Meandering 2.26.2016

"Meandering: adjective; the act of following a winding or indirect course. Ramble, roam, zigzag, circuitous. A blog post about a variety of things; a little bit of this and a little bit of that."

I have a "thing" for office supplies. I love to walk into an office supply store and wander the aisles and ponder all of the new crisp papers and folders; the variety of planners and products to organize my life; labels, dividers, envelopes, pens, pencils - the list goes on and on. I don't exactly get what the appeal is, but I'm hooked! It is no great surprise then, that office supplies have made their way into my art practices. I shared previously that a stop on day one of our sisters road trip provided a wonderful supply of new and vintage office supplies. So once I was home I started playing and using these new found items in my art journaling projects. One of our great finds were two dusty boxes of old ledger paper. I had fun the other day stamping and stenciling on it.

Along with the ledger paper I have used some other office supplies in my art.

Hole reinforcements decorated with ink and paint

Mailing label, plus ledger paper as a background page.

These office supply goodies have made their way into my Etsy shop too. I now have a few Office Supply Ephemera Packs available here.

I have written posts about my recent road trip with my sister  here and here. I didn't get much of a chance to visit any parks and do any birding while on vacation, but I did see some birds. One of the highlights for me was on a walk on the trail behind my daughter's when I spotted an Eagle!

I saw a few birds that we don't have in Ohio:

Northern Mockingbird

Best I can tell this is a female Boat-tailed Grackle

And then it was just nice seeing some of the water birds again since they have migrated from the north for the winter.

Last Sunday after church Sai'Vion and I and my friend Rox went to the Window on Wildlife to watch the birds for a while. Sai'Vion is very interested in animals and is really enjoying birding. He is doing a great job of remembering the birds names and how to identify them. I, of course, am a biased god-grandma, but I'm pretty impressed with how engaged he is for a nine-year-old! We're ready for Spring to come and bring the migratory birds back to our area.

Well, that's all the meandering I have for today. 

Thanks for stopping by!

Let's Start This Road Trip!

My sister and I have wanted to do a road trip together for almost 25 years, but one thing or another (mainly parenting related) never made it possible. Sure, we took day trips and weekend adventures with our girls, but the two of us traveling across multiple states for a week-long adventure ~ that just never happened. This past summer, however, we were determined that now was the time and we scheduled a week in 2016. On January 29th we began our adventure to Charleston, SC to visit my daughter, who is the only one of our kids to live far away from us. We took two-and-a-half days to make the trip down so we could meander and shop along the way.

Our first stop was just two hours into our trip at a great shop called Hollo's PaperCraft in Brunswick, OH. They have rows and rows of paper, envelopes, craft supplies, and office supplies to explore. Here is just a sampling of things I found:

I made travel journals for our trip and many of the above items will make their way into them.  The rest of day 1 was mainly driving as we made our way through Ohio, West Virginia and Virginia to Greensboro, NC where we stayed the night.

Our first stop on day 2 was a wonderful shop called Betty's Creative Studio in Greensboro where we spent a few hours combing through paper and art supplies. Then on to Durham, NC where we spent the rest of our day. Our original plan was to go to a large flea market in Raleigh, but Durham turned out to be such a wonderful town that we stayed there all day. We bounced around to thrift, antique, and art stores. The Scrap Exchange was the best! A warehouse full of recycled items - everything from old books and magazines to old paint and paper.

Durham has done an incredible job of restoring and repurposing historical buildings and downtown districts. The area we stumbled on was the Central Park district.

There we found restaurants in restored auto dealers and old filling stations as well as the original Durham Bulls baseball stadium where the Kevin Costner movie, Bull Durham, was filmed. 

We chose to eat at "The Pit" for North Carolina barbeque.

Delicious Pulled Pork!

We will have to return to Durham someday. There is so much more to explore! Day 3 was a four hour drive down to Charleston .... but that begins a post for another day. :)

Collage Play

I have numerous art mediums that I enjoy: painting, lettering, watercolor, photography, etc. It is the use of multiple art mediums and combining them that makes art journaling so appealing to me. It sure keeps things from getting boring!

I think, however, that collage is probably one of my favorite art mediums. I really can get lost in adhering paper pieces to a page! This summer I found an old atlas at a book sale that has an incredible color palette, so I made some collage backgrounds using the map pages. Here are a few of the pages I have been playing with:

No map paper on this one.

I then added another of my favorite mediums - letters cut from painted papers. I usually just take photos of my art with my camera and edit in PSE, but I have read on some blogs that people also scan their art. So I tried that with the same art piece to see the difference.

Scan

Photo

The scan definitely turned out much better and I like that I can fill the full frame with the photo. I will say that I took my photo in early morning when the natural light is not the best in my room. I'll have to try my experiment again with afternoon light and see the difference. 

That's it for me today. What's your favorite art medium for play?

30 Day Blogging Challenge day 5.

A Little Bit of Art

I have been focusing on writing devotions for the next few months of Take Me Deeper for the His Kingdom Come community. What I have noticed in this new chapter in my life is that when I am putting my energy into writing it usually uses up most of my creative energy. So my art journaling pages have been leaning toward simplicity lately. Join us in Take Me Deeper in April as we look at living the Resurrection Life. We will also be beginning our first HKC book study in May with the book "A Creative Call" by Janice Elsheimer. You can learn more about the book study in this blog post.

Recent art journaling:

Some work in my TMD journal:

March Divider

April divider

TMD March Week 4

I recently added some new/revamped paper packs to my Etsy shop. The paper packs are designed to be used as background pages or for images for art journaling, collage, mixed media art, and other paper crafts.

Faith Themed Pack - 25 pieces

Landscaped Themed Pack - 20 peices

Painted Pages Pack - 10 pieces

Have a blessed Holy week.

This & That

 We have been in a series at church about relational prayer and have tried to make it very practical. Sometimes we just make prayer too difficult. We think it needs to be a certain way in order for God to hear it or answer it. We think it has to have holy or fancy language, when instead God is looking for us to simply talk with him and get to know him better. Two weeks ago we had a panel of people from the congregation share the different ways they connect with God in prayer and other spiritual practices. I got to share about how art journaling has become a spiritual practice for me and shared some of my pages.

This past weekend our Equipping and Communication pastor spoke on the challenges we face when it comes to prayer. He and his wife lost their 4 year old son in March to Batten's Disease. And Andy shared very personally about unanswered prayer and about how God connects to us in our suffering. It was very powerful and moving. (You can listen here if you are interested Here) Andy wrote a great prayer which he shared with us at the end of his message and I wanted to share it with all of you:

"God, if your will is to remove this suffering, that would be a tremendous relief to me; but if your will is to redeem this suffering, then empower me by your Spirit to endure it, so that faith, hope, love and Christlikeness may result in and through me."

What I appreciate about this prayer is that, not only is it relational, but it also helps align our perspective with God's.

I have had little time for art lately. My little Etsy shop has been quite busy over the past few weeks. And last week at church we had vacation Bible school. I volunteered. It exhausted me! But it was good. I love spending time with kids and I helped with the 4-6 year olds, which is my favorite age group. Our next door neighbors have 5 year old twin girls who went with me all week. We had a great time, along with my 5 year old god-grand daughter, Christanay. She loves hanging out with the twins. Below is a picture of them at VBS and then some Documented Life Project pages.

Christanay is in the center with a twin on each side

That's all for today!