And the happy mail continues

Just the other day I was just reminiscing about the "good ol' days" of blogging. I was talking about swaps, and the fun of sending and receiving packages filled with vintage bits and pieces, craft supplies, handmade gifts, and all those things. And whattayaknow…the incredibly sweet and fun mail that has been showing up at my house lately is making me feel like I've time traveled right back to those so called good ol' days!

In fact, this morning's mail contained a totally unexpected package from our friend Jennifer Perkins, who you probably know, or may just recognize as one of the talented gals in the Valentine's Day Wreath Blog Hop from a few posts ago. She was actually the gal who put together the Blog Hop.

 So today's package from Jennifer was pretty much a "just because" type of package. Which are the greatest types of packages. She's familiar with what me and Aaron like to collect and what we like to craft with. And she's got piles and piles of creativity and style to spare. So you better believe that a package coming from her is going to be a very fun package indeed.

It was just packed like a tin of sardines with all sorts of adorable vintage ephemera, and cutesy bits. And all in our color palette! So so fun and thoughtful! Do you see those adorable little cat eye sunglasses? And the sweet little 1949-50 school photo of the sweetly smirking blonde? And the tally card, and playing cards, buttons, paper doll, and there's even more that I couldn't fit in the picture. 

Love the little plastic dentures, and the golden A charm! 

I knew immediately who would be wearing those glasses! Perfect fit! 

Oh and this vintage floral brooch made of tiny seashells!! I ADORE it!! I'll totally be wearing it, but when I'm not I'll be keeping it in this little glass dish filled with my favorite tiny aqua glass ornaments, and honeycomb ball. This is the sort of stuff that makes my heart beat a bit faster. 

Just such a fun fun surprise! I adore it all and am totally inspired to create cute things using some of these pieces. I'm hoping to find a bit of time this weekend for personal crafting. We are also planning another @shoplikeitsaholiday instagram sale! The last one was so fun and we're going to work hard at gathering enough worthy stuff so that it's just as fun this time around! I'll be announcing the date soon! We'll be doing our gathering this weekend. 

We are totally buried in work right now, and doing our best to not freeze. As I type this it is 11 degrees…ughhh…and it's going down to 1!!! And with wind chill…just forget about it! yikes! 

Hope you are warm and cozy wherever you are. Thanks bunches for popping in! I'd love to hear about what you've been up to! Any fun craft projects? Swaps? Home improvements? 

See you tomorrow for Friday Favorites!

xo Jenny... & Aaron says hi!

Girls with Cake

Ahh being back home from our Art Is You trip has us filled with mixed emotions. We're missing our friends, missing the artsy energy and environment…just so many creative folks under one roof…you can take a walk to get some coffee and you'll pass rooms that are humming with art…anything from soldering, sewing, painting, sculpting…all in a 5 minute walk. We're missing getting and giving hugs all throughout the day, and seeing friends we have known for years online. 

But even though the event is over, the great energy is still with us. We're home, all of our stuff is unpacked, we're thrilled to be eating home cooked food, and work-wise we're back in the swing of things...and feeling more inspired than ever. Being at Art Is You reminds us to make more time for making personal artwork. We make art daily, but 95% of it is our WORK. Which, don't get me wrong, we love our work. But we need to make more of the art that speaks directly to our souls. Way more Art Journaling has to happen, and we have to take more time for fun and exploring new mediums and techniques. : )

Today while a bunch of orders dried, we did just that. I had started this canvas a long time ago and put it away. I had been meaning to pull it out and rework it, and finish it...and today that happened! 

Maybe my favorite detail is the simplest part…it has this fantastic crackle textured background. And of course it was loads of fun working on these sweet gals. 

And painting cakes is certainly on my list of favorite things. I love the texture on this one…it's my signature frosting technique...molding paste mixed with paint. 

I also love re-painting vintage wallpaper bits and cutting and pasting them into paintings. 

I shared some of the fantastic old photos I had purchased at Art Is You in my recap post. Well I had also picked up some vintage newspaper, which is perfect to use in our mixed media projects and art journals. We hadn't opened up the paper pack until today, and ohhh boy! This particular publication cracked us up. It's a 1975 edition of The Daily Express from the UK. And oh my gosh the headlines are insanity! All Doom and Gloom! 

And I heard from a UK friend that The Daily Express isn't any different today in 2014! ha!

Aaron got a big kick out of this article on the sports page. Apparently there was some controversy over some soccer players who were sore losers and kicked a hole in the door in the opposing team's locker room.

Well the gist of the story is that the team blamed a mouse for the hole in the door…saying that either the mouse chewed the hole, or possibly a player was scared of the mouse and tried to kick it but partially missed and ended up kicking a hole in the door. They said to be on the lookout for a limping Coventry mouse with broken feet or teeth. ha! 

We used some of the more subtle pages of the paper on the edges of our canvases. I love how old newspapers are so perfectly yellowed! 

And check out that corner of the canvas. This is what I call a "sweet spot". I love the distressed floral cluster, and the way the wash settles into the crackle…and I die for that faint aqua glow.

Here is my finished canvas. Don't these girls look sooo psyched about their cakes?! ha! Maybe they are in a sugar coma? I honestly love turn of the century portraits of children...they are rarely smiling. I find that so interesting.  

I really love how this piece turned out. I'm so glad that these girls are no longer on a shelf in the closet!  I'm really looking forward to painting lots more in this series. 

Wait until you see the piece Aaron worked on today!! It is sooo good! I nearly died! Ok not really… but almost. 

Hope your week is off to a great start! Thanks bunches for popping in! 

xo, Jenny…and Aaron says hi!

Eat More Cake Art Journal Spread

I find Art Journaling to be such a break from the everyday work. In our "real" work everything has to be so perfect. And I feel like Art Journaling is the opposite of that. It's a chance to be haphazard and messy. It had been a long few days of making, packing & shipping, and while the clear coat on a bunch of die cuts was drying I found some time to play around in one of my Art Journals. This is one of my smaller Moleskine journals and it's nearly filled up. This is one of the basic Molskines with the very thin pages. Prior to doing this spread I had went ahead and bolstered most of the pages with extra layers of paper and paint. Me and Aaron each have several Art Journals and jump back and forth between all of them.

Many times with me, an Art Journal page or spread begins with a vague idea that's related to a certain image or piece of ephemera that I'd like to use. In this case, it was this birthday cake image I had cut out from a piece of vintage wrapping paper. Everything about this image makes me swoon! I just had to use it. So I started the page by painting simple oval shapes in pink and cream, and then pieced in some pink and cream stripe paper. A lot of times when I'm doing a spread, meaning two pages, I like to make the pages mirror each other in some way. Sometimes I do one full composition that spreads across the two pages. But here I wanted it to be two separate pages that fit together perfectly.

Then I did some sketchy colored pencil outlines around the ovals, and added some paint spatters. Like I said…haphazard and messy is what I'm about when it comes to Art Journaling.

Besides the cake, I felt like the spread needed a muse. A face to be the spokesperson. And who better than this little chubby faced doll. I love using my collections in my spreads without actually "using" my collections. I just snapped a pretty close and clear photo of the cutie and printed her out.

I then glued her in with some decoupage medium. And from that same piece of vintage wrapping paper I cut out the corresponding slice of birthday cake and put it in her hand. I didn't want the page to be all pale color, so I then added some bright berry pink polkadots with a dauber, some Sharpie pen doodles, and bit of bright aqua paint details.

I knew I needed washi tape somewhere on the spread. I always need washi tape!

I selected my washi tapes and then pulled out my vintage printers tray full of all my bits and pieces.

Last week I had made these tags using my fave Ashley G stamps. I def wanted to use one of these!

I love how well black compliments pretty pastels. I added some more sketchy details with my Sharpie and also a bunch of stamped flourishes. I remember when flourishes were all the rage. I've got tons! I wish I knew who made these. I don't have the original packaging, and I doubt they make these anymore.

So I taped in my cute girl tag with a bit of metallic gold striped washi. I love how it compliments her gold glittered skirt.

I used some fairly crude handwriting skills to render these letters and cut them out of aqua polk dot paper. I adhered them to the page but then felt that they needed to pop a bit more. So I added a drop shadow with some tan paint, and used my sharpie pen to add "stitching".

I glued in some pink sequins for a bit of shimmer.

And while I was in shimmer mode I figured I'd add some glitter. I keep my most used glitters in this adorable chicken wire wall rack.

I added some ultra fine gold glitter to the candle flames.

Just wanted to share some of my Art Journaling with you guys. I plan on sharing a bunch more…I had been Art Journal all this time but I wasn't taking the time to take in progress photos. I'll try to do this a lot more. And yes…I 100% believe that we should all Eat More Cake.

Not so much that we blow up like a paint and paper filled Art Journal…but you know what I mean. :) I still get a kick out of watching a new moleskine go from the skinny guy on the bottom to the chubby colorful guy on top. 

Thanks for reading! And Happy Art Journaling to you!

xo, Jenny…and Aaron says hi!

"Sweethearts" Art Journal page (Inspired by Boardwalk Empire)

So I had mentioned that we just started watching Boardwalk Empire. And we are totally hooked. We are now on Season 3, and even though we are loving it, I have to admit that watching all the episodes in a row is kinda exhausting. We watch an episode every night before bed and I swear we both have had dreams involving aspects of the show. The characters are great. They perfectly walk the line between reality and caricature. There's also so much beautiful scenery, incredible costumes, sets, and decor. And at the same time there is no lack of insane violence and how shall I say??...."boobs galore"! 

But seriously, the show is currently etched into our brains.

Here are some Boardwalk Empire inspired things we've said throughout our days while working:

Jenny: "I wonder if there is a chihuahua out there named Nucky Thompson?"

Aaron: "I was on wikipedia and saw that in real life Arnold Rothstein dies in 1928. Do you think they'll take the show to 1928 so that we will see him die?" 

Jenny: "Seriously, Richard Harrow is an art journaler!?"

Aaron: "It makes sense that Richard Harrow is an art journaler...he's a tortured soul like the rest of us." 

Yes, Richard Harrow, the man with the hand painted lead mask covering half of his face. The result of a horrific war wound. And yes, we looked it up. The face plate is a perfectly accurate representation of what was worn by wounded WWI vets. So ok, Richard Harrow is the most likable cold blooded hit man that you'll ever come across. Because you know that he hates what he does, and you know that he'd do anything to help out the innocent and the meek. He's also a sentimentalist at heart and spends his free time pasting collages of happy family moments in his scrapbook. Yes, in 1920 this psycho killer was an art journaler.

I was thrilled to find pics of his pages on the HBO website. Which, believe it or not, were the inspiration behind our art journal page.

I'm also so incredibly in love with vintage photo booth photos. We've been collecting them for years, and we love the tinted versions. I thought it would be really fun to make our own! A little hand drawn couple, inspired by the show Boardwalk Empire...only without the murder, bootlegging, boobs, and corruption. 

So here we go with a little step by step of our page.

 Starting with a blank primed with Gesso page, we chose a stencil that had a very Deco era feel. 

Then we laid it on top of cardboard, taped it in place, and then we used Mister Huey's, which we sprayed in layers of colors, letting dry between each coat.

We used a blow dryer to speed up the drying time.

Now we've found that Mr. huey's over gesso "moves" when we apply washes, or gel medium or mod podge over it. We really don't mind it since it softens the lines a bit. But a trick to not blurring it too much is to try to not brush over an area too many times. We "sealed" it with gel medium, and when that was dry, we mixed a wash of water and acrylic paint, and gesso. We brushed the wash in select areas.

And then blotted it to soften it, and then we let it dry.

 We mixed black paint and water, and using a round brush we dipped into the black wash and then speckled the page with it. While that was drying we worked on our photo strip.

Aaron is master of cutesy retro faces. I did a rough sketch of what I was thinking and he totally knew exactly what I was going for. He sketched out a few "poses".

And then he gave the gal a beau. Kinda Richard Harrowesque.

Can you even handle the cuteness?? 

We love the feel of the tinted photo booth strips, so we added subtle color and shading. 

While the strip was drying we played around with layout and papers. We cut a "dummy" photo strip to stand in as a place holder while we were figuring out the layout.

When we found a layout that we liked we adhered some torn papers. Vintage wallpaper, sheet music, and stripes. Love the black mixed in.

We had this sweet little house photo envelope and thought it was perfect! Again, it reminded us of something from the show. The Commodore's mansion. An amazing house that becomes a place of ill repute. And this brass Sweetheart trinket seemed perfect. And this vintage black plastic photo slide frame fit perfectly.

We chose some key elements, like our roses cut from floral wallpaper. We adhered those and the house photo, some vintage envelopes with charming old timey handwriting and affixed stamps.

We then did an antiquing wash around the elements. Using a fine tip round brush dipped in water, we brushed the tip of a brown Gelato and then floated the wash around elements, and then blotted with a finger tip.

We then grabbed some chipboard hearts and painted them gold.

And added an antiquey wash using Gelatos to mimic the brass Sweetheart

We glued down the hearts, added more of our wash to areas. And then we added a

hand drawn scrollwork border with a sharpie fine tip marker. We designed the border to be in keeping with the era.

Then we added some stamps, and a saying. We knew we wanted to add more black to balance everything. And it adds a nice masculine touch.

I found this quote while searching for something fitting, and from the era. There were so many slang terms, and sayings from the 1920's but they were all too cartoony. We thought this classic phrase was perfect.  So we typed it up on a black background in PicMonkey, which we use for all of our day to day photo editing as well. Such an easy program to work with. I highly recommend it. 

So, that quote was then printed and we cut it to fit in the right spot. We really love the outcome of the page. It captured exactly what we were going for with Valentines Day looming...and our Boardwalk Empire addiction. And yes, our passion for the show is definitely enhanced by it's Jersey shore locale.

Hope you enjoyed our little step by step art journal page.

xo, Jenny...and Aaron

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