It's Monday morning... again, only this one I am off of work, actually, this WHOLE week. I wouldn't mind having a week with nothing to do, but this one will include more baking, gift wrapping and who-knows-what as I have told Mom I am available to help her work on or finish up whatever she may need, so I am somewhat on-call. She seemed to have most of her plan in place and it may work out perfectly but we know, sometimes it doesn't. Always good to have backup help to call if needed.
I know I've said before that I have not taken on to art journals. Many people that do collage or mixed media do some and there are actually people that make them to sell. I have bought one or two in my collage/mixed media learning journey that started the beginning of March 2024 and I have played in them, but they were more for tests and playing and....in the end, I still wasn't sure what good they were to myself. I waffle on it though, sometimes I think they may be a good idea, other times....still not sure. The first one I ever started playing in finally had it's pages used up and after it traveled round and round in circles in my art area for months, I took the time one day to go through it, pull out a few pages that I actually liked and threw the rest of the book away.
With all of that said, not so long back I saw an artist that also created collages and mixed media things and she had journals for different types of things. One she had was a very small spiral tablet where she made very simple collages, most had only three pieces of colorful paper arranged together. I have made many of those, but had them on painted playing cards and other small bits of paper and some that just floated, with no backgrounds. I love doing them, but they are in photo books and a wooden box waiting to see if they will be used in future projects.
I decided I would like to do this too.
This is the one I made last night. It is not a minimum of papers though, it was multiple pieces, most on transparent paper with only a few solid pieces. I put them on, some overlapping others and this is how it ended. I really liked this one, I think it is my fav so far.
This is what the tablet looks like. The sheets is perforated at the top, under the wire spiral, so you can get them out if you wanted to use them or frame them or whatever. They would then be an even 4X4 inch square.
I sometimes tell you that the art I post close up, sometimes looks different from a little distance away and you can see from the above and below photos how it might change the details of what your eye focuses on and how it looks as a whole.
This was the first one I put in my little book. Very simple with pretty colored papers. It was only going to be 3 pieces of paper, but in the end, I added the round blue dot, because somehow, it just needed that.
Another artist did small collages to commiserate a memory or the such. I had made one with some Harry & David paper and a little bit of the gold foil that a pear was wrapped in. I had made it before I got my tablet. I thought maybe I should include memory things like in my new little collage tablet.
Do you hate to hunt things that you know are there, but you still can't find them? That is truly one of my life-long peeves, which has made me 98 percent good at always putting important things back where they belong. In this case, it was not an important thing, but I know it is in my art area. At first I could not remember which type of background I made it on, so I hunted in the area of several types of paper. Finally, I gave up, hunted through my photos knowing I had to have taken a quickie shot when it was done. I found it, but then it showed me the book I had made it in, so I stopped once again and went back to my art area to find that book. It is usually just laying on top of some pile in that area, but..... as you can guess, I didn't find it either and since hunting things does not keep the moment in full happiness, I came back, spiffed up the quickie photo the best I could. I had not meant to show that here today, but just to go with the explanation.... It's not so much an art piece, but a good memory record and.... why not? My nephew had sent my Mom a Harry & David's sampler box and it had included some of their wonderful pears. My Mom said she couldn't eat them all, so she gave me two. They were wrapped loosely in gold foil and Harry & David's tissue paper, so I took a bit of each and a piece of my colorful collage paper and recorded the memory.
In thinking I might include things like that in my new mini collage tablet/journal, I made this one. The gold tree top and stars and gold lines across the red tree shape came from a piece of beautiful Christmas tissue paper that my younger sister had wrapped around an ornament she made for me.
Here is a a bit of the tissue paper. You can't tell so well here, but all of the print is shiny gold foil and to the real eye, it is very, very attractive.
Here is the ornament it was wrapped around. She's pretty crafty and has made this wooden finial(?) look old and had put the holly on it. She had made the holly different colors on some of the ornaments. They are so beautiful and elegant in an old fashioned way. I really love it.
So I included some of the gold foil from the paper in the little collage to make a memory piece.
This one I made with that black snowflake I showed on the previous post along with bits of two other snowflake stencils that got ruffed up with so much use. I think it probably needs one more little thing to complete it, but since I don't know what that is yet, this is how it is for now.
No memories represented here, just a few colorful bits from my desk the night I created it.
It's really quite fun. Sometimes it's fast to come together and I thought it would be, but others have taken a little longer, which suprised me, but .... oh well!
This is one of the two I made last night....
The second one I made last night is the one in the first two photos of this post.
Although I've used real and fake writing in some of my other pieces along the way, I have not usually included whole words, but I liked the word COLOR in this one.
Now for the Good Will find. I haven't been to Good Will as much for a while. I'm not done with them by any means, but I've slowed down my clean out and so haven't had as much to donate. I will get stared back with that later. I did have two medium-small boxes of things to donate and some of it was Christmas glass or red or green, so I thought I should not wait and maybe someone would consider them treasures here so close to Christmas.
Of course I could not go through the donation drop off and then not go in and look around a bit. I normally only look in the books and housewares section, which include dishes and small appliances and lamps and wall decor and sometimes tools and craft stuff. Holiday things are in a back corner year round, but of course that section grows large during this season.
I checked out the books and found three I was interested in. I then made a casual walk through the housewares. I picked up a set of cups I thought my Mom might like and another small thing or two, but I noticed an employee pushing around a cart of things behind me a row or two, so when I got to the end of the section I was in, I did a quick walk back through the same area in case she had put out any treasures I might like and sure enough, I found a couple of fun things and one of them was this wooden chest.
It is about 11 1/2 inches tall. As you can see the chest is wooden and the wood is stained a nice green and it has short, dark red legs. It is HEAVY too. The neat and interesting thing to me is that, the drawers are wooden cigar boxes that have pull knobs on them. I grabbed it up as soon as I saw it. It was unique and attractive. My photo isn't that great, but the borders on the front of the boxes have some pink flowers and the background on it is gold foil, so the colors really popped sitting in that green chest. As I pushed forward, literally...ha ha.....my mind was wondering about the box and I thought I bet those were some very expensive cigars if they came in a chest like this. I wondered if it was like a commemorative thing, you know, like the 100 year celebration gift, only made one year or season or something.
You just never know where my mind will wander on things. :)
When you pull the drawer/box out, then it opens like the cigar box was made to open.
Neat... huh?
A while after I got home I goog'd around a bit using this cigar brand name and I could find nothing like it. During the search though I did see photos of the normal boxes of this cigar brand and they did actually come with the floral foil boarders, so that had not been enhanced for this chest. I also came across several photos where other people had actually made wooden crate chests or the such and had also used this wooden cigar brand box as drawers in there and so I had to wonder if someone built this little chest specifically to use with these boxes? I will never know maybe and it is not that important. For someone that knows woodworking, it would probably have been no big deal to make it. Anyway.... I love a good mystery and however it came to be, it has now come to live with me!
The little ceramic tree on top of it is one my older sister, who is now 73, made in her middle 20s. I showed it another Christmas and told it's story of that my sister had taken classes and for a while had made ceramic things (before her children were born and there was no more time for such things)....and she had made one for herself and also made this one for my Grandmother. When my Grandmother passed, this went back to my sister, who then offered it to my Mom, who took it and used it a couple of years and then didn't. Later she offered it back to my sister.... this is making me laugh almost..... where a few years back, since my sister still had the one she made for herself, offered this to me! Now we didn't have one of these back in the 50s and 60s when they were all the rage, but I saw many between family and friend's houses growing up and along the way after. I had always thought they were neat, but by the time I would have desired one, they were then vintage and people wanted a fortune for them (the ones originally sold in stores) and.... I never got one, so when my sister offered it too me, I didn't hesitate! I had to buy some new colored light bulbs as some had been lost by then, but they were easy to find and I have enjoyed putting it out in the last few years. I love the tree and I love the fact that my sister made it and the history of my Grandmother and Mother having it before I did. What about THAT is not to love?
I thought the chest and the tree were a good pairing for my Christmas decor.
It's after noon already and I have some things that need to be done. I didn't mean for this to be so long and yet, here it is.
