365 Day Art Challenge: Week 15 and a bonus

Here are my collages for Week 15.  This 365 something project was created in part and hosted by Hanna at i Hanna.  This entire month I am using nothing but scraps from one of my scrap piles I have collected.  I segregated them by color, and this month you will probably get tired of seeing so many of the same bits and pieces I have cut to make these collages.

In case you missed them, here are Week 14's cards.  I post every Monday morning for the previous week.  All my collages are 4" X 4" (10,16 cm X 10,16 cm).

Food for thought

A banner day

The butterfly song

A spellbinding tour

My cup of tea

Awake!

Circle of content

This is Day 16 of 22 leading up to bEARTHday, and I created seven small collages using scraps of paper that are too small to be used for anything else. 

Thank you so much for joining me today.  If you are playing in Hanna's 365 Something project, please let me know and I will be by to see what you are making.  Please let me know if you like any of these.  As always, I am very grateful for your continued support of my art.  

So what is the bonus, you ask.  

Ever since I saw a post that my friend Nancy of Quilting Potpourri shared regarding her latest upcycled book (direct link to her post here), I knew I wanted to try the technique she used.  

Nancy shared a clip on YouTube, but it didn't give any information about how to create the transparent vellum like papers that hold cereal and crackers.  Since that was all I was interested in, I didn't watch the clip after the first 20 seconds.

Nancy's exact words are:

Things are embedded in the pages by pressing them between two layers, using a non-stick pressing sheet to protect the iron.

Although I looked at Nancy's lovely art she created, I worried that the pressing sheet would stick to the ironing board, so I tried to cover both the back and front of the pages with the pressing sheet.

What I learned was, you MUST iron both sides, or the items move around on you.  You MUST cover both sides, or the back will show.  And when you double or fold the page to make a single page, the items on the back side have a tendency to shift around.  Now granted, I added a lot more things on my pages than Nancy did, including my idea that I would turn these cracker containers into curtains, which in the end, didn't happen the way I planned.

I almost goofed on the "back"side when I tried to add the words on the left and realized I was putting them backward.  Then, the word "peek" slipped because I had not pressed that side.  The "curtain rods" moved on the right "page" and they stuck to the plastic which I couldn't unseal.  The items on the right side all moved, too.  I realize this is nothing like what Nancy made, but I was making it up as I went along with little to no instructions.   

Regardless, I'm still glad I created this and now know what I did wrong.  I'll share what else I learned.

Cracker containers are larger than I thought they would be, but I should have used two vellum pages, rather than trying to fold one over.  Next time, I will iron the pages I create, then sew them into the pages of a handmade visual journal, rather than trying to add them to a page like this one I added to my large art journal.

Two good things that came from this are, I recycled more than a few items, and I got to join Alison/Craftytrog, our host this month at Art Journal Journey whose theme is recycle and collage as well as my friends at Try it on Tuesday where their theme is Recycle Something.

For Day 16 of 22 leading up to bEARTHday, in addition to my seven collages, I repurposed two vellum/plastic cracker holders, bits of thread from my craft room floor, three used postage stamps, bits of vintage sheet music, bits of an old blueprint, bits of a German book page, a magazine image, a used tag, two images from a desk calendar, one doily, four rings that hold paint chip samples (free at the paint store), bits of a dictionary page, a rejected die cut letter, and a calendar page as the background image.  The sentiment, "Time to peek behind the curtain" was printed on the back of a sheet of used printer paper.  Additionally, I stamped the clock over the word "time" and sewed the pieces together and to the background page using variegated thread.  The entire assembly was added to my large art journal using glue dots and double sided tape.