Sanguine

This spread is an ode to my favorite color.  It's my favorite color of nail polish, of lipstick, of balloons, of flowers... It was also an opportunity to "restrain" myself and let the color breathe on the page.  And that's something I needed to do, because Michelle's Last Crusade is a challenge to leave some space in our work.  To decide when enough is enough, you must choose - but choose wisely.  I've got lots of stamps I could've used to showcase my favorite color, a lot of embellishments I could've used, a lot of powders and glitzy things and fibers and crap.  But I chose a simple application - just paint, paper, and little tag swatches.  I hope I chose wisely.  What do you think?

I tried to bring different shades but not make it elaborate.  Still a lot going on here, but I tried to keep things solid.

The paper strip has different terms for shades of red written on it.  Hard to cover the whole thing.

So I'd have a record, I wrote in what colors of what materials I used.

I actually managed to get this posted early, so I might manage to squeeze in two entries this month.  It's Springtime, and I tend to go lighter this time of year, so I'm sure I'll come up with something :)

P.S. Mr. Pocket and I were watching Heat Seekers on the Food Network while I posted this; a lot of what they were eating could've gone into this spread.  But I'm not touching that stuff!

First!

This post is somewhat of an update on my previous post.  I finally sat down and bound my little favorites art journal.  I used waxed linen thread and worked from this tutorial:  Tortagialla's Coptic tutorial.  Nice tutorial, very clear, good pictures.  I realized on my 9th of 12 gatherings, though, that I was doing my kettle stitches in the wrong direction.  So I switched for the rest and they looked a bit better.  I did have trouble with thread tension, but hey, it's not like I'm selling it or giving it to anybody else.  It's mine.  It's not consistent and it's not pretty, but it's done, and it's mine.

Not terrible for a first attempt working only from a website and not a real live teacher.  I think next time I try a coptic binding I'm going to use un-waxed thread.  The wax kind of made the thread stick to itself and everything else, which aggravated my thread tension issues.  Opening it between each gathering and wiggling it a little helped settle out the stitches along the spine, so I'm hoping that with some use, the thread will settle out more evenly.  We shall see!