Calico & Kukicha – Books, Cats & Tea – AJJ September 2023

Hi Friends!

I am writing this post on Tuesday though it will probably not appear on Tuesday.  I woke very early again, so I got up and went into the art room with some coffee (decaf) and started working on a new page which you will see below.  It took me about two hours, and I finished my third listen to the latest Richard Osman, so it was a very enjoyable start to the day.  Yes I have listened to the audiobook three times now but I will have to move on soon to another book.  I am loath to leave the gang though knowing that it will be another full year until the next book.  At the end of the audiobook there was a chat with the author and the narrator, and he asked her if there were any accents that were tricky for her or any that she liked to do, and she said that she thought Newcastle (NE England) were tricky, and that she could do a good Northern Irish accent, so I wonder if there will be any Newcastle or Northern Irish characters appearing in the next book?

Today’s Art . . .

Today’s art is another page for my theme on Art Journal Journey for this month – Books, Cats and Tea, which are three of my very favourite things.  Here comes page 20, a tea and cat page with some book paper included…

This page is called  Calico for the cats, and Kukicha for the type of tea.  It might look like the background is yellow but I can assure you that it is green – lime green – painted with Lime Light acrylic paint – OK well maybe a greenish yellow lol.  I don’t know why it looks so yellow or where all the green tones went, the photo was taken in the early morning with good light.  Anyway…

I decided to use the tea box in the middle of the above photo.  It was Japanese twig tea (kukicha) that I bought years ago in a very expensive shop (Harvey Nicks) but on sale in their food emporium.  I really liked the box so when all the tea was gone, I kept it in the cupboard until this summer when I did a clear out.  It was destined for the recycling but I just couldn’t part with it so it got added to the pile of stuff I was saving for this month’s theme… along with this cardboard packaging for a cardboard scratcher I bought in October 2021.  I didn’t want to put these lovely kitties in the bin either!  Those cardboard scratchers are so messy but the cats love them and it stops them ripping the stair carpet to shreds!

I did some stamping over the background as I thought it needed something.  I used two different greens, lime and olive, and stamps from two different stamp sets by Gwen Lafleur, one of my favourite designers.  I also stamped these leaves from the same stamp set, then I coloured them and horror of horrors, fussy cut them, because it was necessary to achieve the look I wanted, but I do not like fussy cutting as it causes me pain in my hand.  I stamped five but I only ended up colouring, cutting and using three.  That was enough fussy cutting for one day since I also had to cut out the cats from the cardboard packaging.

Yes I even cut out those white bits between the leaves!  I used my Pitt artist pens to do the colouring.

Left side of page… the paw print kraft paper is actually packing tape from a cat food order from a few months ago. This tape was used to seal up the box and I tried to save as much of it as possible.  I peeled off as much of it from the box as I could to save it for my journals.

There are also two chalkboard/kraft tags peeking out from under the tea box on each side.  You might wonder why but all will be revealed at the end.

Here are some detail shots…

And what is the exciting big reveal?  Well not that exciting but the tea boxes are only glued on the one side, so that they open up and you can read what was on the other side of the packaging and it gives me extra journalling space to tuck in these tags or anything else I want to write on – perhaps some tea tasting notes!

Here’s another look at the first photo so you can compare them between open and closed.

Hope you enjoyed this page as much as I enjoyed making it this morning. I had an afterthought to add some gold to the page, so I might do that later or maybe I won’t.  We’ll see!

Let me know what you think in the comments.   As always, thanks for reading and Happy Journalling!

Ingredients
my handmade journal, watercolour paper, Paperartsy Gwen Lafleur stamps, fresco paint limelight, versafine clair ink lime, archival ink – olive, chalkboard tags, pawprint box tape, glue, pitt artist pens, book paper, cat toy packaging,

Challenges

Art Journal Journey – Books, Cats and Tea