Hearts & Ashes

It feels odd that Lent begins today.  With Ash Wednesday and also with St. Valentine's Day, so the shops and airwaves are full of hearts and flowers and talk of true lurve.  It's a strange contrast between the solemnity of the religious run-up to Easter alongside the commercialism of 14th Feb.  

There was a wonderful photo I saw on the-site-formerly-known-as-Twitter, with several blokes staring in bewilderment at a Sainsburys display of dozens of Valentine cards.  You could almost hear their thoughts.  What should they buy?  What'll she like?  Jokey?  Sweetly sentimental?  They were probably mind-boggled by the prices too.  How much?  For a folded piece of card and an envelope!!!  It made me laugh anyway.  

Right, on to crafty matters.  After finally listing packs of sari scraps on Etsy, I put together packs of journal ephemera too.  You see, I'd got stacks of vintage birthday cards, and was wondering what to do with them.  Plus old postage stamps and equally ancient stamp albums, the pages full of references to countries no longer even existing.  Not things I have room to keep, but I'm not about to bin them either.  (I think the stamp collecting was done by my maternal grandfather, and my mum was interested in it too as a girl.)  The birthday cards are too pretty end their days in the recycling, while the stamps are little pieces of social history.  So I thought they might be appreciated by crafters who're into junk journals or art journaling.  I gathered together other odds & ends - vintage playing cards, book pages, decorative paper, punchinella, and bundled them into envelopes, ready to (hopefully) be posted off to new homes.

Much as I squirm at doing self-promotion, here's the link to my Etsy shop if you're interested.  
Okay, change of subject.  The photo at the top of this blog post shows my dining table yesterday morning.  I hadn't messed around with the gell plate for ages, so out it came.  I stamped and stenciled on sheets of A3 sketchpad paper, ready for these to be cut up and turned into a journal. 

The idea is to not saturate each surface with colour and pattern, but use just enough so you're not faced with that stark white journal page.  A completely blank page can feel intimidating - you're reluctant to start making marks in case you 'get it wrong' or all that whiteness overwhelms any creative urge.  Having something on the page already, even if your artwork will eventually totally cover it up can act as a jumping-off point, a prompt to get you painting or drawing or making a collage.  That's the theory anyhow.  

I also printed on envelopes, making sure I left plenty of room for the address and the postage to be added.  

Oh, and a final picture to end this blog entry.  Here's my clean-up sheet, where I was simply getting rid of paint off the gell plate.  Isn't it funny how clean-up sheets can often end up as the nicest thing you've printed?  Love the colours, and wish I'd printed it on fabric.  That'd be nice to stitch into.  

Right, that's me done for now.  If you're celebrating Valentine's Day with someone special, then I'll raise a glass to you (or a teacup!).  Have fun!