the earth laughs

Hello, my friends.  I think my blog has been a bit neglected lately.  I have been doing some crafty things, but I don't always post everything.  When I prepare for my stamping classes each month, I rarely post my samples.  I have also been working on the hexagon quilt blocks - usually while watching baseball.  And then there are are art journal pages, which have a tendency to take many days to complete.

The journal spread I have today was actually finished several days ago, but I just didn't get a chance to post it.  It started out as a project that I was going to share as a guest on the OWSE blog, but I decided to do something different for that one.  I just finished the pages for that project tonight.  I still have to take some more photos and do the write-up.  I think it's scheduled to go live sometime next week. 

I started these pages with a coating of gesso.  Once that was dry, I sprayed some blues and brown ink sprays on and let them drip down the pages.  I didn't like how bold the colors were, so when that was dry, I spread some more gesso on randomly with my fingers.  It's fun to experiment. 

I stamped a border down the outer edges and across the top and then brushed a light coating of gesso over it to mute it. 

I stamped the big flowers (Stampendous) with tuxedo black memento ink on white card stock and then colored them with copic markers and cut them out.  I added some white gel pen highlights. 

For the stems, I started with watercolor crayons and a water brush, but then went over them with paint.  The leaves are a hand carved stamp, which I stamped with paint and then filled in. 

I wanted more color in the background, so I brushed some paint on bubble wrap and then stamped it onto the background, using several colors. 

Next I glued the flowers down and added the computer generated sentiment. 

For the top outer corners, I punched a wide border and then cut it apart.  I think the punch is EK Success.  After sponging with turquoise and ballet blue, I glued two pieces in each corner and trimmed the excess.  Then I added just a bit of sponging along the outer edges of the spread. 

Thank you so much for stopping by today.  Have a great week.