Five Shadows

Cloth Doll Book is complete.

There are pockets on the front and back inside to hold the clothes.

These pretty fabrics are about to become a clothe book for a friend.

This is the little wall hanging (21″ x 34″) that I stitched up for a friend. I don’t do the quilting, as she is a long-arm machine quilter. She is also a vendor at quilting shows in Northern Indiana – Country Quilting is the name of her booth. So if you are ever shopping at shows in NI you can look for her booth. She deals mostly in books, patterns, and kits.

These lovely ladies and coordinating prints are about to become a wall-hanging for a friend. I’ll show the resulting quilt in a few days!

The theme for this bag is ‘travel.’ Mary included photos  and tickets printed on fabric of trips she has taken since childhood. I picked the photo of the cruise ship and had fun layering it with  fabrics and ribbon. I used fusible web and did some free motion stitching to hold the piece together. I outlined the ship with a Pigma pen and also did some stitching in a dark grey thread to add detail. This is what the piece looks like before adding it to the canvas bag. I have a tag that says ‘enjoy the journey’ that I hope to fit into the piece. It might have to be sewn on to another place on the bag as it is getting crowded!

This little quiltie will be added to a butterfly theme canvas bag as a pocket. I used Lumiere paint by Jacquard in turquoise and plum. This is for a friend who loves purples and all things glitter. So I decided to try the Lumiere paint as a base, then stenciled the butterfly and leaves, coloring them in with fabric markers. I added a turquoise selvage edge, several ribbons and a button. In the upper left corner, can you read the word ‘charmed’ on the selvage? That word suits my friend!

This Altered Canvas bag swap should be winding down about now – bags are due back to their owners in September. But I have not seen the 11 bags I’m to work on! Looking over my past posts, I think I have only received and worked on 8 bags! Yikes! I wonder who is holding them up? I have three more bags to work on….

As it turned out, I did not work much at all on the journal this final week. Flipping through it the only new page I find is the doodle on the envelope page. So maybe that is kind of a closure – sealing up the envelope with all its pretty and strange contents and setting it aside for another time. I had a silly little project in mind, but the week was taken up in other activities. So here is the doodling …

Thanks for the awesome journey fellow wreckers! Thanks Jamie for hosting the Next Chapter. I have so enjoyed visiting all the blogs and getting to know each of you! Blessings to each precious one in what your future holds!

Wow! These two months are just flying by … Soon we will be saying goodbye to Sunny Days of Summer – and I am not ready for that yet! Are you ready to get back into the swing of a new school year? The good news is, my husband has found a one year position at our local state university and HIS school year has started this week! The girls and I have a few more weeks to play before buckling down to another year of school.

This past week in the Wrecking adventure hosted by Jamie Ridler,  I did tackle some of the ‘writing’ pages. Thanks ladies for the encouragement! I filled the ‘Internal Monologue’ pages with small print and won’t share it because it is after all my own personal thoughts.   I also filled the ANGRY page with a weird happening that involved a very ballistic person directing his anger at innocent by standers! (My daughter and Me!) And I have a few pages that friends helped with. Butch scratched ever so lightly on the ‘scratch with a sharp item page’. His last name is Rose and he scratched a very pretty rose on it, but it does not show up enough to share in a photo. And he left an ‘X’ mark cut in the ‘friend destruction page’  and Marsha ripped a corner off that page. Tee hee! Thanks my dear friends!

I received Kim’s lovely white pages filled with lace and trims and buttons and pebbles and other such items. It is a very pretty page! Thank you Kim – I think it is happy in its new journal home!

So what have I learned through this experience? I think the biggest thing was to just let go and have fun with this whole experience. I did step out of the comfort zone a bit. I found it fascinating how the friends I shared the journal with would just jump in and wreck away! (Altho some thought me a bit strange! You know the type who would never ever damage a book!? They watched, shaking their heads as the others wrecked!)

And I have so liked checking in on what all my fellow wreckers have been doing to their journals! I think I have visited each website – sorry that I did not leave a comment on each one. But I enjoyed each visit!

Happy wrecking ladies!

While in Knoxville last week, I solicited the help of my 8 year old friend Ruthie to help with the wrecking. She was more than happy to help out! Actually, rather gleeful! Wish I had a picture to show her in action! She is a very special and sweet child with Down Syndrome. Her name is Ruth Rachel, but by the end of our playing, I was calling her Ruth Rascal, which her mother said was very fitting! I showed Ruth my journal while her Mom had to run some errands and asked if she would like to do some ‘art’ with me. “YES!” she replied! So I turned to a blank page and asked her to write her name, which she did with no problems. Then I ripped out the page and crumpled it up so we could play Journal Golf. She was very good at kicking the paper ball through the ‘tent’ but the book is getting so full that I had to mostly hold it up.

Next I traced her hand and then she drew in her fingernails. She is so cute giggling as she colored away!

Then I turned to the color out side the lines pages and Ruthie did her thing!

By this time the markers are falling on the floor so I bent down to pick them up and Ruthie is just giggling and coloring away! BUT as I sit back up, Ruthie has turned to the pencil poke page and is adding her signature art work to that page! At first I thought “OH no! this page is just like I like it!” But the very next thought was “this is a wreck this journal venture” so I picked up a marker and joined in coloring in the circles on the page. And thus I started calling her Ruth Rascal.

The last page for last week was glueing in a newspaper page. I found the job fair page and glued it in as a hint to my hubby! He had applied to a job west of Knoxville, but had not heard anything back from them. I wanted him to call while in the area. He wasn’t feeling well by this time – picked up some virus or bacteria on our trip – coughing, sore throat, headache. Anyway the page is in and the good news is he does now have a one year position starting this week at a local state university in our home town! So thank you to all who have shared kind thoughts and encouragement in response to my post about the need for a job back in Week 2 of the Wrecking! This gives us some breathing space as his search for a full time position will continue. …. Thanks again for the well wishes during this time!

I’m late signing up for this week but I have been wrecking. Funny that Jamie suggests we swap our  favorite page on her post this week as I have several that I am really liking now! Which one would I part with!? I’ve decorated the edges of the journal as you can see in some of the pictures, I’ve added lint, white things, random items, four letter words (with the help of creative friends!), smeared lines, dripped chocolate and other fun wreckage.

I used water color pencils for easy line smearing.

Friends helped with the four letter words. Aren't they creative!?

These random items did not come from my couch! They are just random found items!

I’m joining the “swap please” – - are you?