Thursday Theme: Autumn!

I love Fall.  Spring and Fall are my favorite seasons, which is ironic because generally I hate change, but the transition is exactly what I like about Spring and Fall.  Fall in particular does something wonderful for me.  I don't know if it's the welcome break from the Summer heat, or the sight of squirrels frantically stashing acorns, or the abundance of said acorns, or finally getting to wear some of the stuff I've knitted and crocheted again, or the apple cider and pumpkin recipes and harvest flavors and colors and beautiful foliage and all of that wonderful richness of color and scent and flavor and beauty just before Winter comes along and kills it all... I don't know.  But there's something wonderful about Fall. 

 

So, being such a big fan of Fall, imagine how psyched I was last year when Tim Holtz announced his first set of limited edition seasonal colors of Distress Ink (now they're part of the regular range of Distress colors).  They were a fabulous set of orange, purple, and brown.  Fantastic shades.  And Fall is the only time of year that orange becomes one of my favorite colors.  Seriously.  So, naturally, most of my Fall work from last year and this year has been done in those colors, with sometimes some green mixed in.  Like these backgrounds I did last year:

 

Sorry, blurry pic, I know.

 



The purple and brown one didn't have leaves on it originally.

 

I added the leaves with an Inkadinkado stamp and copper embossing powder just the other day.  Maybe next year I'll finish the tag...

 

I even did one whole tag that I considered finished.  I was really loving on some clear Inkadinkado stamps I got last year, and with Archival Ink they worked really well, but with Distress they are hit and miss.  This was a hit:

 

Notice how the ink and the embossing powder coverage are actually pretty even?

 

But perhaps some of you will remember the catastrophe that I blogged about here.  Those squares are now finished.  Well, mostly finished.  I finished one last year and I'm almost done the other two, I just need more stuff.

 

Each one features two of the three seasonal Distress colors.  All three will be mounted on canvases, not just that one in the corner.

 

Oh yeah, Tim Holtz "Foliage" accents, with Ornate Frames, and thesaurus pages.

I inked the thesaurus pages and then painted over them with clear Distress Crackle Paint to get that cracked glass look.

 

Overall I'm pretty happy with how they've turned out, in spite of the embossing and clear stamp challenges.  Incidentally, none of the stamps that I ended up using were from the clear sets.  They were all red rubber, from Stamper's Anonymous Tim Holtz Collection, some old stamp I don't know where it's from, and a set of Graphic 45 cling stamps.  It was just too much trouble getting the clear stamps to take the Distress Ink.

 

Anyway, this year I've been a busy bee too.  Squirrel.  Busy squirrel. That fits better.  Anyway, I made a new cover for my iPhone (it fits in a clear case, woohoo!), and a new tag, and some ATCs.  All of this at art nights that Mom and Running Wave and I have been getting together for, to force ourselves to carve out time to focus on art.

 

The backgrounds for these were both done using a "watercolor" technique that I've now seen from a couple of different artists, but first learned from Tim Holtz.  Naturally.  But I got to use my Blackbird stencil again!

 

The ATCs are a bit different for me.  The one on the left is stamped and then watercolored, like with brushes and everything!  And the one on the right I sort of carefully controlled where I scudged the ink.  Still want to do more with both of these.

 

Fortunately, there's still plenty of Fall left, because I'm not done with it yet.  There's more I want to play with.  Different color palettes, different tools, more dimensions.  I got these cool doilies at the dollar store:

 

Hellooooo cheap stencil/masks!

And I picked this up off the ground outside of work, wanting to use it in some kind of dimensional collage typey thing:

I love acorns.  I like to think of these as leftovers.

Meanwhile, I've been enjoying my Fall decorations, crisp hard apple cider, new tea flavors (found a pumpkin spice rooibos that's fantastic), the local Renaissance festival, and having lunch outside at work, watching my squirrel friends find and bury precious acorns.  I've noticed they do this funny little thing where once they've buried one, they cover it over and then really quickly pat the dirt with their paws like a little kid drumming on something, I guess to pat it into place and hide the fact that something was buried there.  It's adorable.  Those little guys are so clever.

One of my lunchtime companions.

Fall decor in the Pocket household.  Notice the burgeoning collections of squirrels and garden gnomes.

Thanks for joining me again for Thursday Themes.  What's your favorite thing about Fall?  Or do you not like Fall at all?  What's your favorite season instead?