I Must Have Flowers, Always And Always

Hello friends, and Happy February!

I have no idea what happened to January!  Where did it go?  Did you see it?  I confess that I have spent most of it looking after Mr G and the second half of it being surrounded by stuff so I have not seen much of the outside world or even the online world, more on that later on in the post (if you want to read that now, skip to the end).  But first since it is the first of the month, let me share my DT inspiration project for the February Main challenge at More Than Words with you.  This month the main challenge is as follows:

February is one of those months that is very big on flowers – did I read somewhere that there were more flowers sold this month than any other or is that for Mother’s Day?  I can’t remember any more as my brain has turned to mush.  Here is my art journal spread which I made yesterday after finally finding a space to sit down and make a page… on a very small corner of a desk!

This is a page that I made using some fabrics from my (still huge) stash.  I hadn’t planned on using fabric for this page, but since I couldn’t find any paint or brushes or just about anything else to use for my page, I decided to go with fabric, since there was a massive plastic tub of the stuff sitting right in the doorway and I’ve been falling over it all week.  So I took a look inside, and found these three fabrics which in my mind went together quite well.

I have had all of these for quite some time, years actually.  The one on the left I don’t remember buying, the one in the middle, I actually have yards and yards of it for some reason (?), and the one on the right is an Amy Butler organic cotton.

Here’s how they look after they were pasted onto my page.  I used a strip from the fabric on the left, and the rest of the page uses the fabric from the middle, and then I fussy cut some of the leaves from the fabric on the right and added them to the big flowers.  Then I used a flower stencil and some Grunge Paste over the top of the fabric on the left of the page and a little bit in the top right corner.

This very famous quote from Claude Monet was the inspiration for my page.  I had a piece of card that was painted with Prussian Blue acrylic (actually one of my Christmas card testers) so I cut it down to size and then wrote the quote on with a white pen.

I added some white and gold acrylic ink splatters and then did some detailing with a white pen, and some outlining of the flowers with a black pen.

Here’s a look at one of the leaves before and after the white detailing.

I also did some journalling on top of the fabric in white pen and also in pencil which you can see in the full size photo.

I edged the page with a black pen and then added the date stamp 31.1.22 on the side and it was done.  Hope you feel inspired to join in the challenge this month.

t stands for . . .

…totally overwhelmed! I have done nothing for the last ten days but move furniture and move stuff and I feel totally overwhelmed and exhausted.  I have 100s of bruises all over my body and I may have broken a toe.   Some of the furniture is now in the right rooms, some of it has yet to be moved but can’t go anywhere until the stuff moves.  The living room has been filled with stuff, boxes and boxes of stuff that used to be safely hidden away in storage furniture but is now out in the open and is overwhelming.  If there was a skip outside right now, I would be sorely tempted to just dump everything in it and not even open a box.  But there isn’t so at some point I will have to tackle that, but for now it is good to be able to sleep in a bed in the right room and walk around the furniture without tripping over random boxes of stuff.  On the very first day of moving furniture I dropped part of the bed (which had a big metal bar on it) on my naked foot.  It hit me square on my big toe, which is still recovering from a gardening injury last year and the toe nail is still growing back, but now the entire toe is bruised a lovely shade of purple.

Funny story:  Two days after the big toe incident, I was moving more stuff after a very long, grueling day of moving furniture and I was about to finish up for the night as I was getting tired.  I picked up this bundle of what I thought was canvases, cardboard, etc and carried from one room into another room and made to set it down on the floor when suddenly something heavy came down across the top of both feet like a guillotine!  I let out a scream as it was very painful and also confusing as to what could have hit me so hard and caused this pain.  Then I discovered that in amongst all this canvas and cardboard was the Tim Holtz Glass Mat!!!  So a big piece of tempered glass was what had come crashing down on my bare feet.  I watched the bruises form on the top of my feet like cartoon bumps and then called it a day.

So there are several bruises on my feet now but that’s nothing compared to the 100s that are dotted all over the rest of me LOL.  This is what happens when you have to pick up and move things that are too heavy for you to move but you do it anyway and you get lots of bruises.  It is also the worst thing for my hands and I wake up every morning with my hands curled into claws and very stiff and sore.  I am almost done with the furniture though and so it will get better once I get on to tackling the stuff.  Mr G has been a bit better and is taking his medication hidden inside a tasty treat so he doesn’t even know he’s being medicated.  It’s because he’s been doing so well that I’ve been able to keep going with the furniture moving and decluttering, if he had not been doing so well, this would have been an impossibility.  Once everything is in the new positions, I can shut the doors, and then focus on the boxes and boxes and boxes of stuff that needs to be sorted into keep, donate, and trash.  I can see this will take some time as it’s a huge job.

My drink for this week is the peppermint tea from this set of herbal teas I picked up last year.  I need some calming mint tea at the moment to keep me sane.  I’m still putting them in the old thermos to keep them warm while I hobble around upstairs moving stuff out of the way and wishing I lived in a Tardis.  With all of this manual labour I am of course running late with everything, so apologies again and in advance if I have not visited yet.  I will, I promise, just later than usual.

Let me know what you think in the comments.   As always, thanks for reading!Ingredients
my handmade journal, watercolour paper, fabric, stencil, matte medium, grunge paste, acrylic ink, Pitt pens, card, white pen, black pen,

Challenges

More Than Words – February Main Challenge

Altered Book Lover – T Stands for – totally overwhelmed

Try it on Tuesday – Add a Quote – I just noticed during my T day visits that the current challenge is to “add a quote” and I have this favourite quote from Claude Monet on my page so I am joining in there too.

You might also like . . .

Christmas ATCs And My Christmas Cactus Thinks It’s Christmas

November 27, 2021

Always Take The Weather With You

November 26, 2021

Lost To Me Forever – If Only You Could – A Pair Of Tags

November 22, 2021

They Come To Gaze At The Tree

November 21, 2021