Clinging to a dream

In my quest to recycle and repurpose trash or recyclables, I have sadly fallen down on my support of Wendy from Wendy's Art and Craft Journal who is our host at Art Journal Journey this month.  Her theme is Having Fun and I can say at times I had fun, while at other times I was frustrated while trying to create this latest entry.

I had excess paint left on my pages when I created the resist part of my Second Thursday tutorial a few days ago. Since I hate wasting anything, including even inexpensive craft paint, I grabbed a sheet of 110 lb card stock and laid down paint on the substrate.

To clean my brush, I also colored a wet wipe, those translucent wipes many stores in the U.S. give out to clean your cart handles.  I always keep mine, so that's why I have this one.  Most people throw them in the trash basket provided by the store.  But free to me means free art supplies.

Some of you will remember in June last year, I attempted to show three ways to use napkins in your art.   The pellon/wonder under and freezer paper both worked marvelously, but the cling wrap was a total bust.  Recently, however, several of my art friends have used this technique to create backgrounds that produced incredible results.

The object is to have WET paint on your substrate, then lay scrunched cling wrap on your page and allow the paint to dry.  Since some of my paint wasn't wet when I added the cling wrap, I got mixed results.  The wet wipe, on the other hand turned out great.

You can see the areas that were still wet when I added the cling wrap.  The navy paint worked, but it was too dark to show the effect.

No matter how I tried to show the effects the cling wrap had on the navy paint, it simply didn't photograph it well.

Only a small portion of the silver showed any effects.

Additionally, the card stock buckled and refused to straighten, regardless of the days and days I left it under a very heavy book.

My art friend Kathy took a class in her home town.  I had given her some of my leftover copper from a project I was working on at the time.  This is from 2005, so I'm sure I've never shown it.  She brought all the additional supplies she hadn't used and helped me put this together.  It was originally intended to be a card, but was so heavy, I would have needed extra postage to send it.

In order to reduce some of the buckling, I sewed around the edge of the page and the edges of the two elements, too. 

I had a bit of trouble with my thread breaking, so changed it.

Here is where I ran out of bobbin thread.  When I did, I realized the top and bottom thread were different weights, so I ended up changing it again when I added the wet wipe to the page.

For Day 13 of 22, I began by recycling leftover cling wrap to provide a bit of texture to essentially a "mop up" of left over paint.  I did the same to a wet wipe, free from the grocery store.  Next, I added the old card that was decorated with the help of my friend Kathy.  All were held in place using three different variegated threads, which were new, as was the card stock.

As I said in the beginning, I got a bit frustrated that the texture technique didn't work better, and I had all kinds of trouble with my sewing.  But in the end I had fun naming the piece Clinging to a Dream.  Thank you for allowing me to share this piece with all its warts and missteps.   I am so pleased to get such good responses to my recycling efforts.   You have no idea how happy this makes me.  Also, please join me at Art Journal Journey, too.