The tiniest book I ever made – Blue Flowers

14 Friday Oct 2016

Posted by Julia Monroe in All Sparkled Up, allsparkledup, art, books, crafts, flowers, handmade books, miniature, painting

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art, art books, book arts, bookmaking, crafts, miniatures, painting, water color

This tiny book, less than a quarter inch square, is titled Blue Flowers.

The tiniest book I ever made was titled Blue Flowers.

The tiniest book I ever made was titled “Blue Flowers” and included tiny paintings and descriptions of blue flowers. In order to qualify for “micro mini” status, it had to be under 1/4″ square.

I shaved the blue suede as thin as possible so the edges could be folded with less bulk.

I think I made 7 copies and traded them with book making friends. I have one copy but don’t remember where the other copies went. Each book with blue suede cover and gilded page edges was tucked inside a tiny blue flower.

The text was printed using a laser printer. When the pages were cut apart from the sheet of printer paper, I had to be careful not a single breeze blew over my worktable since I couldn’t see the text and would have to use a magnifying glass to put them all back in order again. I was glad when I had all the pages stitched together!

Each book had a headband made of silk ribbon. The gold ink used to gild the edges was sticky so I used an exacto knife to carefully cut the pages apart so they wouldn’t stick as the ink dried.

Tiny book, with blue suede cover, text and water color paintings of blue flowers.

I made the paintings on each page using a magnifying glass and a brush that had only 3 hairs in it.

Blue Flowers – a micro mini book with descriptions and water colors of blue flowers

The paintings were so fun to make! Some day I hope to make a tiny book about Pink Flowers. But that will have to happen soon before my eyesight ages even more.

Winter Tree

05 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by Julia Monroe in All Sparkled Up, art, color, God, nature, painting, photography, sunlight

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All Sparkled Up, color, nature, photo, photography, snow, tree, watercolor, winter, Winter snow, winter tree

I accidentally set the exposure in my camera wrong. But sometimes what we do wrong ends up being way better than right. God didn’t want me to see a bare winter tree in my mom’s yard, he wanted to show me all the color.

Watercolor Winter Tree. This is a photograph, badly overexposed and with some motion blur. But oh the color! I almost missed it. Some day I’m going to make a real watercolor like it.

Crafting with Grandma

15 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by Julia Monroe in art, crafts, family, painting

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crafting with kids, crafts, grandchildren, painting, wood blocks

We’ve been a busy lot. I planned on making individual posts to share our crafting fun but I can’t keep up with such a flurry of crafting events! So here are some fun times with my granddchildren.

Building with the big blocks. The kids love the cake blocks I painted last year. So we made them some big blocks to play with. Eventually we’ll paint these.

Having fun building with the Big Blocks. We made them by cutting up 4 by 4’s and 6 x 6’s.

Sorting the Colored Pencils. It was almost as much fun sorting the pencils as it was drawing with them!

Sorting the colored pencils.

And then there was the Beading-on-a-Wire. It was actually a frantic effort to defuse a melt down. It worked for at least thirty minutes.

Two year old Grandson concentrates hard to get the pony bead on the wire.

We cut dolls out of plywood. She didn’t want to wait until the doll was dressed. It sprang to life immediately!

Dolls don’t need faces or clothes to be alive. They just need a friend.

We were both laughing so much that she nearly fell off her chair! LOVE. <3

And last night we painted some plastic Easter Eggs. This took much concentration because the eggs were slippery.

Four year old granddaughter paints a plastic egg.

Two year old Grandson paints an egg.

It was very messy, of course. Paint is supposed to be messy!

Two year old Grandson concentrates to keep the egg from sliding off the table, which it did.

So we gave him a heavy wood block to paint.

It was much easier painting a wood block because it didn’t slide off the table.

Grandson vigorously plunges the brush into the almost empty acrylic paint. "This is sticky! This is sticky!"

Grandson repeatedly and vigorously plunges the brush into the almost empty acrylic paint. “This is sticky! This is sticky!” It was important to him to get enough paint on the brush.

Painting the block.

But then he finally noticed the paint on his hand. And on the brush. And on the table. And when he tried to wipe everything it rapidly got worse. So that was the end of painting for the day.

But we have lots of eggs so we’ll be painting again.

Painting the plastic Easter Eggs.

Enjoying the Oven Fireplace

25 Friday Jan 2013

Posted by Julia Monroe in crafts, family, funny, home, home decor, painting, tea time

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crafts, fake fireplace, fireplace, funny, oven fireplace

We never got around to getting the chimney swept this year. Plus, the wood stove is in the basement. Not to miss out on the fireplace experience this cold icy night, we made it happen.
As the water warmed for tea, we turned on the oven and enjoyed the nice ambient glow.

Oven Fireplace. Actually, we taped plastic wrap to the oven with electrician’s tape and then painted the logs and flames with acrylic paint. We also dragged two big chairs from the living room out to the kitchen. Oh yeah!

There must have been something magical about the glow because the guys stayed a while.

The Art of Wild Abandonment Bloghop Post :)

04 Friday May 2012

Posted by Julia Monroe in altered books, art, crafts, painting, projects, woodwork

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art, blog hop, bloghop, cake, painting, stacked blocks, the art of wild abandonment, wood block cake, wood blocks

Welcome and greetings if you are following the Art of Wild Abandonment Bloghop! You probably arrived here from the amazing blog of Paty Shaulis. Her artwork is exquisite!
If you didn’t start at the beginning of the bloghop, you can join in the fun by visiting http://clairesmillie.wordpress.com/ and learning all about it.

Make sure you scroll to the bottom of my blog post to get the link for the next hop on the bloghop!

I and hundreds of others recently finished the e-course, The Art of Wild Abandonment, taught by Junelle Hallstrom Jacobsen and Christy Thomlinson. The projects were crazy and colorful and we learned all sorts of new ways to get our hands messy and express our wild creativity.

In addition to learning how to draw radishes and owls and sheep, altering a purse with paint and turning a roofing brush into an art brush holder, we painted wood blocks! Here is my version of the wood block project – Bloom!

It started with a couple wood blocks my dear husband cut for me.

Supplies gathered to decorate the blocks – my sketches, paints, modeling paste, ink pad, oil paint stick, wood blocks and, not in this photo, a flower and a coffee bean.

Once I got the blocks painted, the rest followed quickly.

I decided to make a 3 tiered cake with swags of thick sweet icing around the side. The word I chose for the top was Bloom. It’s the perfect word to describe what happened to so many members of the class. We all bloomed!

A view from the top of that sugary cake.

But wait, what is this on the bottom of the blocks? Another design?

A view from the top of the blocks flipped over. But then what happened to those sweet swags of white frosting?

Is that… a sheep? 0_0

More sheep!

And a sheep on top!

It’s a whole hill of sheep! Bloom Hill, covered with sheep!

But let’s check out that cake again. The sheep are upside down. And what is that under the rose on top?

The sheep’s hooves!

To make the hoof prints, I glued a coffee bean to an eraser and used it like a rubber stamp.

Eat cake! Draw sheep! Bloom!

Have fun hopping to the next post about The Art of Wild Abandonment on the wonderful blog of Janet Terrien Bracewell. I love her art journal!

Thank you so much for stopping by my blog. :)

A huge thank you to Junelle and Christy for teaching the Art of Wild Abandonment. It was a really fun e-course!
And Thank You to Clairesmillie for coordinating this bloghop!

One last pic – my owls.

Finished a mixed media piece – Her Heart

01 Tuesday May 2012

Posted by Julia Monroe in art, Inspirational, mixed media, painting, projects

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canvas, heart, mixed media, painting

Mixed media - No matter how far she roamed, her heart was never far from home. Click photo to see a larger image.

This canvas took weeks because I was discouraged so many times.

It started with a handful of disjointed pieces, cut and torn. Bits from a vintage vinyl wallpaper book, a scan of a page my mom colored when she was a young girl in 1941, my sister's beautiful calligraphy printed on tissue paper.

I was discouraged because I accidentally covered the canvas with too much paint, the colors of the vintage wallpaper butterflies and house seemed too bright, the woman seemed too pale. But I kept going and encouraged myself by saying “It’s not done yet” as I added brush strokes, sponged on painting, glued on butterflies. I set the project aside and looked at it as days went by and I tried to figure out what it needed. I finally rubbed in the brown oil paint stick around the border, and teared up, realizing that it was finished and I actually loved it. It says everything I want it to say.

The last thing I added was painting light in the dark door.

I am Creatively Made

25 Wednesday Apr 2012

Posted by Julia Monroe in art, drawing, Inspirational, painting

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art, canvas, creativity, Jeanne Oliver, mixed media, painting, ziegfeld girls

I am Creatively Made.

I first read a promo for the online class last year. I was not familiar with mixed media and had never drawn more than a few scribbles. The only art supply I owned was a box of acrylic paints and some dried up watercolor tubes. I never had a sketchbook or worked with graphite pencils, charcoal, stencils, gel medium, or gesso before. But I was driven to sign up for the course anyway. Sometimes you just know that you know that you’re supposed to walk a new path. I was driven.

So I signed up for Creatively Made by Jeanne Oliver. Everyone else had already begun by the time I signed up several weeks late. I didn’t sign up for art classes, I signed up because I desperately wanted to hear someone say it’s ok to be creative and to pour your life into it.

Jeanne’s words over the next several weeks opened my eyes to a whole new perspective, a new way to interpret life. I always thought that my interest in art and crafts was just a hobby, something I loved to do on the side of life. But what if that is WHY I was made? What if making art WAS exactly why I was made, 100% pure Julia, with a paintbrush in one hand, a pencil in the other and a dining room table covered with art supplies, canvases, sewing machine and fabric? What if the best part of me that God put together when he knit me together in my mother’s womb was to create art with my hands?

I was not able to complete the art assignments when everyone else was doing them because my eyes were usually too covered with tears. Instead of a paintbrush, I practiced holding truth in one hand and a tissue in the other. It felt good. It felt right. It felt like oxygen.

I’m still grappling with this huge revelation. Where have I been the past 50 years? How could I have thought that something so essential to my being was just a hobby?

So here goes.

This week I finished another project from Creatively Made.

Suzanne, Donna and Julia canvases - three creative souls. Sketches inspired by a Ziegfeld Girls coloring book from 1941. Click photo to see a larger image.

The background is created from bits of tissue copies of my grandmother’s handwritten recipes and an issue of The Household magazine from 1924. The images of women are inspired from a Ziegfeld Girl coloring book that my beautiful, creative mom colored back in 1941. The writing on each piece is a tribute to my creative sisters – she Smiled, for Suzanne; she Dreamed, for Donna; and she Journeyed, for me, Julia, the only sister who moved away and stayed.

Detail of one of the canvases.

I lift a glass in toast to Jeanne Oliver, who followed her heart and made a path for others. I lift a glass in toast to my creatively made sisters, Donna and Suzanne. And I toast my beautiful mom, Lauretta Musser, who never stopped being creative.

My next canvas will have these words: Never Give Up.

“Grandma, can we do messy crafts?”

22 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by Julia Monroe in drawing, painting

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drawing, painting

That’s what she said when she first walked through the door.
“Grandma, can we do messy crafts? Please? We can do messy crafts!” she said as she showed me her new tunic. The outfit was cute but she liked it best because she was allowed to do messy crafts with it.

“Like what?” I asked her. I had no idea what a “messy craft” was.
“Painting!” she said with a huge smile.
I really didn’t have time or energy to get out paints. We had only painted together once or twice.
“Here, I will show you my new pencils!” I told her.
“NO,” she moaned. “Messy crafts! Painting. Can we paint? We have to paint!”
“Here,” I said as I got out my Stabilo Aquarellable pencils. She showed no interest until I quickly added “First you draw with them and then you paint them with water!”
“Yes!” she said with excitement.

She didn’t understand the concept at first but with my instruction, she carefully scribbled a little splotch of red next to blue with the pencils. She scribbled yellow next to blue, red next to yellow, green next to red. When the paper was covered with little bits of scribbled yellow, blue, green, red and orange, we got out the paintbrush. When the brush first touched the blue scratch marks and burst into a wash of color, she looked up at me with absolute wonder and delight.
We turned to the next page and I drew flowers for her to color, which she carefully painted with the damp brush.
I will remember this delightful rainy Sunday with its color-splashed joy.