AAJ1 Challenge 10 & 11 - Altered Art Journal Challenge

April and May 2013 Challenge
Must include:

• There shall be a window between the two pages. 
• April is orange with fabric.
• May is yellow with a border.

APRIL
Top Book = Zoo, Bottom book = Red Bear

Red Bear had picked up some natural ephemera on one of her walks.  She used one of them to paint the meandering word tracks on her left orange page and around the window on her right orange page.

I just figured out that her bird is sandwiched between two layers of translucent-something and is in fact suspended inside her window.  How have I not known that all these years?

I decided to have fabric and borders on both pages. Used my Spellbinders Nestabilities Rectangle and Scalloped Oval dies. The fabric elements are the scalloped ovals under each flower page and the text frames on the window pages.

The same fabric was used for both months. April fabric was coloured with acrylic paint and fabric medium for the orange pages. This also stiffened the fabric so it went through the die cutter easily.

My April Butterflies: I wet the butterfly body and molded it around a reed. I held it in place with a binder clip while drying to give the body a cylindrical shape and to pinch in the wings against the base of the body.

The body was coloured with black and cold grey PITT pens and highlighted with GAC.
Gluing my die cut tissue paper window frames was an exercise in patience.

MAY
Top Book = Zoo, Bottom book = Red Bear

This was when Red Bear fell in love with spreading chalk around a Versa-mark/clear stamp inked image and rubbing the chalk into the ink and spreading it over the page.  She pretty much uses this technique every chance she gets now!  I think she learned this in her card class or maybe from a YouTube video.

My May Butterflies: Once glued to the page I used a Sakura Gelly Roll Black Glaze pen to define the butterfly bodies and when that was dry, covered it with GAC. [Inkadinkado Glossy Accents - Clear]

The text frame is 100% cotton fabric, pre-washed, with a fusible backing attached then die-cut with a Spellbinders rectangle die.

Gluing tissue paper frames on Flickr, orange, yellow.

SpellBinders Curved Border Dies

Hello again. I am waiting for my banana bread to finish baking and since I am stuck on this level of the house and am definitely not in the mood to vacuum, I thought I would do up another post. I recently stole (borrowed) Zoo's two sets of border die's from SpellBinders (Curved Borders One and Two - each with 6 dies) and fell in love with them. Oodles of fun playing with these dies and I can see making waaaaay too many cards with them.

I have done two sets of cards so far. Each time I sat down to play with them I chose a couple of colours of 8 1/2"x11"paper, cut them half then started cutting different borders from each end of the paper. In this way I ended up with an abundant amount of die cut pieces to mount on to a card. I mounted all the pieces onto the card bases and then decorated them at this point. Probably a backward way of doing things but that was how my brain was working at the time.

When it was time to decorate them I found it hard to cover them up, so only used bows (made with the aid of this awesome video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gw6vUApUCrk&list=LLrPw3KR7TMCTKUPVvRy-_3g&index=70&t=969s), Dollarama bling, small die cut shapes and a couple of butterflies from a page Zoo gave me that she coloured and didn't know what to do with (She colours beautiful things and then they sit in her craft room where no one can see them. Such a crime. Thanks, Zoo, for letting me show these off !). Upon previewing the post I discovered that the two cards I made with the butterflies are not in the picture file. I gave them away before I took pictures. Typical me. I know Zoo has one so she may add a picture when she gets a chance.

Anyway... enough of me babbling. Here are the cards I have made so far.

The possibilities with these die sets are endless. I look forward to playing with them again in the future. I know Zoo will want them back when she sees the pretty cards but they have such a long distance to travel back out west that they may have to rest up at my house for a few more weeks : )