Those fleeting moments of inspiration.

Have you ever been driving in your car and been composing a speech, a poem, or thinking about an art project design? Unfortunately for me, it always seems so perfect at the time, but frequently something happens to interrupt my process and by the time I get home, it has slipped away not to be re-created as well as I had it figured out.

When I lived in Salt Lake, I would love to visit the Antropologie store whenever I

went to the Gateway Mall downtown (after I had been to Ben's cookies of course) to see what was new since they have all kinds of cool objects inside. I hardly ever looked at their clothing line. What always drew my attention was the home decor items and the decor around the store. The style of their store decorator always appealed to me. One time, she had taken large bamboo outdoor rugs and painted a design on them. Very cool. I didn't have a use for any bamboo rugs, but I kept searching for a way to use that idea.....somehow. I also loved visiting Sam Weller's used book store which was downtown. Way down in the basement was a clearance room. It quite frequently held old books being cleared out for a few dollars. Just my thing.

One day as I was strolling/trolling thru JoAnn's, I came across some bamboo place mats. They were a miniature version of the bamboo rugs and were only a dollar a piece. I picked up enough to hopefully do an art project with my other rubber stamp enthusiats.I had also picked up several cool books at Sam's, but the two never came together until I moved to Washington.

If you notice, at the beginning of this blog, it mentions trying to clean out and organize the creative room. It was on this day I re-aquainted myself with the bamboo placemats as well as a book I had purchased at Sam Weller's. The book was translated Chinese poems. Some of the poems had simple drawings.

That long ago inspiration popped into my head, slightly on the vague side, but there none the less. An art project to share with some new found friends.

I took the place mats with me to my friend Joy's house. She has been hosting our meetings as she has a great place to work and share together. She also has a ton of cool creative items. I bought a few mat board remnants from a local frame store to use as a backdrop for our bamboo mats. The idea was to pull a poem from the book and build the poster around that. I had been saving a few pieces of Asian type ephemera for just this occasion.
I brought alsong a few stamps, ink, and embossing powder just in case.

The board I created started with the poem I had choosen and the colors in the drawing. As it turned out, the colors of mat board that were available were just the colors everyone would need. I stamped and embossed a dragon at the top center of my board using gold ink and gold embossing powder since 2012 would bring the year of the dragon. Using a watermark pad I did some stamping along the bottom and side of the mat board using an image of a ginko leaf. Then I stamped a few images on the bamboo mat before adhering it to the mat board. I did stamp a few additional images onto the poem pages for added interest. Using an embossing floder I created the Geisha image and cut her out as the embossing folder creates a larger image than I wanted. On the left side of the mat board and along the bottom I had cut a few strips from a beautiful piece of paper to also adhere as added embellishments. I had a punched item that had been sitting around for several years that I placed in the bottom left corner. Since the Geisha cut out was holding a fan, I utilized a paper fan that I had purchaed at World Market. I first removed the ribbings and actually tore the fan apart using a smaller portion. The bottom right of the picture is another stamped image that I placed on a piece of notepad that already had a design printed on it. And can you believe that one of the papers is a piece of wall paper? I love re-purposing. The finishing touch was an Asian coin and a ribbon to hang it from which is not shown in this photo.

Spring cleaning and catching up

Okay...so I haven't posted in forever because I didn't finish organizing and it's still crazy in the art room, but that didn't stop me from creating. I decided to share some of what has been going on because it has been too much fun.

In October a group of friends started gathering at my friend Joy's house to spend some time creating and sharing.
This is what we were up too -

Upper left corner was my card. Upper right was Joy's. Lower left was Paulette's. Lower right was Berta's.

The idea is to create your design and bring all the parts so everyone else can make one also.

For my card, I started with a watercolor card, trimmed the edges using deckled scissors and layered a piece of soft green cardstock. On a piece of mulberry paper I used an old ink pad from Ranger that had multiple colors in it called either Spice or Foliage. I have not checked to see if Ranger still makes these cool multi-colored pads as mine are many, many years old but still work. The stamp I used for stamping this beautiful tree is from Rosebud Rubber Stamps. They seem to be out of business. I have a lot of stamps and since I have been collecting them since the 80's, many of them are old. SORRY! After stamping, we added some dimensional adhesive, sprinkled in some glass beads, tied on a ribbon and voila'....a beautiful card for the fall.