Jeudi Journal - Naughty

Another Dylusion Journal challenge I do with Wendy.  This time I had to think how could I link it differently to my last one so that I could also link it to Art Journal Journey where I have chosen the theme 'Type'.  Again I chose to use 'fonts' as my link to 'type', and again it was a font I chose from my cake icing book.  I have never used this one before and judging by the size of the letters in the book  I needed a short quote.

I needed to draw some lines to try to get my letters more or less the same size, but to be exact you really need to use squared paper, not possible here so mine was just four lines for each word.  As I told you last week, I love looking at calligraphy and would love to be able to do it but I just do not have the patience to practice.  This was an easy alphabet to use but I needed to use a ruler for the straight uprights on the capital (uc) letters.  You will notice that the final word has had to be split into two - I wondered if that was possible so I checked some of the work by one of my favourite Dylusion artists, Miranda van den Bosch, and she does do just what I have done - which is why I went ahead with it,

A big mistake I made was doing the background with Pan Pastels (chalks).  Nice and quick, and I was in a hurry to get some backgrounds done at the time so just went ahead with them - not good when you need to rule lines for the lettering - the background gets erased when you come to get rid of your lines.   Doh!  I still am the 'original dizzy blonde' even though the blonde is turning grey.  Anyway, my story:

"Sarah and Sammy are brother and sister and that is about how far it goes - they are like chalk and cheese.  Their mum tears her hair out at times at some of the things Sammy gets up to, she is so thankful that Sarah is nothing like him and quite a good little helper around the house.

The weather has been unusually sunny of late and Sammy has been playing out with his cricket bat and ball.  Mum had told him not to play with that ball, which was quite hard, near the houses, but Sammy being Sammy did not listen.  Off he had gone and done everything he shouldn't when "CRASH" - yes, the inevitable happened, the ball went through the window. 

Sarah rushed outside and sure enough, there was a gaping hole in one of the panes of the window. 

"What have you done?" she asked,  "Mum told you not to play with that hard ball,  you were supposed to use the foam one.  You are going to be in so much trouble."

"I didn't do it on purpose" said Sammy, "I was just playing cricket on my own and I hit a six but the window got in the way."

"Oh" shouted Sarah, "You do my head in, do you ever use your brain, you are so stupid at times"

"Hell Yeah, I've been naughty" said Sammy with a silly grin on his face.  He knew full well that mum would not punish him too badly, maybe just send him to bed early.  That didn't worry Sammy, he could always play on his iPad if he was banished upstairs."

That's it for this week's Jeudi Journal page, see you over on Art Journal Journey to see what others have done.

Jeudi Journal - Dylusional Heart

This week the quote chosen is "You think it's all about you - bless your Dylusional heart" - a bit of a play on words using 'Dylusional' rather than 'delusional'.

A Distress Ink background in various shades of green, a circle stencil and another for the sun, some stamped flowers from Janet Klein stamps and, of course, the Dylusion figures.

"Janet had been going out with her boyfriend, John, for a full year.  She was so much in love with him, or was she, thought her best friend Jemma.  Jemma suspected that Janet was in love with being in love and having a steady boyfriend whilst the rest of the 'pack' just had the occasional date and that was it.  She suspected Janet felt a bit more grown up than the rest of them by having the steady boyfriend.

It all came to a head in the summer holidays.  The gang, or 'pack' as they were known amongst the other girls at school, were having a picnic in the sunshine in the fields behind the school .  They had each taken some food along and  a bottle of lemonade and were playing some games whilst sitting on the grass.  "Truth, dare or promise" was a favourite with them and it was such fun thinking up dares for one another to do.  Simone had just had to promise to kiss one of the boys who hung around by the park when Petra asked Janet how things were going with her and John.

"Fine, absolutely fine", said Janet.  "I think we might be getting engaged this Christmas."

"What!" exclaimed Petra, you are only 16, why on earth would you want to get engaged to John, the world is your oyster and there's a lot of good things awaiting you out there.  Why you might get the exams you want, go on to do more and then go to university.  You can hardly do that if you are married - and possibly have a family."

"But that is what I want" replied Janet.  "Just think, you could come around for tea some times with Janet, and if and when we did have a baby you could take her out for walks and babysit for us so we could have a night out each week."

"No way" said Petra.  "I will be off to university at the first chance I get and living the life of a student away from home."  Jemma and several others nodded their heads at this.

"But, just imagine how wonderful it will be to be married, have my own house.  No mum and dad to tell me what to do, we will both be earning a good wage and I can have the clothes I want, the make up, have my hair done as I want.  Oh life will be wonderful, and I will get to share it all with John."

"You are so wrong" said Jemma, "life just doesn't work out like that.  What sort of job are you going to get, and John, what can he offer?  You think it's all about you - bless your Dylusional heart!"

And with that the whole group sat silent waiting to see what Janet had to say to that."

I am entering this into Alison's challenge over on Art Journal Journey where she chose Summer Countryside as the theme.  See you over there.

Jeudi Journal - Opinion

Here we are, another Dylusion Journal page again, a bit of brayering for the background.   Brayering the background is an easy way of using left over paint from another project just get it up from the mat and roll away.  Not a skill of mine I am afraid but this one turned out better than most and remained rather subtle.  If you look very closely you can see there are some white Gesso circles over the top of the brayering.  I drew two wobbly lines around the edges of the page and stamped some flowers (and a little ladybird) on the base along with a couple of bits of washi tape.

This week the quote from the Dylusions one is "of course your opinion matters, just not to me" and my story goes:

"Marie and Maryanne were two sisters who normally got along fine.  This particular day they had gone out for a walk in the countryside, it was a lovely Sunday and on the way back from church they decided to go by the river and through the meadows on their way home.  Maryanne had worn her new hat which was very stylish and gave her the height she needed to keep up with big sister Marie who always wore high heeled shoes and had her hair spiked,  adding inches to her height.  She hated being the smaller of the two.

They found themselves chatting about some of the ladies in the congregation and what they were wearing.  Not many got dressed up for church these days but the girls had been brought up to make an effort when attending.  Not that their mother would have altogether approved of either outfit - trousers on the one daughter and spikey hair on the other.  "Oh dear," she would have thought, "what is the world coming to?"  It was as well that the girls had left home and lived together in a flat in town.

Some of the girls came under scrutiny but Mrs Bouquet came under fire immediately with the two girls because of the airs and graces she always put on and the silly hats she wore, which prompted Maryanne to tell Marie that she thought she should make a bit more effort on a Sunday for church and possibly wear a hat instead of spiking her hair all the time.  Not a good move Maryanne.  Marie loved her hair like that and she paid quite handsomely to have it cut and coloured so that she could have it in this style.  "And what about that monstrosity you have on" said Marie,  "Your hat looks like one of Mrs Bouquet's cast offs".

Maryanne was very happy with her new hat, it was in shades of pink which she felt was a colour that set her complexion off, the lady in the shop had complimented her when she bought it for her friend's wedding last month and she had said how not many could carry off a piece like that but that Maryanne could.  "To be honest with you" said Marie, "it looks a bit too small for you, sitting perched like that on the centre of your head".  "I wanted to tell you when you first brought it home for Sylvie's wedding". "Well, why didn't you?" asked Maryanne.  "You mean to tell me you let me think I looked nice at the wedding and all the time you were laughing behind my back".   "No", said Marie, "I didn't want to upset you, you were so excited about the hat and it was the perfect colour with the dress you were wearing."  "I just thought today it looked a bit small, maybe it's your hair."

"Oh well," said Maryanne, "I am not bothered what you think about my hat, I am not that keen on your spikey hair to be honest."  "So does my opinion not matter any more?" asked Marie, to which Maryanne replied "Of course it matters, just not to me."  And with that the two girls walked along the river in total silence as they made their way back home."

I know it is a bit of a long shot but I am entering this page into Art Journal Journey where the lovely Alison has set the theme at 'Summer Countryside'.  I hope the pink, blue and yellow of the background makes you think of sumertime and the flowers and little insect adds to the overall effect.

Jeudi Journal - Cuppa?

Well, the quote for today was an easy one if you took it literally.  It concerned a cuppa which is traditionally quite an English thing.  Everyone associates a cup of tea with the English yet there is one here who never ever drinks it.  It's not my cup of tea!  On my journal page this week you can see a cup and saucer but - oh dear, it is empty.

"Three friends have all met up for an afternoon in the sunshine at Lotta's house.  Lotta was the eldest and also the bossiest of the three girls.  Of the other two, Simone and Sarah, Sarah was the baby in the group as well as the tiniest.  Not that she could not hold her own in an argument, she certainly could.  Simone tended to be the peacemaker in the trio.  She hated confrontation.

As usual the topic of conversation centred around make up, hairstyles and fashion.  Simone had chosen to wear her latest purchase, a lovely dress in shades of blue and yellow and she had bought some tiny yellow ankle boots to wear with it.  The other two admired it and said how it looked good on the slim Simone but Lotta felt that she should have had her hair in a different colour, "lilac does not work with that dress somehow" was her rude remark.

Little Sarah was a bit 'put out' and thought Lotta was being rude, "perhaps in one of her moods", she thought. "I hope she does not start passing comment on my hair because I don't want to start colouring it like the other two".  Just then Lotta made a remark about what Sarah was wearing too.  "Don't you think it's about time you stopped wearing those skirts with the straps over the shoulders", she said, "they are the kind of skirts little girls of six and seven wear, not teenagers like you."

Despite being hurt by the comment Sarah answered back and the conversation became a bit heated between the two of them ending with Sarah in tears.  

Ever the one to try to settle arguments Simone stepped in and told Sarah to calm down, "Lotta did not mean it like that", she said, "and you could always cut the straps off and wear it just as a skirt."  

"Then it would look worse than ever" was Lotta's reply to that one.  Sarah, tears now streaming cried out "You just don't care do you?"  To which Lotta answered "This is my cup of care, oh look it's empty" as she lifted her cup of lemon tea and peered inside it".

I know I have given Lotta a very big cup of lemon tea but it rather emphasises the saying doesn't it.

I am entering this into Art Journal Journey where the lovely Mia chose 'butterflies' as the topic for this month.  I decided to add a couple of butterflies flitting about and decorated the cup with them to pretty it up a bit.  Why not join in with this challenge, you have until the end of this month.

I messed up last week and got this post and the one I did mixed up so Wendy and I were out of sync.  Now I am back with my posts in order I hope I get it correct next week.

Jeudi Journal - It's You

I am back with another Journal page featuring Dylusions figures in the main, along with my co-pilot Wendy.  Just something we decided upon as we had a mutual liking for Dyan and her work quite some time ago.  Both of us now try to link our pages to Art Journal Journey and this month the theme over there is "Inspired By .." which was the theme chosen by Eileen who has since passed.  Erika and Chris have taken over the hosting of the theme in honour of her and so today's page is once more inspired by Dyan, the creator of these weird figures because it is a continuation of the story from the week before last.

Do you remember Jessica and Roy from a couple of weeks back - Roy was the one who was always letting Jessica down and he let her down the day of her birthday but turned up to still go out in the evening?  Well things have progressed from there.  

"Jessica went out with her girl friends that evening to celebrate her birthday and realised that there was more to life than being tied to a boy, namely Roy, at such a young age and so she decided - as her friends put it "to give him the flick".  She was going to start enjoying life - and going out with the girls was a laugh, there were so many places they went to and so many things to do that it was like a new world had opened for Jessica.  She was actually thinking of taking horse riding lessons some time in the future.  Yes, Jessica who was a real 'stay at home and stay safe' person was going to go hang gliding, in fact her first lesson was already booked for next week.

The only fly in the ointment was Roy.  He was still on the scene and she had tried to let him down lightly by making excuses that she was busy some evenings but he had not taken the hint.  She thought he would just give up!  "A Persistent Pest" was how her friends labelled him.  So that evening she decided it was time to lay her cards on the table.    

Roy argued that she had changed since she had started going out with the girls and was no long his little "sugar bush" (a term which she had always detested) it was all the fault of those girls she hung around with.  In the end Jessica told him it was over, that she had grown tired of the way he had behaved with her putting his friends before her and now she was going to do the same - her friends were coming first and he was going to have to go.  Yes, she had changed but as she put it "It's not me, it's you" and with that she walked indoors and closed the door on him."

Again a pinkish background, this time using Titan Buff with a bit of red mixed in and then some Whipped Spackle pushed through my Diamonds in the Rough stencil.  I decided to give it a border and so I used  one of Dyan's border stamps but it still looked quite plain so I added some flowers and a broken heart in the bottom corner.

Jeudi Journal - My Age

Sounds familiar?  "My Age Doesn't Bother Me - It's the Side Effects".  This is the quote for this week and I did it way ahead of time - well, Tuesday.  I decided to do something similar for the background to last week but this time to cover the page.  I used three different stencils and three different colours of ink.  Kept it to blues and violet as I like that combination - reminds me of a whinberry pie with cream on it, yum yum!

I decided to use two figures, two sisters, and here they are:

"Lottie and Leonie are two sisters who meet up each week to go shopping.  Lottie, the eldest of the two, has been having a heart to heart chat on the latest shopping spree with her younger sister.  In fact she shed one or two tears as she recalled some of the things that had been happening to her recently.   

As Lottie said, they should  make a leaflet telling you what to expect as you start reaching a certain age.  Her skin had started to dry out and she was having terrible problems with patches that were very dry.  None so bad as the ones on her heels, the skin was simply coming off in sheets.  Her eyesight was worsening too, threading a needle with cotton was a real problem and when stitching a button on she ended up with as many holes in her fingers as on the fabric because she kept on missing the holes.

The thing that worried her most of all was her memory, or lack of it.  That and the fact that she kept seeing things out of the corner of her eye.  Why, only a few moments ago she could have sworn that some of the flowers in the beds had faces on them - and arms and legs.  Were they fairies or what?  Was she losing her marbles?

Leonie sympathised with her, tried her best to calm her big sister down.  It seemed strange as it was always Lottie who had looked after her.  Perhaps now was the time for a role reversal, maybe now it was time for her to look after her big sister and the first thing was to get her to see the doctor."

Now this is so strange.  I wanted to link this up to Art Journal Journey and suddenly, once the page was finished and scanned in to my blog post I realised we were in a new month and there was a new challenge over there.  Not much room for adding anything so I was hoping it was colour related.  Imagine my joy when I saw that Sheila had chosen "a single flower" as the theme for this month.  I had three flowers and three flower girls by Janet Klein on the bottom of my page.  I had just downloaded the collage sheet of these tiny figures the night before and wanted to use them so had included them in my story,  so two of the flowers had to go - and go they did!  With a bit of picking here and there three became one so here is my entry for Art Journal Journey.  See you next week - with a Single Flower.

Jeudi Journal - Sugar?

 Well I am struggling typing as I cut my finger on a piece of paper and, perhaps because I am on blood thinners, it keeps on bleeding,  third plaster now.  So that's my excuse for the state of my blog today.  Did it work?  I don't want sympathy just you to acknowledge that typing and painting was a bit difficult to do.

To begin with I had a page covered in Victorian Velvet Stain but I did not like it.  I decided to paint over it with a red which I toned down a bit with some white.  Talk about in your face!  I had also been doing an online workshop with Marjie Kemper and one of the things we did was use texture paste through a stencil so the obvious thing was to clean it up by putting it on my journal page.  Some left over paste had to be used up rather than put in the pot so it got quite a bit on it - little did I think about the writing I was going to have to do later.

Anyway the quote this week is "Sorry but I'm, all out of Sugar Coating" and today we are in the home of Petunia the pretty cat and her other half, Bert the bulldog.

"Bert has just got a phone call to say he is to report to his doctor's surgery in five days time for his Covid vaccine.  He's been moaning for a while as to when it will be his turn, thinking he should have had it by now because of his bad chest, but now it has come he is reduced to a bit of a quivering wreck.  You see Bert is afraid of needles!  In fact when Petunia gets her knitting out he turns a paler shade of grey and 'whoa', when she starts to continue with her cross stitch he goes positively ashen.

Poor Petunia has had enough, he has done nothing but moan about him needing the vaccine and now it is here he is moaning that he doesn't think he should go.  She is getting a little tired of going into another room to do her sewing and knitting just because of his "fear" of needles which she seriously thinks is ridiculous and partially because he wants to stretch out on the sofa and watch what HE wants the whole time on television.  She is always finding ways to pacify him about the various phobias he says he has but this time she has had enough.  For the first time in her life she gets angry and yells at him "Sorry but I'm all out of sugar coating".  Then she tells him he is worse than the kids."

This story has come about because they are wheeling out the vaccines like nobody's business here in the UK.  Every night the news is full of the various places where they have set up huge centres in an attempt to get everyone vaccinated as soon as possible.  Some areas are ahead of others but if people will only wait their turn it will come.  (Incidentally this is no reflection on my other half, he is happy to wait his turn, unlike some.). 

I am linking this to Erika's challenge over on Art Journal Journey where she asks you to choose your favourite things.  I think one thing I am very happy about at the moment is that at last it looks as if we might have a more normal life ahead of us - I just pray it is so and the medics and all associated with them  can start to relax a little and have less stress in their lives.  

Jeudi Journal - Ask My Kids

"Ask My Kids, they know Everything" is the latest quote chosen by me from my new plate of quotes by Dyan.  I thought it would be relatively easy to do and I started out with a painted background which got a bit messy.  I decided to use Amsterdam's Burnt Sienna with a little of Dina Wakley's  Cheddar mixed in.  It went on rather patchily and not quite as I had hoped for.  Not to worry, the leaves from the Dylusion Stencil in Amsterdam Yellowish Green helped to disguise it.

For my figures I wanted to do something not quite so obvious so I went down the road of using dogs.  Not Dylusion dogs either - to ring the changes I used the Katzelkraft ones.  I just love the expressions on these faces and felt that the little pug sat by his mother is sort of looking up at her with a kind of sad look and the little guy next to him is a bit cheekier and saying "what on earth are you on about" judging by the expression on his face, "of course we know more".  Am not sure the baby of the group, who is far busier with his cup of hot milk, really knows what is going on or is even part of this conversation.

Because I wanted it to be mum and not dad who featured I changed heads from the original Dylusion figures so we have a rather grumpy looking 'mum' standing there with her hand on her hip.

Not sure if you can tell but I have highlighted some parts of the 'family' with a little Glossy Accents - the cup of the baby dog, the bow tie and nose of the middle one, the bowler hat and the eyeballs of the pug and the nose of mother.

As the words are new and the Glossy Accents is a new one plus the Cheddar (gorgeous isn't it, thanks Angela for putting me onto it) I am entering this into Art Journal Journey where the theme, by Jo, is something new.

Will pop off now and see what Wendy has done.  See you next week.