Thursday Theme: PURPLE!

And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain

Thrilled me, filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before...

~The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe

Purple Nation is a very happy and hopeful place right now.  If you don't follow pro football and don't know what I mean, here's the very simple explanation:  the Baltimore Ravens are in the playoffs, and very well might make it to the Superbowl - and it's really important for them to make it, because after this season, our beloved Ray Lewis, the heart and soul of the team, is retiring.  I've been wearing purple every day since the first playoff game, which makes it very fortunate that purple is one of my favorite colors.  And between Ravens Purple Fever going on here and me having had a hankering for adding purple to my wintery green tags, I decided it was high time I purpled the blog.  

I haven't always been a Ravens fan, per se.  I would say I've supported them since they came to Baltimore and became the Ravens, but I didn't follow pro football.  I was always a Navy fan, and didn't bother watching any other games.  What I have always been a fan of, however, is purple.  When I was little, my two favorite colors were purple and red.  Over the years, they've changed to pink, blue, and black, but purple and red always came back.  The first shawl I made was purple:

It's alpaca, and super cozy.  I'm actually planning to wear it tomorrow...  Note: this is the same pattern I would later use for my Raven Wing shawl.

Back when I was knitting and crocheting like a fiend, I was buying more purple yarn than I knew what to do with.  No, seriously.  I never used most of it.  It's still sitting there, waiting for the "right" pattern.  That's a problem when you buy single skeins of things and tend to like patterns that use a lot of yarn.

In my paper arts, you don't see as much purple.  I tend to stick to neutrals and reds and blues.  Not that I've never used purple.  But while I have purple inks and purple paints, I don't use them much, except for the Seedless Preserves color of Distress Ink in the Fall.

I just love this color!

But I did pack my purple paint when I went to CREATE last year, and sure enough, when I got in trouble with Teacher for not having something on each page of my Debris Journal, I went back to the hotel room that night and this is how I committed to one of my pages:

I call this spread "OMGPURPLE!!!"

Yep, still haven't done anything more with it.  But still.  Lately I've been thinking how nice purple and green look together (I mean, lavender is beautiful, right?  And other purple flowers as well, like my purple pansies that somehow still keep going strong out on the balcony), and since I've been so enamored with green lately, it seemed logical to bring some purple into what I'm already using.  BEHOLD!

More playing around with Michelle's stencils, replicating the background of Mom's birthday tag.

I also started thinking about bare trees, it being Winter and all.  And I had this idea to use the dot stencil from Michelle's line to give a tree sort of faery orbs... or... somethinglikethat.  So, using a stamp from a Tim Holtz Christmas set by Stampers Anonymous, I tried two different versions tonight:

Version 1 has embossing holding the Distress Ink watercolored tree color in place, and version 2 has just Archival ink, with a speckle stamp as well as Michelle's dot stencil.  Both tags used Iced Spruce and Seedless Preserves Distress Ink and Iridescent Gold Tattered Angels Glimmer Mist.

Because I can't leave well enough alone, I will probably tweak that idea a bit.  It's a little weird for me still to be doing such simple things, and without any dimensional elements.  It's like they're not finished.

Well anyway, that's all the purple I have for you today, and it's almost not Thursday anymore anyway.  So I will leave you with a video to enjoy on what I am sure will be a fine Purple Friday, anticipating what I hope will be a Ravens victory over the Patriots this Sunday.