To Frame or Not To Frame...

...that is the question here.
My sister is having her first baby girl after two boys. She bought the cutest little quilt for the nursery and asked me to make canvases of some of the flowers on the quilt for the wall. Well, I came home and promptly painted two of them as I saw them and HATED them. I just couldn't continue. And here is the lesson I learned...when you try to mimic something you haven't created, it will never be "you" and you will never like it or be proud of the work.

So, I started over. I began by laying a foundation of old sheet music, children's book pages, a french lesson book, and scraps of scrapbook paper. Then on each canvas I cut a shape, a butterfly for yellow, a flower and a heart for pink, and a bird for blue. I then painted over the whole thing and wiped away some of the paint to make the foundation show through in places.

Then I used scrapbook paper scraps to cut petal shapes and after sanding and distressing them, glued them all together. I added hand stitching, buttons, and ribbon to each flower and glued them to the canvas using double layers of foam mounting tape for dimension. I like them MUCH better now. I hope my sister does too. Girls don't come along very often in our family so we are all super excited. Now a decision must be made about frames. Should we frame them, leave them as is (I wrapped the paper and painted the sides, too), or should I adhere ribbon to the sides? Decisions, decisions. I think I'll leave that one up to my sister.

The weather has been very overcast and rainy all week so I haven't been able to take any pictures. Here are some of my "Wreck This Journal" pages that I have finished lately.

I decided to choose glitter glue over plain glue. The reason seems obvious. I just LOVE color.

Here is the doodle page. I did it while I was working the Primary Election. Primaries are pretty slow. So I finished this and the page below also.

The only thing on this page originally were the little circles for poking with a pencil. I drew the rest of it with Sharpie's and then poked the holes. So much fun poking holes in books...who knew?

And finally, I received a most awesome gift this week. My mom and friend Deb Evans who owns myvinyldesigner.com asked to borrow my art journal and returned with this:

It is a giant print of my journal page. It is printed on a stretched canvas and it awesome! I crazy LOVE it! I wish the photo could show just how big it is but I can tell you that it is about 2 ft. x 3 ft. and did I say awesome? After they brought it to me, my heart was pounding all day and my mind was racing with all of the possibilities Deb's scanner could bring. It is just so exciting. Well, that pretty much sums up my creative life lately. I'm off to get some more work done.