may now start an Art journal of my own.