"F"

Happy accident or making the best of a bad situation? This was the dilemma facing me when I decided to dry some Rose of Sharon flowers in the microwave. Never having done this before, I placed the flowers in a small telephone book, set a heavy plate on top, and proceeded to dry the flowers. I checked after one minute and they were very fragile and still quite wet, so I zapped them for another minute. When I checked them this time, the flowers were completely stuck to the phone book page. They wouldn't budge, so I could do one of two things: use them as is or pitch the pages and start over. Since I don't like throwing anything artsy away, I decided to include the page in a spread in my Coll-AH-ge book.

To give the page a bit more color, I spritzed Butterscotch Color Wash on the page, and gently wiped it off the flowers where it pooled onto them. I thought the piece was too plain as it was and went searching for a focal image. Now that is working backward for me. I usually have my focal image and match it to a background.

On my work table were a couple of those cheap paper faux credit cards that the credit card companies have now replaced the solid plastics ones with. These paper cards are not good for much. In fact, they soon buckle under the weight of white glue and I've gone through as many as three while gluing cardboard together. However, when I held this one up near the collage, the color was perfect for this spread. So instead of using this credit card to spread glue, I got out my "F" stencil and drew in the lines (from the back of the card with the stencil flipped). Then I used an X-acto knife to cut the lines. It's NO SECRET I'm not very good with an X-acto, but I was quite happy with the way it turned out.

It still needed something, though and I hunted for my flourish stamp, but couldn't find it. Now I don't have that many stamps and they are all in the same place, so it must have gone wherever lost dryer socks go. While looking for it, I found this stamp, which is foam, so I used a metallic lavender paint to "ink" it.

I feel proud that I can say everything in this spread is recycled except the paint. Comments are always welcome. Please click on picture for a larger view.