What are you up to wednesday - part 4

It's wednesday again. Time to show what I'm up to! First I'd like to show my work table as it is right now:

I am working on a second page of labels/tags for my fully handmade journal project. I have painted the papers already and am now making other elements to embellish those pages with. I am working on tags with my little houses on them and just started coloring them in. When they are finished they will become another freebie! It's really a lot of fun to make these tags.

I also wanted to show you something the mailman brought yesterday. A box full of goodies from my friend and partner in creative crime M.! For my birthday! I swear I've been having a birthday for a week now ;-) And it's not even over yet because some family members will stay for a few days the coming weekend! A ten day birthday, who doesn't want that?

Anyway, here's a detail of M.'s wonderful gift:

In the box were several fabrics (my sewing room is rejoicing right now), a beautiful sketch folder, a dipping pen with different nibs, four colors of bister (which is a type of drawing ink that you mix yourself), some wonderful photo's of both of my deceased cats (she's a great photographer and I will probably use the images for two mixed media pieces to remember them by), a lovely piece of art mail,  and the most cool thing of all: she made a stamp based on one of my art pieces! You can see samples of it in the picture. It's the piece I use in all my profiles on the web! It's made from a simple eraser and I can't believe she did this, such a wonderful idea.

And just to show you what a talented gal she really is, here's her blog, her flickr and her fotothing. Take a look and leave lots of admiring comments!

Freebie + give-away

Today is my birthday! I turned 41 and since I have no hangups about aging I am quite happy with that. I still can't believe I have the privilege of getting to be a real grown up (well... sort of) and see how it feels to get older. I like how I get a better sense of self and more peace of mind with who I am as the years go by. That being said, the years do go by way too fast, don't they? ;-)

To celebrate this joyous occasion I thought I'd hand out two gifts to you, my sweet readers. The first is a little freebie for all of you and the second is for one lucky person who gets drawn from a hat (or a cap or whatever else I have available at the moment). Read on for the details.

Freebie sheet of self made labels:
I am currently working on a new handmade journal, that will be somewhat ROD-style, but with all the elements made by me, myself and I, so no recycled parts or pretty ready made papers this time. This means I am painting and decorating papers myself and thinking about how I want the cover to look, but also that I want to make my own tags and labels and other decorative elements to put inside the book. It's the first time I'm doing something like this, so it's a fun challenge to draw my own designs.

I finished my first sheet of labels/tags this weekend and I thought I would share it with you. I drew the labels with a fineliner and colored them in with gouache and felt tip pens. The outer shapes are from a stencil that I have for a cutting system by Fiskars. But what's in these shapes is all my own doing.  I haven't had such fun in drawing in a long time. They are simple, but colorful and I hope you like them. If you click on the picture it will take you to my flickr, where you can download the original size. It's scanned at 300 dpi, so it should be good enough to print. I recommend printing it on cardstock or (even better) watercolor paper. There is little black line on the top and left side of the image (I did not trim the scan correctly and was too lazy to correct it), but it's outside of the labels, so it shouldn't matter.

For future reference: I will make at least three more sheets of labels/tags and I will put those up as freebies as well when they are done, so stay tuned! I can't wait to incorporate them in the new journal. The colors just make me so happy.

First blog give-away
My second gift to you is my first blog give-away! I anounced it a short while back and now it's here.
Recently I finished two notebooks that are 6x6 inches (15x15 cm), inspired by my ROD journal. They are filled with beautiful scrapbook papers and elements, all by Tilda. They were a try out for me to see how a different size and a different kind of cover would work out, so I am keeping one myself as a sample and the other one goes to one of you! Here's a picture of the two books together, you get to win the top one, because it turned out just a little better than the other one.

Here are some spreads of the book you might win:

And here are some overall views to give you an idea of the outside and inside.

The book has 24 pages of two different sizes and the inside covers have pockets to put stuff into.

If you want to win this little book, all you have to do if leave a comment on this post before next monday (april 18). That day I will put your names in a container and draw a lucky winner. I have no idea if any of you even want this little notebook, but hey, if there's only one who does that one is sure to get it, haha, so if you like it I hope you participate! I will post the winner a week from now! Looking forward to your responses.

Bye bye Heart Journal - Hello Roses Journal

It's time for some everyday journal pages again. I closed the book on the heart journal about four weeks ago. I wanted to show you the last spread I did in this journal. It's not the last spread in the book, but somewhere in the middle where I had still left some pages unfinished.

After the heart journal it was time for a new book and I decided to leave the landscape format behind me for a while and choose a spiral bound photo-album as my next journal. The cool part of a photo-album is that it has these transparent protective sheets of paper between the regular pages and I found that those were really nice to write on! This also gives an interesting effect to the page underneath.

The cover of this book was plain purple linen, so I upgraded it a little with a simple layer of a napkin with roses on it and some lettering. Here's how it looks now:

It's quite simple and to keep it simple I dubbed it The Roses Journal. Really, how do I come up with these things? My journals are always called something so obvious that it makes you want to go "Duh" ;-)

Anyway, here's some pages from that journal. They are mostly decorated pages with writing on them and one collage. I of course chose the pages where I didn't mind if people read the writing. I don't really have that many secrets, but I am wary of putting up pages where I mention other people even if it's in a good way. It's just to give you an idea what the journal looks like on the inside. For those who don't speak Dutch: since the writing is from the past few weeks it's all about my cat Mara being sick and my worries about her. This just shows that my journal really does reflect my daily life ;-)

The last one is actually the beginning of a personal project I am doing outside of the journal now, which is spending about 30 minutes a day working on small abstract collages. It's a kind of practice for me to get more comfortable with abstract collage and working with just shapes and patterns instead of integrating words and images. When I have more of these collages I will of course show them on my blog.

Hope you enjoyed this little tour of my current journal and wishing you a wonderful weekend.

What are you up to wednesday - part 3

Today a view of my sewing table/cabinet thingy (whatever you call it). I'm right smack between projects right now. I finished two little booklets yesterday that are done ROD style, but with a different kind of cover. This cover is directly sewn onto the paper. I will show more of these two books in a next post. One of these will be my very first blog give away! Yay! So stay tuned for that!

On the right a fun and wonderful surprise that I received through the mail today. It's an early birthday present from my friend P. My birthday is not until april 11, but I know how this goes: when you order online you always tend to be on the safe side ;-) It's a beautiful deluxe set of graphite pencils. This is exactly the kind of thing I would love to own, but always feel is too decadent to buy for myself. I mean, it's not like I don't own any pencils. So I am really really happy with this set (I'm doing a little happy dance right now). Thank you P!.

Finally a thank you to all the kind words I received both here and elsewhere about the loss of my cat. It means a lot to me.

Mara Cat is dead

It was the saddest of weekends, or actually the past few weeks have been quite sad and worrisome. My cat Mara was struck by a minor stroke and got from not even that bad to much worse to a point where she had to be euthanised last saturday.

It's strange how fast these things can go. Here's a page from my journal that I wrote just yesterday, all about my grief of course, but I'm showing it because there are two photographs in it that are almost exactly a month apart. I still can't get my head around the quick change!

The first photo shows Mara at her best. It was taken in the early morning, which is the time when I usually write in my journal. As you can see she liked to be on top of things, usually quite literally. This was already far away for her. She usually lay against my left hand while I was writing with my right. She loved attention and had no shame in asking for it, or should I say 'demanding it'?  ;-)
The second photo was taken last friday and shows just how miserable she had become. Her expression says it all. I had to bind her legs in bandages because she was gnawing at them and all the fur was dissappearing. I had to protect the skin from further damage. She was dehydrated and lost a lot of weight. She could barely find the strength to walk anymore, but she kept her dignity and kept using the litter box, which was amazing to me.

The whole thing started three weeks ago. Until that moment she had never been sick or hurt in all her 15 years of living (unlike her brother who died last september and who was a real trouble maker). She started shaking her head and her legs as if she wanted to shake something off and her personality kind of changed from being the most affectionate and talkative cat in the world to be being much more aloof and quiet. The vet thought she had had a minor stroke and said it was quite possible she could recover over time. So I still had hope mixed with all my fears. That's why there's still some humor in the journal page I did shortly after she got sick.

It's a small painting in my journal done with poster paints and a glaze pen. It's a little play on words. On the one hand it's of course about my fear of losing her, but on the other hand it's a display of a character trait of hers. She was really easily offended and then literally sat like that a little away from me, but in plain view just to show me she was not amused. ;-)

But things got worse rather fast. She lost strength, she simply forgot to eat (I had to remind her to eat and drink), she started to breathe more difficultly. Every now and then she would have this small period of feeling better and I hoped she would recover after all, but it always was one step forward and two steps back. Until the point where I thought maybe it would be better to let her go. I wanted to ask the vet for advice first though. But I felt there was little chance she would get better. I made a little work on paper about this, just to get this sad energy out.

Last saturday was the final day. She had gotten so bad that there was no doubt left in my mind that I should save her from any worse. So in the morning the vet helped her out. I had never been present at a thing like this before and I expected it to be somewhat cold and clinical, but it was nothing like that at all. In fact it may be the kindest thing I have ever done for her. She went quietly and without pain and I am happy to say she did so after one wonderful life!

I was and still am really sad of course. It's not easy losing such a great cat. I'm not one of those people who thinks of cats as equal to people, but the fact remains that this cat and her brother before her spent eight years with me and except for vacations were my constant companions in those years. I got them both from an animal shelter when they were seven years old, and I can't recommend getting an older cat enough to anybody. They can be so cool and sweet!

After it was over I went home and cleared some stuff away and then I took her into the dunes and buried her (that's the great thing about living here, lots of wonderful remote places for a thing like that). She lies close to her brother, be it not in the exact same spot.

I made this journal page after I came home again.

The heart is made of the same fabric as the one I wrapped her in when I went to bury her. I did not bury her with anything though. I want nature to take her as fast as possible, that's just what feels right to me.

So, now I have gone from two cats to one cat to no more cats. The house feels really empty without them and I keep expecting a cat around every corner, which is really strange. I will definitely go to an animal shelter some time in the future to get another cat, but first I want to get over these two and just be alone for a while.