‘Keep Going On’ has been kind of a mantra for me in the last half year or so. It keeps me going even as I’m stagnant, the invisible force making me look ahead and just take another step forward. The full phrase actually comes from a song, Zeal of Proud by Roselia and was originally ‘Life will take us to the right place, keep going, going on the road’. Somehow I had mutated the lyrics to be ‘keep going, going on and on’, and that’s been stuck as my earworm all these time. But no matter, that’s how it is for me.
It’s another new year, and time just seems to fly by so quickly. There’s a joke that we’re starting 2020 season 3, depressing for sure, but perhaps we may finally get a finale. It feels hopeful. I don’t think life can go back to ‘normal’, so the struggle is real in being yourself in this new normal. One of my friend have to constantly remind me that lockdown and quarantine doesn’t mean that it’s a good thing for introverts. I couldn’t understand, because I had wholeheartedly embraced it as a introvert. But 2 years later, I can see now where some of the cracks are. It’s frankly a little scary, and fills me with shame, but if I keep looking back I’m going to be frozen. Keep going on.
The art room has been a mess, full of half finished projects, new products I’ve bought but haven’t used, and junque collection that haven’t been sorted or organised. Lately the muse has been more of junque journal, made 2 journals in the last month as well as a myraid of junque journal embellishments from things around. I’m currently working on making another 2 more junque journal, one for a friend, and another as an experiment in a different style of junque journal. Working on bits and pieces at a time, as I find that I can hardly focus for an extended period nowadays, and working in steps just seems to move things along better.
Here’s a peek at some of these projects:
Bunch of seed packets paper clipsDecorating the covers of my new junque journalCollection of tags made in series, from mostly scraps
Hope you enjoy the little peek into what I’ve been working on. I had thoughts of sharing some of these projects but then they just.. ran away from me. Someday, maybe.
After 3 weeks of puttering around, Day 42-48 picked up to be productive again though I did hop from project to project this week.
1. Organisation of die cuts
1 & 2. My embellishment box. They are grouped by type so I can find what I need. Each box can be taken out independently. 3. Inside each box, the embellishments are grouped by baggies. This is the die cut box. 4. This is my cut-apart embellishment box. 5. Close up of my little baggies. I used washi tape to seal it up so nothing drops out.
After the PixScan die cutting session the previous, I had a bunch of die cut images and embellishments that I needed to organise and keep so that I can find them easily to use in my projects. Along the same train of thought, I pulled out all the cut apart sheets in my stash and cut all of them up, so I had a lot of cut apart papers and die cuts to organise. The best organisation tip is to store like with like, so I took out my embellishment box and organised its content a little to have a die cut category.
I bought this box from Amazon a while ago, and I love that it has separate boxes inside that can be taken out on their own. They are supposed to be for photo organisation, but I have been using them to store journal cards and embellishments. But having the boxes is not enough, as I have so many different types of embellishments, so I used little plastic baggies to group similar embellishments together. Here you can see that I have them grouped by size, type of image, which paper packs they are from etc.
These plastic baggies are actually what I use to for my clear stamp storage, and I cut them into two to get two shorter baggies. To close them, I used washi tape so they don’t fall out of their baggies and become a mess. The ideal storage baggies would be ziplock bags but I didn’t have small ones on hand and ziplock bags are not as transparent. I quite like how these ones turn out, just by using whatever supply I have on hand.
2. Giving new life to my failed doilies die cuts
Close up of the details, it’s cut off on one side because I didn’t check the paper size before I cut and the design went off the page. I should have more of them but I can’t seem to find them..
Remember my failed die-cutting session from Day 21-34 where the mandala/doily didn’t cut through all the way and I didn’t realise until I pull the paper off the cutting mat? They’ve been sitting on my table and generally annoying me since I didn’t know what to do with them. Somewhere in the middle of the die cut organisation session, I had a idea and tried it out immediately.
I wanted to keep the integrity of the mandala/doily, since my Silhouette did take a long time to ‘cut’ them and I thought that since the cut lines were etched into the paper, they would absorb water better, and I could bring out the design with watercolours. And voila, it did work and I’m so proud of myself. I wanted it to be dramatic, so I went with black watercolour and have to be careful with the amount of water as I didn’t want the whole paper to be soaking wet, just for the etched lines to absorb more of the paint naturally.
3. ‘Batman’ art journal page
I had an image of this art journal page in my mind after an online friend mentioned that I just need to ping them (@ mention) and they’ll come running like batman. I started by making sketching out the skyline and then painted in the night sky using acrylic paint. I knew I wanted blue and purple tints to the sky so I mixed in some black to my paints. I actually liked how the colour turned out after mixing, but the paint layer was too splotchy for my liking, so I painted a second layer, which turned out way too black and the colour got a little lost. I could still see it if I tilt the page in the light but for the most part the night sky is black.
When presented a problem for my skyline, because I needed them to be black but still stand out from the sky. I tried with black chinese calligraphy ink and it worked out great, standing out from the ‘black’ of the night sky. The ink didn’t want to seep into the gesso-ed background much, so it’s slightly splotchy but I’m ok with the texture on the buildings.
I wanted the Batman beacon in the night sky, and I did a sketch on a piece of graph paper so that it would be symmetrical, before transferring to the page using tracing paper and painting in the negative image. It came out a little too large by proportions but I’m fairly happy with how it turned out, since I spent a lot of time layering on the yellow paint to be opaque. I used the same yellow paint for the city windows, but only single layer as I didn’t want to take the focal point away from the beacon. To finish up, I dotted the sky with starts and did my journaling using a Sakura Tiara pen along the edge of the city line.
I don’t think the page is perfect, but it’s pretty close to how I imagined it in my head and it’s meaningful to me. There’s a lot of paint layers on this page which doesn’t transmit through the photo but looking and touching the page in real life is pretty satisfying.
4. Journal pocket inserts
I can’t deny it, I have an attraction to junk journal because it involves so much paper, and I love paper. Though I have found that I don’t know what to do with junk journaling, I still really like to watch junk journal videos, and once in a (very long) while, I will make something which looks like I can utilise.
This project is one of them, a simple 3 pocket insert that I can stick into my Smashbook, which is sorely lacking pocket spaces for me to tug ephemeras in. It involved simple folding from a single sheet of paper, which I learnt from Treasure Books’ YouTube. This was the perfect opportunity to use the papers I tea-dyed a couple weeks back, since they have the aged look already. It took me just a few minutes to make 2 of them and they were pretty quick to embellish as well, though I kept it mostly flat and simple as I want them to sit in the pages of my other journals. Did you notice the mandala/doily which I made from (2) above?
I didn’t stitch them as I’m still not very confident about stitching on paper much, but I may do that afterwards as the double-sided tape doesn’t seem to want to stick too much.
4. Baby wipe distress ink technique
This is another technique that I saw on YouTube, this time from Jennifer McGuire on Distress Stencil Technique. In her video, she used distress inks, stencils, die-cutting machine and baby wipe to create a soft distress background and I was very intrigued by this technique. Unfortunately, I don’t own a die-cutting machine (no, the Silhouette don’t count in this case), so I have to be a little creative to try this technique myself.
To create an embossed look without a die-cutting machine, I used dry embossing with a stencil instead, placing the stencil and the paper faced down, and then use an embossing tool to emboss the pattern. Once I have the emboss ready, I place a baby wipe below and went over with the embossing tool again to take away some of the distress ink through the stencil pattern.
It.. didn’t quite turn out as I thought. Jennifer’s results were an even soft tone through the stencil patterns but I got really splotchy results due to the evenness of manual dry embossing. I think the paper probably played some role too as in some parts I completely lifted all the ink, like the distress ink didn’t get absorbs into the paper at all. I’m not too sure. It’s still a cool look though, and way more distressed than the Jennifer’s version. I should probably try this with other papers that I have but dry embossing is a tiring affair and I pretty much exhausted all my energy for the afternoon after these 2 cards. Oh well, next time then ;p
Well that’s all for the week! I’m still working on using my supplies, especially as I make more, particularly from my die-cutting adventures, instead of hoarding supplies. This seems like a problem I always have, especially as having more things can overwhelm me and paralyse me into inaction. And that wars with the practical side of me, because making something for the sake of making stresses me out equally, so I need a purpose for the making as well. To more crafting adventures ahead!
My Craft Diary 