A Crazy, Busy July

 Where has the first half of July gone? We have been traveling and spending time with grand boys.

We spent July 4th weekend in Austin with our daughter's family and then brought the two kiddos home with us for a week. As soon as we put them on a plane home (they were very excited to travel as unaccompanied minors!), we boarded a flight to Albuquerque to spend the weekend celebrating another grand boy's tenth birthday. So much fun, but exhausting as they keep us running the entire time.

I've been playing catch-up on art swaps and challenges since I returned.

This was the project I made for a "flamingo" challenge. I made a little flip-up matchbook-style notepad with a pink paint chip. Several small pieces of plain paper are stapled inside. The flamingo and leaf are stamped on tissue paper and colored with water-based paint pens. The "smile" is a stamp, white-embossed on black card stock.

Next is my "summer house" for a quarterly house swap (we make one for each season). This is my beach hut. The house, roof and door are papers. The bathing beauty is fussy-cut from a copy of a vintage photo and the starfish is a sticker. The little banner is from a scrapbook paper and I added the pennants individually to a piece of baker's twine. I embellished with tiny shells and real sand glued to the bottom.

For this swap we had to use the magazine image transfer technique with a gelli plate and make it into a card. After about 15 failed attempts I finally pulled this print from a magazine image from a travel brochure. I need to practice this more - there are many variables and the whole process is trial and error!

Instead of using black acrylic paint as the base color as most of the instructions said, I used a magenta paint and I really like it.