Amateur marbeling

Borders Bookstore has this new collection of classics with gorgeous cover designs, so I'm visiting an old process...

A while back, I found myself a marbeling kit, and made my first batch of imperfectly marbeled pages. I love this process, the mess of it, the dry time, the textures. This weekend, I'm at it again, paying more attention to the palette, and mixing some custom colors. I thought these papers might make amazing frontispieces in my little handmade books, but I'm seeing that they may just work for scrapbooking too (if I can get the colors right). 'bye!

scissor-hands

Well, there's no good excuse for not posting except it's all production around here. I feel like Edward Scissorhands lately since I've undertaken 60 little silhouette portraits for our nursery school auction. My good friend Dana tells me that I need to keep track of process, and her comment made me look at the whole silhouette avalanche with clear-er vision. It started with patterned paper on patterned paper with stitching, and a variety of frames. Then I made a silhouette portrait for my fun wedding clients, and used classic black. Oh wow. Much better. So I ditched about a dozen portraits and re-made in black. Now I'm a crazy lady running all over the city rescuing 5X7 frames from Goodwill etc. Good to be back in blogland.

Inchies; a process

Inchies--they're everywhere! I've seen them surface on the trading boards, they grace this summer's Somerset cover, and so I thought I'd share one of my processes for creating them. But first, a definition: inchies are 1X1 squares of collaged, stamped, drawn art, usually signed on the back. Some people swap theirs around. Some use a set to adorn a journal, card series or scrapbook page. The latest set I made landed a premiere spot on an ATC {artist trading card}.

1. I flipped through a couple magazines {Real Simple & Domino for this set} and glued snippets of color & wonder down to pink cardstock.

2. Then I went over the whole page with tiny scrap of paper, small rubber stamps, hole punches, and bits of ribbon & filled in the gaps.

3. I trimmed the edges, then cut 1 inch strips with a paper cutter. It's not precious; just go for it!

4. Then, crosswise, chop into 1 inch squares. Voila. Inchies.