A Mixed Up Girl

Yesterday my hubby showed me this video - I noticed some of the lyrics are "I'm a mixed up girl in a mixed up world."

29 Days of Giving

Chrysti of the Altered Abbey is having a month of giveaways on her blog, Art By Chrysti. How generous of her! I remember seeing Chrysti in Cloth Paper Scissors, but only recently stumbled on to her blog via another blog (don't you just love finding new-to-you blogs that way!?). It has been a lot of fun reading her posts and seeing artwork by her and the artists that she features on the blog. Lots of inspiration there! After reading her post about Suzi Blu's workshop and filling up journals with sweet petite dolls, I got out my journal and started another girl.

Good luck charms

now that I know how to take macro photos, I can show some close ups from my journal! I did the photo editing for these pics in iPhoto, and I'm proud of myself for figuring out how to do it.

The latest pages that I finished feature a Suzi Blu girl. I drew her with colored pencils and watercolor pencils, then did different color washes in the background. I used a dye-based ink to stamp in the background, so when I added water to the water soluble crayon in the background, the stamping blurred a bit and the brown color bled out into the blue and green.

Here's a close up of one stamped clover, showing the bleed into the background. You can see a little bit of the texture of the watercolor paper as well. Here the blue is watercolor crayon and a little bit of water soluble oil pastel. The heart in the center is gel pen, and is a little metallic IRL.

The clover is a new stamp for me -- got it in a super fun round robin box via ATCsforall.com. The box has gone from person to person, and each one takes supplies/ephemera and adds in something new. My kind of fun :-)

My little doll-girl is wearing cutesy stockings (wish I could remember what I did with MY pink and white stockings, can't find them in any of the usual places!) and holding a horseshoe for good luck. I was thinking about lucky things, and I included the horseshoe, four leaf clovers, and a chipmunk. I dunno why I think chipmunks mean good luck, but I do :-)

So, here are some pieces of my journal pages on luck. I'm feeling extremely lucky at the moment, because Christmas vacation has finally begun!! Hoping that you've got good luck coming your way, too.

Face Inchies

Here are some inchies I did. First I drew leetle faces on marker paper with a Copic multiliner. Then I colored them in with markers, and cut the faces out. Next I cut them right in half -- ouch! I glued half a face on each inchie. I cut the inchie blanks from boxes and then glued on a background paper. After I put the face on, I put on a few accents with gel pens. I traded some of the inchies and kept some to put on the big inchie canvas I was working on.

Journaling

Finding the perfect journal is hard! So I have a few different ones that I add to when I feel like it. Here is my latest -- it's got thick watercolor pages and chipboard covers. I cut up a pad of watercolor paper into fourths and then used the bind-it-all to put the journal together. Ended up with two journals, one for me and one for my best bud, Dee :-)

The first thing that I worked on in mine was inserting a compass. I got some cute scruffy little compasses from skybluepink a while back and have been thinking on how to get them into a journal. I cut circles out of half the pages and then glued the compass to the back cover: I was able to get a good pic of that cause I finally found the MACRO function on our camera. (it's only been about a year since we got it, lol!) The holes fit right over the compass, how fun! It may be a challenge to incorporate the compass in to so many pages, but I'm going to give it a shot.

Here is the first spread that I've done in it, with Copic markers and multiliner. The words are lyrics from "These Days" by Nico.

Laundry Machine

I HATE laundry. Not sure why, cause it's really not all that hard to do. Our apartment complex has machines we can use, so it's way easier than when I had to wash by hand. Nevertheless, I have been known to go buy new underwear or socks in lieu of washing my dirty ones. Well, today I finally did laundry. I spent more than $20 in our quarter washers and driers - that's NINE loads of laundry. How can two people have that many dirty clothes????

Lookie here!

Oooh, Tanya named me a BFF -- Blogging Friend Forever, how cute!

Photo Journal

I'm in a circle journal group on ATCsforAll where we make two page spreads -- one page has a photo and the other page is our interpretation of the photo. This time the theme I worked on was 'trees.' I took a picture of a pretty maple tree near my apartment building. I've been admiring it as the color of its leaves change. (Since I took this photo it has lost nearly all of its leaves)



I haven't done very much photography, but I do like taking pictures. I signed up for this journal group thinking it would inspire me to carry my camera around with me more often. I have taken more pictures than I normally do, but I still feel a little weird taking pictures on campus when people are walking around.

Make it Mondays: Houses

I made these ATCs for a swap, and they fit with the theme of the Make it Mondays challenge too! Neato :) I had fun making these. I used my copic markers, then put some colored pencil on top. A few gel pen accents.

Altered Playing Cards

I'm so excited about having a WHOLE deck of altered playing cards, that I'm posting pics of them everywhere :-) Don't they look awesome together?? I can't decide how to display them -- putting them in a binder seems too boring. I might make up a scrapbook for them.

Tagged!

I got tagged by Blueskysunburn (Jennifer), a friend from AFA. It's a kind of blogging game! You tag someone, they make a post with six snippets about themselves, and then they tag 6 more people. Cool game! Six things about me:

1. I'm mad for inchies! I cut up some boxes from Mary Kay products today to make inchie blanks.
2. I'm an English teacher who can't spell!! I dread students asking me to spell something, haha! Well, what do we have spellcheck for nowadays, right??
3. I never ever dust. Achoo!!
4. I, erm, in fact am in need of a dragon intervention. I keep clicking on those things, like I don't have anything better to do :-) While I'm at it, here's my latest egg:
5. I hate socks.
6. But I like shoes!

I'm tagging:

• Dee, one of Two Brains (I'm the other brain!)
• Tanya, that Cheeky Urchin
• Zhenia, from two bits
• SuziBlu, who shares her Lovely Dream
• Lupin, making handstitched lovely Bugs and Fishes
• Michelle, from Mish Mash
  

Here there be dragons :)

These are kind of silly, but I like them: dragon eggs!! They need to be clicked on so that they'll hatch, and then after they hatch they need to be clicked to grow up. Here are the ones I have so far:

Crafting 365

I saw this fun-looking group on Flickr and decided to join. Members post a photo a day showing their creative endeavors. I noticed it because some of my contacts had photos in the group's photo pool. So far I've done 8 days - it's fun!

This week I've been working on house-shaped chunky pages for a swap on ATCsforAll - lots of fun! I started with cardboard pages, then gessoed and smeared on acrylic paint. then I stenciled with ink pads through punchinello and glued on paper accents. I used some of my favorite paper: brightly colored memos from work that I paint, draw, and stamp on while I'm working on other projects. I love how it kind of preserves some history about me, and I really like the crazy color combinations that end up on this paper. I made a door and window on each house. I colored a phonebook page green and cut out leaves. I glued those on, then used my sewing machine to put on some stems and grass. Then I used markers and gel pens to put quotes about home on the pages. I did eight pages -- seven to swap and one to keep. Here's the page I'm keeping. The words say, "Home is where the dirty dishes are." That sure is true for me!!

Inchie Display

I've been collecting inchies from swaps and one-on-one trades, and have had a few different storage methods. At first, they were shoved into a teeny drawer in an organizer on my art table. When they outgrew that spot, I moved them to a plastic box that I got with some Ferrero Rocher candies (mmmm....). I figured that once I had a box full I'd be ready to put them on display. Well, that box got full after I hosted the word inchie swap!

At first my plan was to get a HUGE canvas to glue the inchies on. Then I started thinking about how much a gigantic canvas would cost, and how difficult it would be to find a good place to hang it (keeping in mind that our apartment has concrete walls that you can't hammer into). Last weekend I spotted a great deal on 16 x 20 canvases -- 2 for $6! I bought two packs, and figured that a three panel display would be ideal.

This week I painted the first canvas and glued my teeny inchies onto it while watching the Olympics (go Michael Phelps!!). I hadn't calculated how many inchies would fit on one canvas, so I was surprised to see nearly my whole collection fit! 180 inchies fit on the canvas -- I could have squeezed in one more row on top if I had started a smidgen lower on the last row -- hmmmpf!! I've still got about 50 left for the next canvas -- will need to get swapping to get enough!

Inspiring Video

A while back, Zhenia recommended some Ira Glass videos on her blog. In them he talks about creativity and taste - really interesting stuff, and very inspirational. He says that we're bound to make crap when we're trying to be creative, and that we just need to keep on making lots of things and eventually something good will come out of our efforts - when you've got good taste you can recognize the good from the crap :)

After I watched those videos, I remembered how much I used to love listening to This American Life when I used to drive from the university to my parents' place on the weekends. I listened to some old episodes on their archive and cut out ATC blanks from cereal boxes. Good times.

I'm a bad blogger

I haven't been posting regularly, and I missed two whole months! Does this make me a bad blogger? I'm a blogger that doesn't blog.

I got a blog because I enjoyed looking at other people's blogs. It started when I read a few blogs by people that I know, then I got a copy of Artful Blogging. I really wanted to have a blog like that -- like the beautiful blogs featured in the magazine where they featured beautiful artwork, like the blogs my friends had where I got to know them better than I did before. So I got a blog. And don't know what to do with it.

It turned out that getting a blog was super easy -- all but the picking your name thing. I wanted something to do with mixed media, since that's what I've been playing with lately, but all the addresses with that were taken. So I got mixing-katie and named the blog Mixed Up, and figured that it was pretty appropriate: I'm messing around in mixed media but don't really know what I'm doing. Also, I'm at a place where I need to decide where my "career" is going, and I'm not sure about that. We're going to move relatively soon and don't know where we'll go. I want to take my "art" more seriously, but don't know if it's worth it. So many decisions, and I'm not sure about any of them. So Mixed Up seems like a good name for me.

Inchies : )

I'm hosting an inchie swap on ATCsforAll.com, and finally got around to making my own inchies for it. I cut out images from an American history textbook, put them on some inchie blanks that I had made when cutting out something else, and then stuck on inked up words and did the edges with a silver marker.

While I was doing them, I spread out the finished ones and noticed that some of the words kinda made interesting phrases. Maybe that will turn into an idea for another swap -- sentence inchies :)

Chunky Madness

Just what I needed -- another addiction! As if ATCs and inchies and rolos weren't enough, now I've got myself hooked on chunky pages, too! They're 4 inches by 4 inches and super fun! Here are a few a made for trades on ATCSforAll with nursery rhyme themes:



And here is a bound book. I got these pages from different trades, then made covers and bound them on metal rings. I love how all the fibers and charms and beads and whatnot look when they stick out all over the place. My kind of madness :)

Fun Link

Here is a link to a site that will spell out your name with photos from flickr: http://metaatem.net/words/. Thanks to Goatgoddess from ATCsforAll.com for the tip!

Altered Rolo

I've been trading altered rolodex cards with friends from ATCsforAll. When I trade with someone that I don't have a rolo for, I cut out the return address portion of their envelope, paste it to a blank rolo card, and file it. I thought my rolo holder looked a little boring, so I added some stripes with white electrical tape.

Make It Mondays - April 14, 2008

Lisa Vollrath is putting up a new challenge every Monday on Go Make Something. This week's challenge was music. I did a 4x4 page based on REM's song "Night Swimming." I glued on some background papers, smeared on acrylic paint, then drew on top and colored with markers and colored pencils. This song always reminds me of a fun time I had with some friends in Saratov on the Volga river, so I drew the bridge that crosses the Volga there, and one of the pretty lampposts that are on the embankment.

Inspirational site

Yesterday I spent a lot of time on Lisa Vollrath's site Go Make Something. Lisa Vollrath is a member of ATCsforAll and I've seen links to some of her pages in the past, but never explored the site much before yesterday. Wow is there a lot of great stuff there!! Fun articles, great templates, lots of how-to's with excellent photographs. I loved the videos she had posted, especially the ones on organization. Very neat to see and hear the person who's been giving you instructions. It makes it so much more personal. Will definitely spend some more time on that site during my vacation (which starts this Friday, woooooooooot!).

Tunes

I'm not sure why, but I haven't been listening to much music lately. Maybe it's because my iPod broke, but maybe I've just been in a funk. I signed up for a fun 'Mixtape' swap on ATCsforAll.com and had a blast going through my CDs and putting the music up loud to pick the songs for my cards. Here's what I ended up with:



These cards were really fun - for the backgrounds I used some of the paper that I cover my table with and draw/paint/whatever on that collects lots of colors.

Today I signed up for Amie Street - my BFF sent me an invite about a year ago!! It's lots of fun to hear new music. I'm glad I finally registered.

WIP ATCs

Here are three ATCs I made for a personal trade. The theme: Under the Sea. First, I cut printed papers into strips and glued them on to ATC blanks with a glue stick:
Next, I smeared on off-white acrylic paint, put on a few accents with permanent markers, and covered the cards with two different acrylic glazes; blue on top, brownish on the bottom:

Then I used solvent ink over stencil waste to add some "bubbles." I drew fish, an octopus, and a mermaid on copy paper (used stamps for the mermaid's hands and tail), colored them in with markers, and glued them onto the cards with gel medium. I painted tissue paper for seaweed, and added a few highlights with gel pens. Then I stuck on a few words with my label maker:

Very fun to make! The end result was a lot different than I expected in step one, but I like them a lot.

Stamp Fulfillment

Last weekend I needed some stamps. I went to the post office, even though it was closed, thinking I could buy cute stamps from the stamp machine. No such luck. They took out the stamp machine and now have some ATM-looking thing that sells postage stickers for Priority and Express mail, and sheets of the not-so-attractive Forever Liberty Bell stamps. I got a sheet of these, but was disappointed about it (I've been wanting more of those Star Wars stamps).

Well, later I read online that the cost of mailing a letter will go up to 42 cents in May. So those ugly forever stamps aren't looking so ugly now. I also found out that you can buy stamps online from the post office website (usps.com). They charge a dollar to mail your stamps, no matter how many you order. I ordered me some cute stamps! Plus some more forevers, plus a bunch of one cent stamps. Looking forward to getting these cute stamps back from mail art trades.

My order came in today. Return address: Stamp Fulfillment Services, Kansas City, MO. Boy do I feel fulfilled. Plus, each sheet of stamps comes on a nice, clean piece of cardboard *perfect* for cutting up for chunky 4x4's :) Even more fulfillment.

Altered Playing Cards

This week, perhaps as a result of having such a clean desk, I've done LOTS of ATCs and several altered playing cards. The playing cards that I posted on ATCards.com have traded really fast. I've enjoyed making them, but I started to wonder -- how much do you need to alter something before you call it altered? The deck of cards that I've been "altering" is beautiful to begin with -- so it feels almost like cheating to use them. But just ALMOST :)


I got this deck of cards when my mom and I visited London a couple summers ago. We saw The Tempest in the new Globe and I picked up a deck of The Famous Shakespeare's Flowers Playing Cards as a souvenir of making it through standing up in the sun for an entire Shakespeare play. Each card has a painting of a different flower, plus a Shakespeare quote. At first I didn't want to even play with the cards because they looked so nice. I got over that, though!

One night I took the cards to someone's house and we played a Russian card game that doesn't use cards lower than 6. We took those cards out of the deck and then I completely forgot about them! I didn't see that person again (a friend of a friend of my husband's) so that left my lovely deck incomplete and unsuitable for any game other than durak.

When I saw a swap for altered playing cards on ATCards.com, I knew exactly which deck of cards I wanted to alter. I thought, if I can't play with them, I might as well paint them :) So I started altering these already pretty cards. First, I used sandpaper to scratch up the surface a bit. Then I used twinkling h2o paints to color the background. On some of the cards I used fine point pens to outline the flower paintings. I used ink over sequin waste to make some interesting circles. Then I used eyelets, gel pens, stickers, and a label maker to add some accents. I'm trading them in one-on-one trades and can't wait to build up a whole deck of altered cards!

New Year's Resolutions

This year I decided to make some resolutions. I kept them pretty vague so that I would be able to actually keep them for a month or two.

I noticed in Cloth Paper Scissors that many people made plans of doing an ATC a day for a year, or an inchie a day or an art quilt a week or whatever. I thought about making a resolution like that, but figured I'd bomb out in no time. I just don't like feeling like I HAVE to do something. So I decided to just make a resolution to do something creative every day.

Well, that sounded alright and I did it for the first few days while I was visiting my parents, and even on the day when we drove 12 hours to come back home. But once we got back to our apartment, I realized that my simple little resolution would not be so simple. Why?? Because my "creative space" (a 2x6 table in our computer room) was a disaster. I tell myself that I'm messy because it helps my creativity to have all of my "tools" out at all times, but I had gotten carried away. The table that seemed HUGE when we bought it was covered with the aftermath of many many projects and in the actual flat space available, I could just barely fit a 8.5x11 sheet of paper. So this led to resolution #2: CLEAN UP!! I took a before shot to document my progress. A real mess.
Needless to say, it had gotten to the point where I could no longer work here. I didn't even really want to be in the room with that mess anymore! I could barely get into the chair, I had to shuffle piles of stuff around in order to do anything, my super cool altered rolodex was more of an obstacle than a decoration (and practically useless as an address file), and even though it seemed like all my supplies were out, I could not find anything!! Clearly, something HAD to be done.

After sorting out paper to keep for projects and paper to recycle, trash that might find its way into artwork and trash that was just TRASH, I could actually see the floor. My husband seemed pretty impressed with my efforts even at this early stage (I guess that says something about his opinion of me as a houskeeper, haha). Then I went on to some fun cleaning up: sorting through teeny bits to go in my little drawer unit, flipping through my ATC collection while butting cards in to boxes, filing images into a shoebox, and organizing the funky fibers that nice folks from ATCards.com had sent me. This was really enjoyable -- I cut up some of the cardboard boxes from the TRASH trash pile and wrapped the cool pieces of yarn onto them. I think they look pretty happy in their new home, and I'll probably be way more likely to actually use them now that they're not squished up in envelopes anymore.

I grabbed a few of my favorite books from our overstuffed bookshelf and put them in a crate, along with some inspiring magazines, and put my shoebox of images and basket of sewing notions on top of the crate. This freed up a lot of space, and I can always shove the crate on to the floor when I start a big messy project. Now my rolo file is a lovely centerpiece at my table, and I can really enjoy flipping through the cards.

I got a set of stacking bins for larger items, things that plug in, and made the top bin into a mailing station. It's got all my stamps, envelopes, used envelopes, ATC sleeves, and note cards. So I'm ready for some mail art now :)

Here's an after shot. It's not perfect, but it sure is an improvement. My sewing machine is still living on the floor, and my set of drawers is still covered with a pile of who-knows-what, but, hey - it's a start.