Welcome home!

Look at this ~ my calendar made it's way home this week!! What a treasure of art it is.
It's so thick and chock-full of wonderful textures, colour and fantastic art by some of altered art's best-est mixed mediaists!

Thank you Beth, Sue, Liz, Caren, Christine, Lorraine, Sharon, Jennifer, Cece, Ruth, and Marci.

You guys have created a wonderful piece of art that I shall always be cherished. Thank you Marci for sending the calendars on to me in rotation without delay. Also I'd like to give a big thank you to Kathy Wasilewski for putting this year-long swap together. It's been a wonderful journey together. I've experimented, stretched, made mistakes, grown and learnt so much from the other talented artists, mentioned above, in the process.

Please note: Thanks to my art buddy Arlene who is so incredibly computer savvy NOT! but who helped me add links to people I mention in my blog. Would that make you computer literate now, Arlene?

Love em ATCs

Four ATCs for Ruth Rae's Valentine ATC swap are now complete. It took me forever to start working on them, but I'm pretty happy with how they turned out. January and February always seem to be such a difficult month to produce art after the big Christmas rush. I feel artistically drained.

Anyhoo, here's "Love Bug", one of the ATCs. Material used include: copies of photos of me at ages 1 and 2, DYMO labels, chandelier danglies, glitter and more.

I'll be very exciting to receive 4 ATCs in return for these babies. It's been a long time since I've been in an ATC swap.

After completing these ATCs, yesterday, I continued making Valentine ATCs for an upcoming PHAP ATC swap. I'll post one or two of those ATCs soon for you to have a look.

Be my Valentine

I'm in a 14 day swap with the artists I participated with in the 12 Days of Christmas. This time around, we made 15 Valentine gifties for each other. We need to mail the gifts out to each participant directly. I love getting Snail Mail ~ it's such an event in this fast paced computer age.

Here's a photo of my WRAPPED gifts ~ What? You thought I'd show you what I made before February 8th, when my gift will be opened by the group? Silly you!

My art buddy, Arlene and I plan to mail out our things together. (Her gift will be opened on February 5th) This is soooo much fun ~ I can't wait to see what these wonderfully talented friends will create for this swap. Other swaps I'm in right now include a 4 for 4 Valentine ATC swap ~ which I really have to get moving on! Plus, I'm also working on a collaborative publishing effort with the artists of the Charm swap. More about that exciting subject yet to come ....

Happy New Year!

ABOVE: Two inserts tucked into page one of Beth's December calendar
RIGHT: Page 4 & 5 spread of the calendar

I apologize for the lull in posting blogs ... I see it was December 7th last time I actually put something out there. Thanks to the nagging of a nameless art buddy (Hi ARLENE), I'm FINALLY getting around to getting something done on here.

I've completed the last month of calendar pages ~ hard to believe a whole year has passed since we started this project. December's calendar is Beth's and her theme, Journeys. I created 10 pages, count em, in her book. I won't post all the photos here, but you can check out ALL the pages I completed in other people's calendars in 2006. Now I just have to sit back and patiently (NOT!) wait for my calendar to return home to me. This has been an awesome experience. Thanks to Kathy for heading up this project. I don't have one regret in signing up for this swap. It's been such an awesome learning experience for me all year through.

Next on the agenda ... I need to work on a Valentine Swap and a 5 for 5 ATC swap. It's kind of hard to get back into the artwork mode after Christmas. I need some inspiration ~ quick!