MailART Monday: Persistence

Today I would like to show you this postcard I made for a swap on swapbot in which you were required to use one of your gelli printed pieces of paper. And last week I showed you my process of printing on Tomoe River paper. I took one of those printed papers and created the above postcard. I only added some background stamping with some lush VLVS!, the lady is a cut out from a vintage fashion magazine and the dots are made with distress paints daubers. The sentiment "nevertheless, she persisted" is from VLVS! as well and it's definitely among my fave of the new releases! This piece has such a wonderful retro feel to it with with yellow and orange tones :) I loved making one of my vintage magazine mail art pieces again! I recently got a bunch of old magazine from a friend and I am excited to go through them!

Even when it rains, my mail box drops are always ever persistent!

Have a great Monday everyone and thanks for stopping by!

WIP: Gelli Printing on Tomoe River Paper + process video!

Today I'm sharing a fun experiment I did recently, which is gelli printing on Tomoe River paper. It's a very lightweight paper, 52gms and in the fountain pen community famous for its great workings with fountain pen (and other) inks. I was wondering if it could hold up to fluid acrylic paints so I experimented a little with DecoART media Fluid Acrylics which I recently received from the decoarts media team as part of the blogger out reach program.

Gorgeous little bottles with fluid acrylics from Deco Art Media. I also used the bottom stencil by Andy Skinner for a couple of prints among other stencils.

The paper holds up the fluid acrylics really well and the drying time wasn't bad at all. I've filmed this process video and you can watch the whole process here

Not bad work for an half an hour on a monday night, right? The video is sped up to around 9 minutes total, so no worries, LOL :) I really had fun with this and am looking forward to use the prints in a few upcoming projects. If you like the video, please hit like and subscribe to my channel to see more. I have been working on a few other process video's and hope to upload on a bi-weekly basis. Still very new to this, so if you have any tips/suggestions they are welcome. 

As always, thanks ever so much for stopping by and hope you are having a wonderful day!

Monthly Planning MTN: September 2016 update

After a bit of an underwhelming August, the month of september was filled with bright and colorful days!  I was excited to start on this spread because a lot of cool things happened and I wanted to use a fun combination of rubber stamps to set this month's theme which was "Ink, pens and writing". But before I got started I had to lay some ground work.

I really enjoyed the use of Carabelle stamps and Tombows in my spread of last month, but it bled through a bit on the back. A while back a friend gave me an A5 pad of cream colored Tomoe River paper and I used a couple of pages to cover the next pages I would be working on. The paper is really thin but sturdy and holds up ink like a trooper, so it was a good choice to add that as an extra barrier. I drew the month's grid with Faber Castell Pitt pen and stamped the carabelle ink spatters and journal stamp on it with various memento ink colors. Then I used the date stamper from the top picture to mark the days.

The page needed some images on pens on them and this was a great excuse to use the fountain pen and nibs rubber stamps from Impression obsession (calligraphy 1 and calligraphy 2) and Viva Las Vegastamps (fountain pen and nibs). Definitely liked the way how it all came together. Now it's time to fill up the month!

I wrote it all down with my Faber Castell Pitt artist pen because it's water proof. I colored the grids with different colors Tombows and highlighted the best days in green. For some more decoration I added a couple of my home made arti-stamps! Yes, I know I still need to do a post on how I made those!!

The best days definitely happened on the weekend. The first ever Pelikan Hub on Friday the 16th and a week later on saturday, the 28th edition of the Tilburg Penshow were definitely highlights of the whole year! And the fact I had a nice 2 week holiday in which I enjoyed wonderful " Indian summer days" at a spa resort with my sisters :)

The completed spread in full color! I thought about adding a quote like I have done in most spreads, but I felt it didn't need one. This might be my fave spread so far! I am excited to work on October's spread because I am going to use a stencil in combination with stamps. And maybe try a bit mixed media. Having experimented covering the pages with Tomoe River to counteract bleed through on the back pages, opens up exciting possibilities!

Thanks for stopping by and have a wonderful weekend.

namasté