This dispenser is perfect for your on-the-go journaling bag. I use glue stick a lot, but the tape comes in handy for quick add-ins and things that might be slightly heavier than the glue stick can handle. There’s a coupon that you can download and print, too. I bought the green one yesterday to try out, but I’m going to get more of these for my assorted supply bags. I never have to untangle my double stick tape from the other stuff in my bag ever again! This is brilliant!

This past weekend, I took 5 mixed media workshops from Kelly Kilmer, who was the visiting artist at The Artists’ Nook this month. There are no words to describe how much I love Kelly’s classes and how much I get out of her workshops. Every time I take a Kelly class, I am able to play, experiment and I always get new ideas, either from her, or from expanding on something she or another student said.

This weekend’s highlights, not in any particular order:

• Seeing Kelly and learning from her. She is so creative, free and amazingly supportive.
• Getting to know Allyson better, and getting an awesome ego boost from her. *waves and paints Allyson’s hand*
• Learning more about layering and color mixing and composition.
• Realizing that some of the crazy stuff I do in my journals isn’t as crazy as I thought!
• Seeing my old pals, like Susan and Marcy and Karen and Terry, who I haven’t seen in a long time. I really admire the talent of these ladies!
• Meeting new people! Yes, I’m talking about you, you Ladies From Parker!
• Three full days of making art and playing. Heaven.

Last night, I was so amped up, I made 14 of the little paper journals while we watched tv. I love them.

I think my favorite book was the Reclaimed book. I love the idea of taking old books, gutting them, and making new pages for them.

THANK YOU SO MUCH, KELLY!

Clicking on any of the photos below should take you to my Flickr set of photos from this weekend. I should have taken more of the process, but I was too absorbed to even think of that.

Transcribed	Altered Photos Revisited
Triptych Book	Swatches: Little Paper Books
Reclaimed: An Altered Artist’s Book

Mini quilts. These are fun and I’m finally getting the hang of using my machine. I’m no expert, but I like the way these are all coming out. The base fabric is stuff I painted in workshops with Lisa Englebrecht (Maybe I’ll actually finish the projects I started in Lisa’s workshops someday!) last year. The two that say “hope” are for my youngest brothers and there’s a pocket made from a Hambly overlay that holds a prayer card from our dad’s funeral, which was last year on 2/14. The card is of St. Jude, who was my dad’s favorite saint (and is my second favorite). St. Jude is the patron saint of hopeless cases (and policemen) and I thought my brothers would like a little something to remind them to have hope for whatever their dreams may be. Recently I thought that gluing pony beads on the ends of the hanging stick would finish off the look nicely and I was right! Very happy with these.

Mini quilt for my brother Steve and his wife. A belated Christmas 2008 gift!	Mini quilt for my brother Mike. A belated Christmas 2008 gift!	This was Jennie’s Christmas gift and it was less late than the ones for my family.

Collage stuff. I’ve been trying each week to find a little time to participate in the Collage Play With Crowabout challenge. Here are a few of the recent collages I’ve done using images from that challenge. If you are interested in playing along with us, email Nancy and ask for an invite. Let her know traypup sent you! I’m really enjoying art journaling lately and will be posting more pages from my journals in my next post.

Crowabout challenge week 20.	Crowabout challenge week 21.	Crowabout challenge week 22. The heads are my mom and myself about 40 years ago.

Cards. Sometimes I have a hankering to make a ton of cards. I can’t bear to buy them in the store because I feel like making them from scratch means so much more. Plus, I have all of the stuff! So I collected all of my Valentine’s Day-related supplies and sat on the sofa watching movies with my husband and made a ton of cards. Here are a few:

Vday 2009 card for Devin	Assorted Vday cards	You make my heart whirl

So that’s what I’ve been up to lately! There is lots more that I’ll be writing about this week. I’m excited to get back into the swing of things.

None of these projects are complete. There is still a lot of journaling and collaging to be done (what a bummer…haha). I’ve spent the past two nights ripping collage images out of old magazines while we watch tv. Kelly really has inspired me. She also took a look at an ongoing project of mine and encouraged me to teach a class on it. I would never have thought it would be a good class idea, but once she turned on the light, I could see it! One of the other students said she would take a class like the one Kelly and I were talking about, so I’m going to work on outlining that over the next month or so.

		The Storyteller book was fun. We made a book out half of a parent sheet of cardstock, folding and cutting following Kelly’s instructions. It’s a fun little book and I can see it being a great travel journal or journal for a specific event where you might not need a whole lot of pages like in a regular book or journal. Here is the cover and one of the spreads within the book.
The Storyteller
		Little Book of Faux Monoprints started from sheets of cardstock that we painted and on which we used a bunch of monoprinting exercises. At some point, I just started painting pages and then smooshing them together with another page. It was so freeing. This little book is so cute, but I am not sure what I’m using it for yet. Snippets was awesome. I love the shape and size of this book and Kelly’s methods of making split pages within the book are really cool. I never would have thought of them myself! This is just the cover. None of my collages inside are complete yet.
Little Book of Faux Monoprints	Snippets- A Unique Artist Book
		Goin’ Postal was a 2-hour class where we used 6×9 matboard to create mailable art. I am a big fan of mail art and appreciated Kelly’s input on my compositions. This little girl really haunts me. The other side of this card and the other postcard I started are on Flickr. And I finally learned Japanese stab binding in the Fukoro Toji or Little Bound Book. It’s not as difficult as I thought it was, probably because Kelly is such a good instructor.
Goin’ Postal	Fukoro Toji or Little Bound Book

I did this spread on Day 5 and didn’t think a lot about it. Used a background I did over the weekend. Cobbled together a silly little bird I drew on a book page. Played with watercolor crayons. TA DA! This is also in the same calendar journal as featured on Day 4.

I did most of this journaling while we watched the election returns on Tuesday. I felt hope and excitement and like I can do anything…just like Twyla Tharp appears to feel in this photo from a Gap ad.

This is in the calendar journal belonging to Terry, a member of Calendargirlz.

• I made a big batch of pizza sausage tonight, managing to turn $10-12 worth of meat into the makins for a total of 6 easy meals for Tim and myself. Yay! And pizza dough was on sale, so that was an extra bonus.
• Started writing a letter to my aunt.
• I created our menus for the upcoming week.
• I began planning the autumn and Christmas decorating (in my head).
• I doodled in my daily journal, setting up my November calendar page spread.
• I jotted down a couple of pages of ideas for canvases.
• When I went to look for my canvases, I realized that stepping over everything and not being able to find what I’m looking for was hindering my creativity, so I did some filing, organizing, recycling and trashing. I filed a bunch of ATCs from swaps and figured out how I’m going to handle inchies (now that I am in love with them and am compelled to make many more).
• I came up with my plan for revamping an area of my office that isn’t making me happy.
• Informed myself and my husband that my “office” is now officially my STUDIO and we will never refer to it as an office again.

And, just so this post isn’t devoid of pretty pictures, I’ve added a photo of a recent journal spread I did in an RR. I am in love with this spread and luckily, the owner of the journal in which I did it loves it too! yay!

And after I post this and finish the letter to my aunt, I am going to doodle some more.

I have been doing less and less art lately. Mom visited for a week and then we took her to her sister’s house in Carbondale and spent last weekend there. I’ve also been trying to catch up on work (which exploded) this past week while she was out there. Auntie and cousin and small cousin (once removed) and tiny dog brought mom back yesterday and we had an evening and morning of hilarity. They’ve all headed home and the house is fairly quiet again, but Mom’s still here for a few more days before life gets back to normal. We have a little crafty itinerary, so I’m hoping I will post something yummy here in the next few days. Later today, we’re going to The Artists’ Nook, since mom hasn’t been there yet and I’ll probably teach mom some techniques tomorrow. She’s already collected some fallen leaves from my yard, so we’ll do some prints, I think! yay!

For now, I’ll just post this collage I did the week before last as a part of Collage Play With Crowabout. Clicky to see a larger version.

Work has been super busy, so I haven’t had much time this week to make stuff, but I’ve been squeezing in some reading and calendar journaling (see photos below). I’ve finished the current issue of Somerset Studio and can’t wait to alter some cutlery. And the current issue of CRAFT has the most amazing (and hilarious) instructions on how to make little stuffed monster dolls and I cannot WAIT to start making some of those. I am, however, being true to my promise of finishing my unfinished projects before I take on new ones.

Well, mostly, anyway. I got a wild hair (or hare, whatever) about taking an online class for webby research purposes and signed up for Susan Sorrell’s Doodle Designs class. It’s a lot more embroidery than I expected and I am not really good at it, but I’m giving it a go! My first piece is shown here. It’s requiring me to have patience, which I really need practice with, so that’s good for me.

That’s all I have today. I do want to let those of you who are commenting here know that I finally did get your comments. I forgot to check my inbox for a few days and found I had a pile of comments to approve. It’s funny how I remember to tell my clients all of these things, but when it comes to my own sites, I tend to forget the simplest things!

Below is the work I did in my pal Karen’s calendar journal for January. This is part of a yearlong project via the Calendargirlz Yahoo Group. If you click the photos, you’ll be taken to Flickr, where you can see larger versions.