When the Muse visits, she blows in, makes herself at home, and refuses to leave until she has said what she's got to say. Goodness!
Yesterday I followed Esther K. Smith's instructions for making an instant book; I used a sheet of 8-1/2 x 11" brown kraft paper. So cool! I realized that the acrylic skin weaving I did (that was not at all to my liking) actually looked great on the front cover, so I glued that down with Matte Accents. Then I thought that the skeleton leaf that came packaged with wood-grained chopsticks that I put in my stocking this Xmas (I'm pretty much responsible for my own stocking stuffers and table presents) would be the perfect thing to put over the weaving, and that turned out to be the case. I put a very thin streak of Matte Accents along the spine of the leaf and adhered it to the weaving.
Then I searched for a nature quote and found part of a Lord Byron poem: "There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, there is a rapture on the lonely shore . . . " I quickly decided where to put the words on the pages and wrote them in with a white Bruynzeel pencil. I'm happy with the writing, surprisingly enough. I wanted it to look rustic and as though someone had written with something they'd found on the forest floor.
Then I used the set of leaf stamps by Hero Arts that I so miserably failed at using last night with the Jacquard Castaway stamp pad (don't use Castaway on brown kraft paper) and stamped using Archival Ink Sepia. I had no problems or doubts about which image to put where. I am very pleased with the result.
