Challenge #210 and Back from India

Challenge #210 - "Spiralstring - that's the thing!"

This week's Diva challenge (here) is to use a spiral as your string.  I went with a Bijou tile (2 x 2 in), and had some fun.  After 2 weeks of doing nothing art related, it was really fun to get back to it.

I'm sure there are gorgeous tiles from the other participants; this is such a talented group!!  They inspire me all the time.  If you want to check them out, click on the link above and see all the other entries.  I try not to look at them until after I've posted mine, otherwise I may change my mind :)

Back from India

I spent a week and a half in India (Bangalore) on business.  It was a very, very busy business trip with very long days and very short nights :).  Anyway, I had a very good time meeting the people I work with every day, and it was all worth the exhaustion I feel now.

I took some pictures while I was there and  I'm sure I will be making something with them - stamps, stencils, and drawings/sketches.  It will be a lot of fun.

I was amazed by the colors everywhere, even in one of the local fruit/vegetable/flower markets.  Here are a couple of pictures I took there; don't you love all the colors and how everything is displayed?

I saw her across the street and
had to capture her and her choice of backdrop :)

Challenge #207 and Making THE Card

Challenge #207 - Unbatz by Sandy Hunter

I absolutely loved this new tangle; it is one of those really fun ones that you can't mess up.  OK... you can, and I did (every single time), but you can't really notice it too much :).

You can see here the challenge with a link to the step by step instructions.  Definitely try it, if you haven't yet!!  So easy and fun!  Unbatz is the whitest of the tangles below and a variation on the tallest mountain.

I used a hand-carved stamp I created last year for the mountains, traced them with a sepia micron pen, and then had fun tangling inside the mountains.  Then had this crazy idea of tangling the sky and leaving the moon white :).  This was done on an ATC sized Bristol paper.

Making THE Card

I have a little niece who loves to make cards for people on their birthdays.  On my last birthday, I got an awesome one, and was asked if I would please make one for her on her 5th birthday :).  She said she loved the one I made her last year (here) and was really looking forward to her next one.  That was 5 months ago! 

So, I had to make her something special.  I started out with getting out my Gelli Plate.  You can see below how I had everything really organized when I first started :)

• Mark making recycled items on the right
• Acrylic paint all lined up behind them
• My 6x6" Gelli plate
• Some hand-carved stamps, a couple of my home-made stencils
• brayer
• Different types of paper
• baby wipes
• container with water (the black thing next to the paints) to put my hand-carved stamps in after using them

Let me just say that's not how this table looked after an hour or two :)... it looked like a hurricane hit!  But I did get a lot of fun prints; here are some of them (including one of my cats' tail).  The one I ended up using for Rowan's card is the pink /blue one on the left (in the middle).  It was printed on both sides - on purpose :)

I cut the bottom piece for the card, stamped a bit more on both sides with my hand-carved stamps, and then added more details with acrylics, colored pencils, sparkling pens (which she loves), watercolors, pen and ink, and a Sharpie for the edges.  When I folded it to make an accordion book, because it was thick bristol paper, it cracked and it looked awful.  So... I cut it, added eyelets, thread, and... done :)