Salad Mandala

For my third Inspiration Card, I chose the prompt "an exquisitely made salad, delicious and healthy." It will be going to Clare, who makes the most lovely mandalas. I wanted to incorporate a mandala into my inspiration card for Clare. I found a mandala template that actually looked like a salad. From there, I decorated the mandala with pieces of crumpled tissue papers the colors of a fresh garden salad. Can you see the luscious red tomatoes and the juicy golden apple slices? I used four different colors of green for the lettuce. Thanks to Su for suggesting I add the fork and to my friend Michele, who suggested I put the salad onto a plate. I call it "Salad Mandala." Now doesn't it just look good enough to eat?

My Second Inspiration Card

For my second Inspiration Card, I chose the prompt "A life ignited, burning and fueled by creative passion. I used red, orange and yellow cellophane to create the flames and then cut and glued words that for me, describe creating and making art.

Under the Sea

The inspiration for my spread in Laura's AB entitled "The Sea," came from the Yahoo AlteredBooks group's August Challenge: "At the Beach" incorporating texture. I immediately knew that I wanted to do a colorful underwater coral reef. I used many different materials to create a variety of textures: peacock feathers to simulate sea grass, glitter and metallic paints, gold microbeadz for the starfish, assorted nail art embellishments to create the coral formations, flower stamens and irridescent glitter for the pink anemones and finally, a product called "Flower-Soft" to texturize the red coral tree. You can almost feel the texture--especially in the last photo. I just love how this turned out!!

Ingrid's Circle Book

In our Honolulu AB RR, for each book we work in, we are asked to describe the technique we used. I went quite literal with Ingrid's Circle Book this month. I wanted to create a circle book for my spread. Since this is a 3-dimensional object, the challenge was to find a way to incorporate my "pop-up" circle book into Ingrid's loose-leaf, three-ring paged book.

First, I selected several different papers decorated with circles and ended up creating three separate circle books. I used four different patterns for each circle book (top photo). The circle books needed to be folded flat in order to be incorporated into the book. So, on the front of my page (third photo), I created three quarter-circle pockets to hold my folded circle books. On the back of my page (bottom photo), I made a quarter-circle pocket to hold the tutorial.

More Marie Madness: 4 x 4 Fat Book Pages

At first I didn't think I would have the time to participate in this wonderful Marie Antoinette 4 x 4 fat book swap hosted by Janet. I certainly have an abundant stash of Marie-related stuff to use up and the thought of having a Marie fat book of my own was too tempting. So...I'm happy to say that I managed to find the time to make 6 pages for the swap. And for someone who was so short on time, I can't believe I chose to compose my pages with INCHIES! Do you know how many inchies there are on a 4 x 4 page? SIXTEEN! Multiply that by 6 and well, that's how many inchies I had to create. In the end, I over-calculated and ended up making more than I needed so I will have to come up with a clever way to use up the leftovers.

The six pages are basically the same with a few minor differences. On the back of each page, I stamped a chandelier. I can't wait to see the all of the other beautiful pages!