Book of Dreams

Lately, I have been working on the book "Creative Awakenings" by Sheri Gaynor. I have been s...l...o...wly working on the assignments but I have really enjoyed them. One of the first was to create my "Book of Dreams Journal" to use for the remainder of the exercises. I finally finished the covers on Friday.

First I did some metal embossing. The book suggested silver, but I already had copper so I decided to use it. Then I cut the square in the front and gessoed the whole thing just like the book said. That's when artistic license started to really come in. I really didn't care for just glazing over the gesso like the book suggested so I decided to take the covers out of the spine, and gel medium vintage tissue pattern papers to it and then paint it. Then I glued patterned paper to the inside of the covers, and put the book back together. I wanted my journey to be about the heart so I chose to emboss a heart that would hold meaning for me. The book suggested adding glitter to my metal piece, but once I did, I really didn't like it, so I scraped it off. The scraping took off the alcohol ink from the heart and make it look really interesting, so I left it. Then I was ready to begin working in it.

My kids went with their grandparents camping for the weekend, so I spent all day yesterday, playing with my journal. Good day. My first page was a note to self:And here's the most exciting thing: While perusing my new Art Journaling magazine I came across an article from Ingrid Dijkers about using varied page edges. When I read it I thought, "DUH, why didn't I think of that!" I loved it immediately and found myself thinking about, dreaming about, obsessing about, all the different page edges and shapes I could include in my newly finished book of dreams. No more rectangles for me and it makes me almost giggle.

For the back side of my new not rectangle page, I had to answer a question (honestly) about the last year of my life. I feel a little unsure about sharing this one because, (honestly) this has not exactly been my year and mostly this page comes off as whining to me. It was more difficult than I expected to write a whiny page. I felt so ungrateful. I really do feel grateful about all of the good things that have happened to me but at the beginning of the year when I imagined 2010, it really didn't look like this. Don't get me wrong, I feel grateful, hopeful, and optimistic about things right now, but if I have to (honestly) look at how it's been going, I'm not going to lie. It's not been a party. But I really do like how the colors in this page turned out so I thought I would share. So my suggestion would be to enjoy the colors and EDGES (I really love those) and ignore the rest.