Day 31

Well my wonderful family and friends, you've stuck with me for 31 days!  I can honestly say that I'm surprised I've stuck with this, but it's been fun and eye opening!  Because you have stuck by my side through bobble head cats and zombie dogs, I think you deserve something in return.  How about a bit of honesty?  No, you want money??  TOO BAD!  It's my blog after all, so you get honesty!

I come from a family of some seriously creative people!  My mom is super creative and artsy!  The woman can sew, draw, crochet, paint, sculpt and soooo much more.  My uncle is a great artist, and much more!  Their mom, a total seamstress!  My dad's mom and his sisters...crafty too!!  I seriously have asked on several occasions if I was adopted.  I do crafts, but nothing super special.  So why am I telling you this?  Well on to my honest confession of sorts, I've always wanted to be "artsy".  I've always wanted to paint, or draw, or sculpt, do pottery, something that is totally A R T...not crafts.  I don't know if it's because I just haven't found something that I'm "good" at, or just a fear of trying something and having it fail maybe?  Who knows, but as I get older, I sort of throw all that out the window and I'm willing to try things I wouldn't have tried years ago!  YAY for getting old!

Today's craft is something that has struck my fancy for a while now, but have been too afraid to try.  It's called "altered art" or in this case "altered book art"  The first fear comes from hurting a book.  I love books, I mean really LOVE books.  I can't even throw a book out.  Which is part of the reason I finally made myself try this.  It's not fair to have a book just sit on a shelf and collect dust when it's has the potential to do something wonderful with it's life!!  Then there is the fear of having whatever I make look like a preschooler did it, but as stated above, the older I get, the less I care what others think.  Soooo, here is my first attempt at altered art!  I won't really go into what it "means", because isn't the whole point and fun of art??  Trying to figure it out?  So here you go, try to delve into the recesses of my mind.  HA!  Good luck with that!

(FYI...you can click on any of the pictures to see them in a bigger size.)

Here is my altered art book.  The left side is a collage of pictures, and the right a collage of words that stood out to me.

 

A close up of the picture collage side:

 

And  close up of the word collage side:

 

One more of the whole book:

 

And last, here is proof it's a book!  If I had more time, I would have glued some of the pages together to make the work area thicker, but it's suggested you let it dry overnight, and I didn't think to do that yesterday!:

Day 24

I got my daily Martha Stewart Craft of the Day in my email today and low and behold, it was a bookmark!  A ribbon bookmark actually.  I was just going through all my craft supplies the other day and when I got to my box of ribbon I thought, "Hmmm...what am I going to do with this!".  So receiving the email today was a good start to get through my supply!

I pulled out two blue ribbons, one shear blue which was a bit larger then the other.  The other was a smaller dragonfly motif.  I cut small slits horizontal into the larger ribbon in 1.5" increments.  I then threaded the smaller ribbon through the holes leaving a little space at both ends.  I did a simple stitch across the top and bottom where the smaller ribbon ended and then fringed the extra of the larger ribbon.  Voila!!!  A blue dragonfly ribbon bookmark!

Here are the supplies (minus needle and thread, forgot to pull them out):

 

Finished bookmark:

 

Close up of finished bookmark:

Close up of fringe end:

And here it is in action!  Works great!!  (P.S. If you have not read this book, "The Girl Who Chased the Moon" by Sarah Addison Allen - get it!!!  She is one of my favorite authors and ALL three of her books are awesome!!)

Day 14

Two weeks into the challenge and I'm a bit surprised I have stuck with this.  I think it has to do with the love of crafting and not so much the ability to follow through with stuff!  Anyone who knows me knows I get bored easily!  I see other people's blogs, who are doing this challenge and a lot of them stick with one craft theme.  I was thinking about doing that, but I know that would be the beginning of the end!  I need variety. 

Today's craft was more of a lesson for me then an actual craft project, but I feel it still counts!  I had picked up this book called "Drawing Lab: 52 Creative Exercises To Make Drawing Fun" and the first exercise in the book is called "Cats in Bed".  The book is fantastic, it basically takes the fear of a blank page away from you.  Anyone who has sat down to draw has felt that fear or anxiety, I'm sure.  The instructions for this exercise were simple.  Get a piece of white card stock, a pen and get into bed.  Once in bed, draw cats!  Simple, easy, nothing fancy cats.  Being a self described "crazy cat lady", this exercise was right up my alley.  And since one of our cats, Cody, was on the bed next to me kneading the blankets, I used him as my muse.  He was thrilled at the idea of being captured on paper, let me tell you.  Once I explained what I was doing to him, he quit kneading and proceeded to clean my forehead.  (See, I told you...crazy cat lady!)

Here is the book cover:

And the exercise I did:

And here are the cats I drew, sort of hard to see so making the picture bigger (yeah, they look insane, but they are cute if nothing else):