Don't be a sheep...............

but if you have to........be a black one!!

 I think what I mean by this is don't just blindly follow, try to be a little (or a lot) different, to stand out from the crowd............be a black sheep in a crowd of white ones!

 And what prompted this?

Well......let me just get me soap box out and climb up on it......

OK,  I find it very strange that a product only has to have Tim Holtz written on it for all common sense to go out the window regardless of whether the product is good or not........want an example? "new" stamps that are just old ones re-sized.......paper clips with gems stuck on, screw eyes....and the best of all the new Stamp and Cut which cuts out Tims stamps......even the square and rectangular ones.....by means of a mega expensive die cutting machine......I mean, come on!!

 Is it just me that thinks this way??????

Just my opinion:)

Reaper of Hearts

 I started this page yesterday......had to leave the drips and splatters to dry ............

 .......I like this little quote.................

 ........meet Saint Valentine......he is a new image from Lily over at THE OCTOPODE FACTORY

Lost in Lace

 I was so taken by one particular piece that I saw at the Lace exhibition in Birmingham the other day that I decided to use some of my pics for a journal page. A few days ago I bought myself a new Moleskine journal.....a nice red one.......and I decided on a ruled one just to give another dimension to the pages. The idea is to leave some of the lines showing or to actually use them.....not too sure I achieved that on this page! Oh well!

 First step was to use up the left over watery brown paint you can see sitting on the tile in the picture above.....ooops made the pages curl.....heat gun sorted that out!

 Before it was completely dry I rubbed over some Pan Pastels in orange and brown....................

 ........then stamped some lace around the edges and used a credit card dipped in black paint to echo the lines in the photos......................

 The finished thing..............my natural inclination was to add the pics at angles and overlapping each other but I resisted and put them down on the page straight as contrast to all the crossing lines

 If you are interested, the artist who created this installation in the exhibition is  

CHIHARU SHIOTA....click to read more.

Oh yes.....I used my Poloroid Pogo mini printer for the pics.

Lace and a metal man

 Today a friend and I went to Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery to see LOST IN LACE......a contemporary look at lace...it was very interesting and certainly not lace as you normally think of it.

 

 This was made from metal.............and look....a skull!!

 A beautiful wire and bead chandelier- like piece........

 here are two pieces......the one in the distance is made with punch cards and wire................

 .................. the nearer one looks like punched paper.......all these were lovely but.....

  MY ABSOLUTE FAVOURITE PIECE WAS THIS..................WOW, WOW AND WOW!

 its hard to see the scale of this.....it was set into the corner of the room and the dresses were hanging free and were more than life sized.....

 the black lines are lengths of black wool representing the lace aspect..................

 it had something of a creepy, slightly spooky feel to it but I LOVED IT!

 Then outside of the museum was this................I was thinking 

"it looks a bit like the Angel of the North".......

 and lo and behold when I went to look it is called "Iron Man" by Anthony Gormley!

A Winter Day

and today certainly was.............a WINTER DAY that is. 

My friend Tracy and I decided to head for a local garden centre for coffee and a scone .....they make particularly yummy scones:).......before going junk shopping.............boy was it COLD and even tried to snow at one point...........as soon as we had bought what we needed we headed home!

I could happily have spent the rest of the day on the sofa and dozed with a book but instead decided not to be lazy and to work on another page in my map journal.

Foundling, a girl 11868

 Yesterday I spent the day in London. I met up with a friend at The British Library where we saw an exhibition of Illuminated Books that have been owned by royalty.........it was beautiful.

After that we went to The Foundling Museum to see an exhibition of paintings by Quentin Blake, great fun and quirky................but I have to say that the thing that stays with me from the day was something I saw in The Foundling Museum itself.

 These postcards show scraps of fabric..........many of the children left at the Foundling Hospital had these scraps of fabric attached to their clothing by their mothers in the hope that they would stay with the children so that if they could ever retrurn to collect them they could identify their children.

There were also display cases of  other tokens that had been left with the children...........from coins and medals to tiny twists of wire to little strings of beads to scraps of sewn fabric, whatever the mothers could afford to leave with the children they could not look after..............I have to say the heart shaped pieces were the most poignnant especially when we read that the tokens etc were not kept with the children so even if they did return the mothers couldn't identify their children...............it was heart wrenching.

 So, today, unable to get it out of my head I decided to make a journal page to remind me of the day...........this is my tribute to all those mothers who could not look after their children and had to give them up.

The children were given numbers..............foundling, a girl 11868, b.1759

The background to my page started out as squares of paper ( my shopping from Anthropologie was wrapped in it......love that shop!) glued to the page so the edges were not stuck down completely.......I like the way it came out, will use the idea again!

Big hat?

 This is another page in my new map journal (see previous post). I have decided on a sort of theme for this journal............I am going to keep it simpler than usual as I don't want to cover over the maps completely......especially those pages that have more mappy bits on them.....so, I'm going to use black and white images and probably only a quote......we'll see how it goes!

 Answers on a postcard please!!

 I love this image! 

I drew around the bloke a bit as he had faded into the background with all the red and black inky circles and drips but had to stop when he was in danger of getting drawn on glasses!

 Black and red inky circles, drips, spots and spatters! Oh and a long-legged beastie!

 Did you know that I LOVE alphabet stamps?? Well, I do!

I popped into Hobbycraft at the weekend.....was meant to be going to Currys but Hobbycraft is only two shops down so rude not to.................and they had these little alphabet sets for only £1.50!

I like the slightly Gothic looking one very much!

"edit"...I just saw that MACABRE MONDAY has the challenge to use a map......so as this qualifies I'm entering it to the challenge!