7/10/10 Entering the Castle

Paper Whimsy hosts a monthly ATC lottery - the subject is chosen by whoever won the lottery the month before.  This month was "Entering the Castle" and inspired by a book by Carolyn Myss.

The image of the woman was from a free download offered to members who figured out a puzzle devised by Gale - it was a lot of fun and many goodies were won at the end.

7/9/10 Garden Variety

Lenna Andrews  is hosting an Alpha Stamps swap called "Garden Variety" Postcard swap.  Alpha Stamps has a wealth of images and supplies to chose from.  I do a lot of ATC's so the larger 4 x 6 postcard size is a nice change.  I used some of their collage sheets, german scrap and patterned papers for these cards.  Lenna hosts swaps all the time on her blog and they're always fabulous!

6/30/10 A Little Whimsy

The website Paper Whimsy is a site I've written about before - it has beautiful collage sheets.  Many of the images are available for download as well as hardcopies.  Gale has a large collection of old photos which she lovingly "restores/retouches" - her site has a look and feel all it's own.
The site hosts a monthly ATC Lottery - all images are due by the end of the month, a winner is chosen and they get all the ATC's that were done for that challenge.  The winner then decides on the theme for the following month, and on it goes.
This month the theme was Fruits of Life and my ATC is pictured below.

I used one of the collage sheets that had images of pears and some of them were arranged in the size of an ATC already.  I then too leaves from another floral sheet to make a hat and chose one of the many adorable children available on the site to place on top.  I then cut out another pear, covered it in clear Stickles and attached it with a dimensional square adhesive.  Hope I win.....

6/11/10 Summer is Here

Chicago heat has come early this year.  Even Memorial Day weekend was warm - almost unheard of.  So, it seemed fitting that a Summertime / Beach theme ATC challenge is being done through Alphastamps Yahoo Group.  I'm just getting ready to mail these in.

I also just mailed 10 Chunky Book pages -  Bird themed - to Lisa at Collage Stuff.  She's going to collect pages from everyone,  assemble/bind the books so each has the work of 10 different artists and make the cover for each.  I bought single sheets of paper from Michael's for the backgrounds and the images are from both collage sheets and german scrap I bought at Collagestuff. Here's the pages I sent in last week:

 

5/26/10 More Tags - Ginormous Tags

AlphaStamps Ginormous Tag Swap with a Mad Hatter's / Tea Party theme.  The subject matter had to be about tea and a tea party - with one of their collage sheets and an embellishment of some kind.

5/15/10 Tags and Postcards

This week I finished tags for an ArtChix swap - 6 tags using some new collage sheets.

I also sent an ATC for the "Sisters" swap on the fairly new ArtChix Sister-Site Yahoo Group.  It's featured on their home page!!!

And three postcards also through the Artchix Sister Site - swap themed "Sunnier Days" 4x6 postcards.

I found the Barbie images in some old Barbie Bazaar magazines I had in my studio.  They reminded me of summer days as a kid playing with dolls.

5/9/10 An Enchanted Room

Paper Whimsy hosted an Enchanted Room Challenge - a miniature room no larger that 7" on any side with the theme of a nursery rhyme or poem.  I had a really hard time with this - originally I was stuck on doing "The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe", but I could not figure out the shoe.  I made several mock-ups and even bought some kids shoes that I thought I'd alter, but nothing really worked. I wanted to use several of the kids images, so I remembered the nursery rhyme  "Mondays Child is fair of face......" so that's what I finally used on as inspiration.

Front of Room

Back of room