WOYWW 643

It's another WOYWW day!  Gather your craft stuff whilst you may - show us your desk - then off to play.  Not much of a poet am I?  But it is Wednesday and that means it is WOYWW.

Yes, we've been away again but no more glorious sunsets, sorry.  I did make two birthday cards but sent them off without scanning but I did remember for Mary Anne especially, to show some of my Midori Books.  Well that's what the Jane Davenport ones were sold as - here they are:

These are the covers of some of them.  Top left and laid out at the bottom are two covers done with Abs in workshops, the centre one is my own covered in tissue and decorated, the third with the ladies is the bought Jane Davenport one as is the white one laid at the bottom right.

This is an attempt to show you the inside.  If you look top right that is the Jane Davenport one (my first) and there are lots of individual booklets inside.  One is for a holiday in Amsterdam, one for a Christmas market in Germany, one for unmounted stamps by a certain supplier (long gone idea) and so on.  The books are not stapled together but held together with a piece of elastic - like shirring elastic, each in its own cover so it is easy to slip two more pages in if/when you want to.  Is that clear, or clear as mud? If "muddy" I will have to do a video of them.

Not had the chance to do the videos for You Tube of the journals, but I have done the covers for my Open Spine Journal or whatever it is called.  I won't put them on here today but I hope to get up to date with some videos later.

My desk is rather busy with a jumble of stuff for a workshop I am doing online. Thought I had better get everything together whilst I have the chance.  So here it is below and then its toodle pip until next WOYWW - IN OCTOBER!

Jeudi Journal - Sarcastic?

"Things were a bit tight after the end of the war and Mrs Brown had been as frugal as she possibly could be with most things.  Her husband had been invited to a "bit of a do" by his boss at work, "just drinks and nibbles and a chance to network" hubby had said.  He wanted his wife to look nice and so she had been planning a new outfit for weeks.

She had managed to unpick the sleeves from a golfing sweater her husband used to wear.  It was in good condition apart from holes in the elbows where he had leant on his desk and together with the sleeves from one of her own sweaters (she had got bleach on the front of it whilst cleaning a while ago, ever so upset she had been) she felt it made a super top for her.  She knew she wouldn't be the best dressed woman there but with what Reggie earned and what she managed to scrape together she felt her outfit would be admired and maybe even a talking point amongst the other women.

It was the skirt she was most proud of.  It had taken a long time in the planning but with begging her friends for old ties that their husbands and sons no longer wanted she had made herself a skirt.  She was absolutely delighted and couldn't wait for Reggie to come home.  She had it all planned.  They would have a light meal that evening, so little preparation was needed, and then he would get in his best demob suit and she would surprise him with her lovely new outfit set off with a cute beret her aunt had knitted for her and which she had attached a bow to.

Reggie came home, they sat down, had a bite to eat, in anticipation of the "nibbles" that evening, and sure enough, Reggie went upstairs, had a quick shower and came back down all ready and sporting a cravat as it was a special evening.  Mrs Brown looked at herself in the mirror upstairs, gave her beret a little twist to one side to show off the bow and walked slowly down the stairs and into the living room.

"Well?" she said, as she stood there waiting for Reggie to tell her how lovely she looked.

Poor Reggie, he was not sure about that skirt at all.  He realised she had done it all to make an effort to look nice for him in front of his friends from the office but he was not that good at making his face look as if he was really saying nice things and so he asked himself "Hmm.. should I answer normally or should I be sarcastic?"  In the end he said "I do like that beret you are wearing dear, but surely you won't be keeping it on all the time will you?"

To begin with I had a green page done previously and so I stencilled my favourite 'wallpaper looking stencil' over it very lightly in Tea Dye, added a 40's tv and some flying ducks (at this point `I must say we never had flying anything on the walls of our house when I was a child) to try to give it an authentic 40 - 50's look about the page.

I chose to type the words out again instead of doing my own writing as I had so little room on the page to do anything other than that.

Now that I have managed to reproduce something like a vintage vibe to this Dylusion page I am entering it into Art Journal Journey where Wendy has chosen vintage as the theme this month.

WOYWW 642

Another Wednesday, another WOYWW and another desk to bare.  We've had another nice week weatherwise so it's been some nice sunshiny days for us in the north, hope everyone else has had much the same.

I did find my inner pages for my spineless journal just after I had posted, it was in the pile of papers on the right hand side of my journal.  Recognisable by the sari ribbon - which I did not see - needed my new glasses from Specsavers!  Well, it is still in the same state, ie not done the front and back covers but that's because we have been away again and I didn't want to mess up with Gesso and paint etc etc.  I did, however, almost finish a tiny teabag junk journal.  I'll show you the front cover. I just ran out of tiny things to put in it so there are three pages still to finish. I'll put it on my You Tube later when it is finished.

Talking Journals, Mary Anne mentioned a Traveller's Notebook in her comments to me last week.  I wonder if she means the Midori Books.  If so I have lots of those, they were quite the craze a few years ago and I made my first with Abs from AA&C but I had bought a Jane Davenport one previous to that.  The posh bought one came with all kinds of attachments - I really did not need all of those - could have made similar myself.

Anyway, here is my desk:

And here are some journals for you to look at, I'll dig my Midori's out next week.  Maybe even have a Journal Fest.

Finally some sunset photos from Monday evening, strolling along the prom

The colours are not as vivid as the one I took, a few weeks ago, but it had not been as dry a day.  However I still enjoyed it and it was worth waiting for as we walked along,  I loved how the top edges of the clouds were tinged with gold.

That's it for now so see you next week hopefully.

Jeudi Journal - Judgement

 Today we will go straight into the story:

"Leah and Toni had met up outside the new store in town.  Both obeying the rules about Covid they were suitably masked and sanitised with extra sanitiser with them for when they came out of the store.  They had heard all about 'VB & S' and as both were very fashion conscious they immediately wanted to shop.  Toni would not say she had a fetish for handbags, but she certainly had more than her fair share of them tucked in her wardrobe and this was a store that specialised in Vintage bags and shoes.  Both girls were fans of the 20s to 40's and anything Art Deco really was a 'must have'.

Inside was like an Aladdin's Cave to them.  There was every colour of handbag under the sun and whilst Leah just bought the one, with cute hearts all over the front Toni went crazy and bought four handbags, all different colours and styles.  Her favourite was the green one but she loved the pink one and it would match the outfit she was wearing today.

They came out of the store and straight away Leah wanted to know what Toni had bought so with no hesitation she piled them all up on the floor and began chattering about them all.  The pink one would look good with today's dress, the green one with her pant-suit, the small red one would be ideal when they went dancing and the brown squishy one was ideal for work.

Leah thought she had bought too much in the one shopping spree and told her so.  "You know what you are like, you see something and immediately you have to have it."  "Really Toni would it not have been better to wait and see what the new deliveries would bring?"  "You already have one very much like the brown one, and do you think the red one will hold all the 'clobber' you take when we go out.  It's hardly big enough to hold a mobile phone."

Toni was annoyed and started to justify herself ending by telling Leah she was jealous of all the nice things she had and if she hadn't anything nice to say she should keep her mouth firmly closed.  It really began to look as if the two girls were going to end their friendship.

Leah realised this was going to blow up out of all proportion and so she ended it by saying "The only thing I ever have to add is judgement," and the two looked at one another and began laughing."

I really want to get using some of my Dylusion paints up before they dry out and so I used the blue to cover this entire page.  I was intending to put a stencil on top but my right thumb is so painful at the moment that crafting (and typing) is a real chore.  So I set to and began drawing the accessories I needed for the page.  I was sure I had a lace rubber stamp somewhere but as which box I looked in I could not find it.  Then I found this Art Deco border stamps and decided that would do.  It was difficult stamping it at the beginning of a Journal but I did my best

So that is it for this week, Wendy I am struggling to link to AJJ but so far am managing even if the stories are going wilder and wilder.  So my Jeudi Journal page is once more entering the challenge at Art Journal Journey.  See you there.

WOYWW 641

 Another week, another desk picture and this one is only a tiny bit of my mess of a room.

I'll just show you the desk, the bit I work on.  Like last week I have been doing my journal page ready for Thursday so I've flipped back to an old one.  I did want to do some cards but the mojo for card making has not come back as yet despite my having my Janet Klein figures out at the side of my journal.

I have done something this week, I've made a start on a spineless Journal book.  I thought it meant I could add pages as I went on but I found out, when making it, that that is not so.  Anyway, I went ahead and cut some lovely papers up that I was sure I would not use - more suited to a scrapbooker.  Then I folded them in half and stuck a hole through the centre and made them all fit inside one another.  I now have to do a cover and I have the mountboard cut, just not got around to painting it as yet.  That doesn't really matter as I can't find the pages.  Doh!

After my journal on my desk are some of my scraps of paper which I am going to use to make another junk journal, but at the moment my bff sent me a link to a Phoebe Tonasaki video where she made a teabag book from some teabags.  You only use three or four and I actually managed to find some which I can use.  They are not the ones I have at home but more the kind you find in cafes and hotels - where the bag is doubled up.

So next week I might just might have done something of interest.  Will it be cards (that I need to do), a teabag journal in miniature, or my completed spineless one.  See you over at the Stamping Ground in a minute.

Jeudi Journal - Old Enough

 Today the words I had to work with were "I am starting to think I will never be old enough to know better" and so many times they really do apply to me.  But then I tell myself that really I am "young at heart if old in body" and it is only the aches and pains that have come on in later years that have stopped me from doing some of the things I would love to do.

Take for instance the background to this page.  It began life inked up with Tumbled Glass Distress Ink, but because of the pain I have in my right thumb I was finding putting it on with a light touch was not going as planned and it looked very patchy.  So on with a stencil and some more ink.  Well, that covered up the blotchiness but it didn't look at all right.  A coat of Pistachio paint was next, not keen on the colour although it looks good where the stencil pattern shows through a little.  Another coat of paint, this time Birch, ugh!  No that was not nice at all - back to the Pistachio.  At first it looked a bit like one of those lovely textured paint jobs that Valerie does so well but then it dried - flat!

By this time I was running out of time and so it had to do, now to the figures.  No, they won't do and the story has to be vintage so I can enter it into Wendy's challenge on Art Journal Journey.  Another think.  Yes, Bill Haley can be classed as Vintage.  If you look him up it says he was active from 1946 - 1980, surely that makes him vintage.  And so an alternative story was formed and the page was constructed.

I remember "Rock Around the Clock" coming to our local cinema and some teenagers were asked to leave the cinema for dancing in the aisles at the music.  Now I am not saying I was one of those teenagers or even a bystander but I do remember it clearly.  And so does Ethel ...

"Ethel was a terrific grandma to young Gemma, or so Gemma thought.  Always lots of fun when her gran was around, and the stories she used to tell were wonderful.  Gran had been telling Gemma about the time Bill Haley and the Comets were all the rage.  In fact he was known for being one of the pioneers of rock and roll music, and credited by many with first popularising this kind of music in the early 50's with his band, The Comets.

Gemma had loved listening to gran and her stories and listening to the music that gran played on her old record player.  Gran had been trying to teach her to jive to some of the music and Rock Around the Clock was a big favourite of the two of them.

Gemma's mum had gone to her local craft group, held in the Community Centre and she came back eager to tell her daughter about a tribute band that was coming to their town and playing at the centre in two week's time.  Gemma could not wait to let her gran know.  Little did she know that her mum had secured two tickets, one for Gemma and one for Gran.  At last she was going to hear the real sounds of Bill Hayley and The Comets.

She rushed around to Grans as soon as she could and the two of them began planning what they were going to wear and to brush up on their dancing skills.  Poor gran said "I am starting to think I will never be old enough to know better" as she felt the aches and pains coming on from her old bones dancing about in a frenzy. "

So there you are, I've done my best to use the quote which Wendy chose and also include her other challenge, Vintage, into the story.  Figures were Dylusion ones as usual and the posters were from the internet.  I added some words from Rock Around the Clock to the poster on the right to create a border.

WOYWW 640

A nice round number today, and I am feeling 'round' so think it is time I took myself in hand.  All through lockdown I was fine, stayed a nice reasonable weight but as soon as I start actually going in a supermarket I start eating all the wrong things.  Too much temptation on the shelves.  I must learn to have a bit more restraint when I go shopping later this morning.  I've had more exercise but that does not make up for all the munchies I have had.  Confession:  I am a chocoholic!

Confession over, now to my desk.  Yes, away again but home later today so once more it is a different desk you are seeing.  Actually taken Tuesday morning I thought I would treat you to a view outside on the patio - to the woods that surround us when we are up here.

Obviously I have turned my Journal to another page, not the page I am working on as that is work in process for tomorrow.  At the far end of the coffee table is a box with some images in and on top are my stencils from AALL & Create.  I was using blues and greens so I have my tiny Distress Inks out in a small tin storing those shades and there are also two brushes that I use, one for each colour.  So that is it - my desk for WOYWW for today.  Want to join in?  Follow the link and we'll see you there.

That geranium you can see has been the most prolific plant I have ever had.  Endless flowers, I think it could really do with a bigger pot now.  I've cut lots of flowers off as they have died but it still goes on producing. Well worth the £3.99 from the local (to home) garden centre.

Monday was quite a misty morning down on the sea front but it was lovely and warm and we had a good long walk spotting lots of Sandpipers, Curlews and Cormorants.  Unfortunately they were a bit too far out for me to take a photo that would be worth saving so here's a photo I took of the water and some boats - it was as still as a mill pond.  You can see how misty it was when you look across at the Lake District - you can hardly see the mountains in the distance.

Well, that's it for this morning, nothing else to report.  Had my eyes tested, just a slight change in distance but not enough to warrant definitely getting new specs but I did as I want new frames.  Funny though as I took an old pair of specs with me as I wanted as close to that design as possible,  Luckily I got some very close so I will be a happy bunny when they arrive in two weeks time.

See you around. x