Surprise! It's Yelling Girl

Here's a multi-media journal page thingy I made a long time ago that I just uncovered while cleaning my studio.  Yay for fun surprises!  I love this zany little girl...and the combination of orange and pink...and using staples instead of glue...and fake rhinestones...and butterflies...and ephemera...and hand stamped paper.

Up to the moon! All through the sky!

Here's a collage I made this weekend. It is supposedly for my holiday cards, although there's nothing holiday-ish about it. It is, however, optimistic and peaceful and nurturing...and I think that's a grand way to start off a new year. The crown was made from a nifty punch I bought at Michael's with a gift certificate my sister sent me...that makes it doubly fun! I was inspired by the book SCRAPS (that I posted about earlier) to incorporate lots of postage stamps.

SCRAPS is TOPS!

Oooooh, I just checked out the niftiest library book. It's called SCRAPS - An Inspirational Field Guide to Collage, and boy, is THAT truth in advertising! It is chock full of amazing multi-media collages that evoke fantasies of world travel when it was mysterious and exotic. I am declaring myself an official groupie of Elsebeth Gynther and Christine Clemmensen henceforth. Check out their work (and their blogs)!

Heigho! Purple flowers and robin wings

And here are some more from my alphabet-block series. For the blue and purple one, I mixed all sorts of pages from French poetry and shorthand books with snippets from an old dictionary and nature images.


For this piece, I used dictionary pages and Asian text I had spritzed with walnut ink through a wing-shaped stencil.

4 and 20 blackbirds baked in a pie???!!!!

A few months ago I scored a huge tub of wooden alphabet blocks at a thrift store. Some were new, but many were chipped and worn with rounded edges...just the way I like 'em. I also happened upon a disintegrating vintage book of nursery rhymes...the kind all in black and white except for a few illustrations in primary colors.

I set aside the distressed blocks to use as they were. Then I covered a flat side of the newer blocks with little snippets from the book. I alternated the blocks and then hot glued them together, layer by layer. Then I wrapped strips of text around the edges to finish the look.

I gotta tell you...I had forgotten how creepy some of those rhymes could be. I didn't mind cutting THOSE particular ones up to make these little treasures.

Watch those lips!

This binder of volunteer information was so bland I decided to bling it up with some crazy collage. I cut flowers out of old wallpaper, glued egg images onto a paint strip, outlined parts with funky red tape and used my nifty Sigmo white pen to doodle. Ahhhhhh, MUCH better....

Except, I get that the woman in the June Cleaver pearls and blouse really loves her bird, but each time I look at her, I fear for her lips.

Rose Blocks

This is a little something I made out of worn out wooden alphabet blocks. I glued snippets from old books and music sheets onto a smooth side of each block, hot-glued all of the blocks together to form the bigger 3x4 block, and then covered the edges with still more text from an old nursery rhyme book. I glued little fabric tabs on top so that it could be hung.

My patient, patient friend Jason, who is a photographic whiz spent time with me this evening getting me set up to take pictures that aren't blurry. We finally found the magic settings, so even though I was tired and grungy from gardening, I took a few shots to post.

Boredom's Brother

This is a smattering of oddball cookie fortunes I've tracked down over the years. I used them to make a bunch of little collaged bookmarks for a friend's 40th birthday celebration (like this one):

Now is the time to stop relying on fortune cookies for answers.

To you life is a bold and dashing dog tag.

Take time today to thank the little rodents.

The greatest danger could be your stupidity.

Your luck has completely changed your goldfish.

A modest person never talks to the tissue box.

Ceiling fans can never hope to win you while your electric plug is still young.

Your present question marks are going to succeed.

Your uniqueness is more than your social problem.

Be willing to take napkins as to give them.

If a talking dog should cross your path, hide your food before it does.

Your love life will be yours.

When one lacks a sense of running, there will be disaster.

Someone is speaking well of your tree.

The current year will bring you many happy pencils.

Siblings need your attention...so what.

There is a secret romance brewing despite your running faucet.

Your rubber bands are heading in the right direction.

Spring fling

Feeling the need for a little spring in my life, I crafted these little stitched paper collages. The background is a stack of pages from an old foreign book held together by sewing the bird image on top. The bird images came from a fabulous sheet of upscale Cavallini wrapping paper (with 25 images per sheet, it's just pennies per serving!)

I love those little flower stamens that come in all sorts of colors, so I added a few along with a strip of fun ribbon to the botton. I used a circle hole punch at the top of the first page and then glued an image behind the little window.

I love the look of the vintage game tiles with letters so I crafted a "faux" set by painting a piece of chipboard with acrylic paint, then slicing it into small squares, onto which I stamped letters. I threaded a short length of ribbon through two holes punched at the top corners for hanging and it was complete.

The blue collage contains stamps I collected from Roratonga in the Cook Islands when I was lucky enough to go scuba diving there several years back. A few matching buttons, baubles and scoopy little scallops on the edges finished it off.

Do butterflies grow on vines?

Here I stitched only through the centers of the butterflies so the wings were slightly 3-dimensional.

A very cozy nest

This is a sample of a stitched paper collage that I'll be teaching at the Salvage Studio on Saturday, March 7. I combined wallpaper, scrapbook paper and vintage images along with scraps of sheet music, tea-dyed cheesecloth and cherry-printed ribbon snipped into bits for the nest. I like how the mother bird is tending to the little girl.

Hope is a grand thing

For this stitched paper collage I used text scraps with 6 different languages (7 if you count music). I'm thinking if they all work together in this project, they should all work together on the planet, n'est ce pas?

Not the blues

And just to shake up the color scheme a little bit...here's some red for you.

Dr Hill, I Presume?

This collage contains an old Rolodex-style index card that identifes Dr. John Wesley Hill as a "prominent peace speaker" from New York. Isn't that mysterious? Who typed up that card? For what purpose? It makes me wonder what flotsam and jetsam from my life might end up in someone's artwork years from now.

I did some cybersleuthing on "the google" and determined that in 1915 Dr. Hill was president of the International Peace Forum. Its purpose was "to promote industrial and international peace by encouraging a systematic study of the causes of strikes, lock-outs and war, and the best methods of bringing about conciliation." Works for me...

The Bird is the Word!

I'm really happy with the series of stitched paper collages I did a few months ago, if I say so myself. I'm going to teach this project at the Salvage Studio next spring and have my fingers crossed to teach at another venue next summer. The photos were taken by my stupendously fabulous photographer friend Julie Sotomura.

The Patron Saint of Artgirl Island

Frida, as a collage under glass...