Friday-10am

Feels wonderful to have been busy creating this week!  I forgot to take a before picture of the Zendala Dare template for this week, so I borrowed it off of Erin's blog over at The Bright Owl.

Back to doing my own thing...

...with nothing but dots, circles, straight lines, and a couple curls with a pop of color.  So relaxing!!  I thought it looked kind of lacy. 

And this is a two birds with one stone happy coincidence--for both Jennifer's Artist's Playroom over at Just Add Water, Silly and the next workshop I started of the 21 Secrets Workshops.  Jennifer's challenge this week was your favorite color or colors.  I don't really have one because I like them all, so I thought the rainbows were appropriate.  ;)  

This next workshop is called Games Journalers Play and in this one we make our own deck of prompt cards in a tin.  I already had a generic Altoids tin...but what to make the cards out of?

Scrounging through my stuff, I found a couple of bristol ATC cards--20 in a pack.  (Never did get into making ATCs.)  I ruined one trying to cut it down to the right size, but figured it out and cut them all down.

Then rounded the corners with a corner punch... 

...and ended up with 39 cards. 

How to decorate them?

****

You know I would want them to basically all be the same like a real deck of cards, right?  I came up with the rainbow idea using my Lyra crayons.  Of course, I wanted them to be as even as possible... 

...so I made a guide I could use to double-check.

Even practiced on some of the removed strips as to how to blend them.  A damp brush with plain water worked the best.  I know--I am so anal. 

Then I started in...assembly-line fashion, as I am wont to do.  Also had a small bucket with a damp washcloth to clean my fingers on the right there.   

As you can imagine, this took me a lot of my time sessions! 

Ended up wrapping the crayons in pieces of paper towel because I took off all the wrappings long ago...but I've never held one crayon for this long and they (unlike M&Ms) melt in your hand--LOL! 

But I finally finished this step.  They are all colored and ready for a damp brush...one color stripe at a time.  Perfect activity to do while watching TV (some program that doesn't require my full attention, of course) or listening to an audio book.

Once these are all blended then I will see how messy the white sides are.  They will probably need a coat of gesso.  Next I will glue or tape on the prompts to the white side.  I printed off the two lists she gave us, picked out 39 of the prompts that I liked the best, and cut them out.

I think that's all I am going to do to the side with the prompts--we'll see.  Last step on the cards will be to seal both sides with a liquid sealer of some kind--some mod podge, gel medium or something along those lines.  Then if I want to decorate the tin, I can.  Not sure I want to, though, because I'm really not sure if I will use these much and I might want to use the tin for something else later on, you know?  We'll see.

****

Anyhow...

I'm having a good time on these dark, damp days.  It was 51 degrees when I got up this morning and it's been drizzling away.  I have been at the art table or writing letters and haven't cracked a book open yet this week!  That tall stack of library books is calling me--and I need to give my back a break today after all that coloring, anyways.  I am so grateful my body has been in a cooperative mood lately and hope to put a dent in the prompt cards over the weekend.  Time will tell.  ;)

****

I hope you have a really good time this weekend...no matter the weather, no matter what bumps in your road.  :) :)

****

"The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts."

Marcus Aurelius