WOYWW 393

I’m doing this on Tuesday night because I’ve got a busy day tomorrow. It’s so nice to have something on my desk to show, after neglecting my studio for so long. I’ve managed to put in a few sessions this week and it makes me realise just how much I’d been missing it. Here’s my drawing zone again, with mini-album pages laid out.

I’ve been doing more work on my mini-album about Mamhead woods, and have now progressed to the stage where I’m working out which pages should go together. I still have a few pages to make with the as yet unmounted photos, so I am choosing suitable backgrounds for them, to go with pages I’ve already done.

If you scroll back to my previous posts you can see how I’ve done the new pages. I’ll share a few pics here.

Leaf making:

These are a mixture of die-cut leaves and leaves cut with Sheba, my Cougar cutting machine. The middle-left ones are made from glassine paper and were cut by hand. All have been hand-embossed and are ready to embellish the various pages.

The purple pages I showed you last week, now complete.

I added gold embossing, using a nice grungy background stamp. I love this effect.

I cut a frame to go round one of the photos I’d manipulated and didn’t really like the border.

Designed in Inkscape on the Mac, and then cut from white card on Sheba, and then darkened with Black Soot distress stain and a touch of the pewter one, and spritzed with water to blend a bit.

Here’s the completed page together with its partner.

For the left-hand page I embossed some card with the Cuttlebug and added a bit of silver gilding wax. I deliberately chose a photo of trees with tall straight trunks to complement the picture on the right. I may add some text.

I’m now working on a double page spread with pics of my hubby and his friend walking ahead of us. I took another of my pieces of inked kitchen paper and tore strips which have been applied with gel medium, and a bit of glitter added to enhance some that was already on the kitchen paper.

Here’s a detail shot of the left-hand page.

There will be some text between the strips of kitchen paper.

I have a sheet of lovely quotes about trees and woodland which I found online, and I shall add these at various points through the book.

I’ve also been really busy clearing out a load of Mum’s stuff, finally finishing clearing her kitchen (bar the cleaning). There is someone in our church who had a disaster in her home and we are all doing what we can to help replace all their stuff which was ruined. A great incentive to get on with this job!

The lady from the forum has now posted her piece after her Skype interview with me last week. I feature in it a LOT! It’s great, and has links to art therapy sites etc. There have been quite a few responses to it, all very positive. As well as emailing her privately about it I’ve also thanked her on the forum and have contributed further to the thread and asked again about getting our own art board. We shall see. This thread is a “public” one, so visible outside the forum, and if you are interested, click here.

Health Update

I’ve been suffering with a very frequent and extremely severe gripping pain in one leg which the doctor said was a nerve pain so I’ve been put on gabapentin which has certainly helped. He told me to make a physio appointment because he thinks it’s coming from my back, but I think it is more likely to be an ME-related pain (stupidly forgot to ask him that!).

Today I went again and saw another GP because on Saturday night I developed a very painful and swollen knuckle joint and the pain was spreading to the next joint. She said it was osteo-arthritis and I should continue what I was doing, applying ibuprofen gel and the flare should subside in about a week. My fingers are looking like sausages and I told my hubby I didn’t want sausage fingers! – and to go all gnarled and old… He said “You poor old thing,” and I said, “A little less of the ‘old’ if you don’t mind!” and then he started calling me SausageFingers.

Try saying ShoshiSausageFingers when you’ve had a few.

Tonight I told him I couldn’t possibly lose the use of my hands – I’m an artist! He said I could apply glue and glitter with my mouth. Nice.

I did mention to the GP this morning about the leg pain and she said, “Well, you know ME pains – they wander all over the place!” and said it was quite likely to be that, and was pleased that the gabapentin was doing the trick.

I’ve got the support garments lady coming back to see me tomorrow afternoon, to sort out the alterations that need to be done to the first pair of support pants they’ve made for Miss Piggy (my hernia). They are only minor problems, and once they’ve sorted them and I am happy, they will go ahead and make up the remaining two pairs that I can have in a year.

Happy WOYWW and have a great creative week, everybody.