Round robin pages for Cath in Cyprus

The person I sent round robin pages to in July was Cath who lives in Cyprus. In case you don't know where Cyprus is, it's an island in the Mediterranean. Even though it is so close to the danger in the area (Cyprus is west of Syria and north of Egypt), it is a popular tourist attraction. Cyprus is a long way away, and the package I sent took forever to arrive, but it is finally in Cath's hands, so I can show the pages I sent. I was truly unable to send all the lovely extra goodies that Cath sent me, so I tried to make up for it by sending an extra tip-in, along with some handmade paper. Cath's colors are yellow and black, and I loved the color combination. These were the colors of Wichita State University, so I knew I would enjoy working with them.

Cath's pages were small. I am not good at working with small, so these were a real challenge for me. For the first page, I used long strips of paint chips on the two outer sides and individual chips cut to 1 inch square each on the two inside lengths. BTW, the little black tag moves, so it won't be in the way when Cath punches her holes. To compliment the piece, I used as many black and yellow embellishments as I could find, since my charms and embellishments were still in storage at that time. And no, I didn't drink the wine or the hard lemonade (whatever that is).


For the back side, I used two more paint chips and sewed the pieces together. I used black and yellow thread on the pieces, black on the yellow paint chips and yellow on the black background.



For the next page, I started with a sheet of paper I painted yellow, then I added some black.



I thought it was terrible, so I tried to remove most of the black. It was a MESS, and I almost scrapped the page.



You may have read where I tried to use a stencil and a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser after reading about the technique on Marilyn Rock's blog.


All I got was another mess on top of that mess, because some of the paint not only went away, but so did the top portion of the paper. Still undeterred (even with the poor photo),



I decided to use it in my next set of pages. This is actually the back side, but I wanted to show the technique I used. I also painted two more birds in flight using the same stencil, then sewed the piece. You can see the stencil got some paint on the backside, and I was unable to correct the problem in the top bird's tail. I took Dianne's advice and drew an outline around the central bird. It helped a lot.


I was looking for something to use with the stencil when I found a children's connect-the-dots book. I thought the cat was a great image and I spent a great bit of time getting it positioned correctly under the stencil after I colored it. For the background, I used Quinacridone/Nickel Azo Gold that I mixed with a bit of Pineapple color acrylic paint. Believe it or not, this background and the other side are some of the black card stock I bought for this project. It looks green/black to me in the scan. I bet it would bleach greenish, too.


For the final piece, I started with yellow paper, then added


black acrylic to liquid starch. This is the combination I used for making my paste paper, along with the trowel in the background.


In the end, this is how it turned out. I added lace and an image to the paste paper background. I notice the scans are more greenish, but I swear that background and lace were both black.


This has been a horrible year for flowers. They have been nearly non-existent due to the drought and heat. So I had to use silk flowers on the final piece. This is



my "revised version" of Lynn's at Her Creative Spirit technique and the tutorial she shows on her blog. I use the technique quite often, but have never used silk flowers before.


I truly believe the actual page looks better than the scan. I used black thread and black ink to make the additional black bits in the piece. I backed the flowers with a piece of sheet music I painted yellow.



For Cath's tag, I used another sunflower as above, only this time I used yellow and black for the backing. I had a piece of multicolored trim I used at the bottom.



I even added a bit of black tape to the back of the tag to keep the black and yellow theme going. I had a lot of fun with this color combination. These were two colors I truly enjoyed working with. I only wish I had fibers (for the hole in the tag) that matched the lovely trim, but I had nothing the same colors, so went with the closest I could find.