Splendeur Caisse

Number 23. I used a Martha Stewart border stencil in the background. xo Alicia

Well this month has been something else. I haven't posted as regularly as I normally do. I decided to take the month off from FMS' Photo a Day challenge , cause I just wasn't feeling it. I'm hoping that'll change in November. We shall see. I've been following along with The Right Brain Planner   on self-directed study. So I've taken almost no pictures the month of October, I made my art journal/gluebook for the New Year, I followed along with Journaling Junkie 's journaling challenge, and started crocheting again. I'm hoping to keep all this up. I'm loving how 'productive' I've been. xo Alicia

xo Alicia

Still enjoying this exploration into paint, I finally decided to take. Now I plan to incorporate these into my art journal. And of course to paint more pages into backgrounds. So much fun. xo Alicia

Doodling and arranging images in the art journal. Now, I need to find some words to add. xo Alicia

These are pages are my first attempts at creating background pages for my art journal. I love it, creating them made my heart swell. I can't wait to go create a few more pages today. These backgrounds were done on magazine pages.  I was inspired by Alma Stoller's post Painting a Magazine Page . Check out her videos. xo Alicia

  Recently I saw t his tutorial , among others out there and decided to give it a try. I also want to try the technique used in the tutorial. That way I can create personal stencil unique to me. This is all I've done so far. It is tedious work and I need an exacto knife. I'll check in with you next week to show you my progress. Bye   xo Alicia

I've followed Little Ink's blog Little Raven Ink  for a while now. When I saw this video I knew I wanted to join in. Give it a try, especially if you think you can't draw!   Here are my first attempts:   I'm making more little creatures before I move onto the next video, where you practice coloring them. Yay, see ya!   xo Alicia   

 I've been working on different stitches for binding on art journals I'm making. I spent the weekend cutting and folding junk mail envelopes into signatures. I need to work on the covers but I have plenty of signatures, enough to make about 10 books. I made a protoype using coptic binding. Okay I'm off to go work on some covers. xo Alicia

I've been busy creating journals for my younger sisters. I'm having fun creating and crafting. xo Alicia

How was your weekend? Mine wasn't too terrible. I did lose some sleep because I was up learning new things for the blog. I made a new banner! This was the first rough draft. I didn't like the white space under the photos and couldn't get to be transparent so I scrapped this first draft and went with the mosaic banner you see up top. All thanks to this tutorial from  Clover Lane . I had to download Picasa but it was definitely worth it. Now I can create photo collages to share here. Fun! Plus, I finally learned how to create a grab badge for myself! <---------------It's over there! Under the bloglovin' button. Yeah, it's the same as the banner. I just wanted to try making one and it worked! Believe me I've tried before without any success. Until last night when I found this awesome tutorial by Bartering Blogger! Yay, I feel accomplished! On to the next goal. xo Alicia