Creators' Circle

How many of you have art journals???  This is my first one.....our Creators' Circle group decided to make them last year, and each month for our make and take one of our members designs a page with a different technique and challenge.

For this month, I created the page above.  The technique was sewing the mini garland, and the challenge was to "frame" your inspirational word for the year.  

I had Ryan take a photo of me holding a chalkboard frame with the word "believe" on it.  I framed the photo with a chipboard shape.  For the background I used a couple different techniques:  Spray painted yellow with a Heidi Swap leaf mask, added a Hambly rub-on, and splattered a reddish pink acrylic paint.  

As an embellishment to our frames, we also made paper flowers out of different size circle punches.....you take 6 to 8 different pieces, connect them together with a brad, and fold / crinkle the edges up, so you can see all the different layers of papers.....the green leaf on my page is cut out of a piece of flocked scrapbook paper.

For sewing the garland, some of the girls punched out butterflies, circles, and even cut out circles from fabric!  They all turned out so cute!!!  Can you imagine???  A table filled with masks, paint, ink, chipboard, thickers, brads, beautiful paper, rub-ons.....all the ingredients for a wonderful creative evening!!!

Above is the cover of my art journal, and the first page.  The challenge (for the first page) was to add your title directly onto a photo.  The technique was covering the binder clip with lovely paper.  We originally created our art journals with this as inspiration.....isn't she wonderful :)

Even though it may seem a lot like what I do with my scrapbook layouts, working in my art journal feels different to me.  I see this project in a different way, and I feel like I'm growing with each page I complete!  I am so excited because I get to create another page (make & take) for next month (I traded with Melanie), and I know exactly what I am going to do!  Next time, I will take photos as I am putting the page together, so I can make it into a a tutorial for you all....

I will add photos of the layouts from our last meeting, to the Creators' Circle blog very soon.....I may even have photos of some of the other girls' art journal pages.....they are all so different and perfect :)

Hugs!

Carrie