ARC November book

This month I read The TeaBerry Strangler by Laura Childs. Its the 11th book in the Tea Shop Mysteries. Laura  also writes two other series, a scrapbooking series, and the Cracklebery club mysteries. The last one I have not read.

Theodsia Browning owns Indigo Tea shop. Drayton who is the expert of teas and makes the blends for the store. and Haley the chef who makes the food for teas and catered events. The tea shop is in Charleston, SC.

In this book The shop owners in town hosted an event. The owners dressed in clocks of yore and opened their back doors of their shops to visitors to take part in sales. It was after this event that Theodisa(Theo) went out back and saw The owner of the map store, Daria dead in the alley. Theo tries to find out who did it at the urging of her Aunt Libby who is friends with Daria's relative.

the book was okay. It wasn't the best in the books I read in the series. I do enjoy the series so I will be reading the ones after this one. There is about 16 books in the series. So I have some catch up to do.

Here is my journal page I did. And yes, I wrote murder instead of strangler. I didn't have the book infront of me when I did the page. I did a mental slap when I saw my mistake.

So for my final book on this reading challenge, I WAS going to read Butercream Bump off by Jenn McKinlay but I just got from the library for my Kindle Jim Henson: the Biography by Brian Jay Jones. That I will be reading instead. (Edit: Since the writing of this blog post,I'm almost done with the book) Who knows I might do both next month. :)

NanoJouMo days 13-19

Okay so I've been lagging in the posting department. I do most of these pages at night. So its too dark to take a picture of them when I'm done. Then I forget to do it. So then I have a whole bunch of them to take pictures of. The I have to edit them so they don't eat up too much space on here.

So here are pages days 13-19.

day 13 "why am I here" by Dave Matthews band

Day 14 "Nobody told me" the prompt is bay Vintage Table but I thought of the John Lennon song when I saw the title.

day 15 "Come Home" by One Repblic

Day 16 "Me" by Paula Cole

Day17 Mrs. Potter's Lullaby" by Counting Crows

Day 18 "Always" by Switchfoot (one of my favorite pages)

Day 19 "Learning to Fly" by Pink Flpyd

NaNoJouMo day 11

The song of the say was Be Ok by Ingrid Michaelson.

I used a page where I had already did the background on. I glued an image down. then I wrote in very bad block lettering "I Just want to be ok."

NaNoJouMo day 10

The song of the day was We're going to be friends by Jack Johnson. I used a fall napkin for the background.Added some white paint to tone it down. Then used some leaves from a magazine ad.

Art journal swap part 2

Here are the rest of the pages from the swap

Anything but a card Challenge - Fall into Fall

The challenge over at Anything but a card is Fall into fall. I did a journal page on leaves.

I was trying to think of what to do for this challenge. I was looking through my container of napkins and saw this one with fall leaves. So I went with that. I peeled off the 2 layers of the white napkins and glued down the leaves with matte medium. First I put the matte medium on the journal page then I put the napkin down. Then I carefully brushed more matte medium on the napkin. If you are too rough the napkin can tear. I let that dry and went down to get some leave stamps. Stamped them on cardstock with black archival. I colored them with Prisma's. I glued them on the page with Helmar craft and hobby pva glue. I outlined some of the leaves with stickles. I typed in and printed a quote from Peanuts. It was said by Linus. "Never jump in a pile of wet leaves with a wet sucker". Cut and glued them on the page.

Hope you come play and link up to ABAC challenge blog and see what other DT members have done.

Art journal page swap part one

This summer I particapated in the 2nd round of the art journal page swap that was hosted by Mandy. This was the 2nd round of the swap. I wanted to do the 1st round, but decided not to and sort of wished I did, so I joined the 2nd round.  The rues was simple make a 5 x 8 journal page, no theme, anything you wanted to do, but keep it flat so its easy to mail. They could be all the same or all different pages And mail the pages to everyone in the swap. This round there were 23 people doing it. And we didn't have to mail them all at once. We had basically 1 week per person to mail them out so the deadline was Nov. 9 to have them all mailed out to everyone. I did them in groups. First group went out was the Chezch and Australasia. Well the Australasia one I did mail 3 pages in 1 envelope to save postage. lol The next batch that went out was to the U.K. and Canada. next batches were to the U.S.

I didn't have any clue what I wanted to do for my pages. I just went in with my first page and played with a background, and went from there. Basically on most of them I put some paint down some color on the page. When the paint dried I took some book pages and used the Claudine Hellmuth multi medium gloss to do a transfer. Lifting the piece of book paper off almost as soon as I put it on the page. The I used some stamps (VLVS! of course!) and some stencils and sprays.

As for the main image I had no idea what I wanted to do. I looked through magazine images I ripped out I saw an ad that I liked. I thought I can trace that and then do a Julie Nutting type girl with it. I've read her book "Collage Couture" and in the book she suggested that if you can't draw you can trace. Course this was before her rubber stamps came out with Prima. So thats what I did. I traced the girl out on tracing paper. Then I shrunk the traced image to size I wanted it. I then took the shrunken size and copied that to dictionary pages. This took a few tries to get it right. When printing the girl had the words upside down! I was getting frustrated. LOl but finally I somehow managed to get it right and printed all of them in one shot so I didn't have to mess with it when I needed them. :P I painted the skin with Artist loft Watercolors. The hair is with Pearlesnt watercolors. The dress are from differnt scrapbook papers. The belt is the black Enamel accents by Ranger. Used the Helmar craft and Hobby PVA glue to glue the clothes to the girl and the girl to the page. The sentiments I used on the pages is from Viva Las VegaStamps! Cut and glued the sentiments to the page with glossy accents. The I edge the words around with black pick pen and the clear star dust gelly roll pen.

Now I'll probably do the pictures of what the pages look like in more than one post as I said there are 23 (including myself) people in the swap, so it will be quiet picture heavy. LOL

Here are the first batch of 10 them.

This is the page went to Fiona

This is the page went to Fran

This is the page went to Jaen

This is the page went to Jen

This is the page  went to JJ

This is the page  went to Julia

This page went to Lori

This is the page went to Mandy (I had just gotten my Dylusions spray, I Had to play!

This is the page went to Pavla

This is the page went to Robin

NaNoJouMo day 9

Today's song was Yellow by Coldplay. I did a monochromatic page with shades of yellow. the only exception was the hair and the black outline of the letters.

NaNoJouMo day 8

Well the song of the day was 1000 years by Sting. I didn't do the song. Wasn't feeling it. I got in the mail some stencils from Fiona and I paced with one of them last night.

NanoJouMo day 7

So Wed was my birthday I decided to d a birthday page. Plus I didn't know the song of the day. Love Stain by Jose Gonzalez

NaNoJouMo day 6

Gravity by John Mayer All the stamps are from Art Gone Wild from back in the day. :)

NaNoJouMo day 5

Song was Flowers in your hair by the Lumineers. I did another face. Not happy how she turned out though.

NanoJouMo day 4

Song was These are the days by Van Morrison. I did a face this time. with Neo 2's and artist loft water colors, and outlined the face features in black pen

NaNoJouMo day 3

day 3's song was "If I could Fly" By Charity Chapman

When I saw the title I knew what I wanted to use for the page. I used a page that had some left over green spray on it from when I used star punchenilla from Gauche Alchemy.  I used some water down green and a blue craft paints. Dd some drip with water down craft paint. I wanted to still see the stars, thats why I used the water down craft paints. Next I took the cloud stencil by Crafter's Workshop and some glass bead gel and did the clouds. I got this idea from a previous page I did in this journal. Thought it would work with this age too. After most of the clouds had dried I stamp some Whimsical clouds From VLVS! on the page. I stamped the boy from VLVS! on white Bristol(it was a scrap from another project I was doing) lightly colored him with water colors. I put him on the page with foam tape. The letters are I think from Making Memories (got them at a thrift store) I glued those on. I took a black Bic pen and outlined the clouds.

NaNoJouMo day 2

Day 2 is Life is Fre By Arkana. Again not someone I heard before, so I looked up the song. I did use a page that I did that wasn't finished It needed words. So I typed up part of the song and printed it and cut and glued it to the page.

NaNoJouMo day 1

Its that wonderful time of the year again....no not Christmas. Its NaNoJouMo. National nonstop journailing month. This Year Dawn is doing songs titles again, but these are her favorite songs.

Day one title was Let it Be by (no not them) Superchic(k). I had never heard of the song (okay I did hear of the song...by you know who) or the band. So I looked up the lyrics and picked a line from it and came up with this.

Bricks were a stencil. Stamps are from VLVS!