I've completed my Circle Swap pages

Finally I've finished the full 20 pages for the Circle Swap organized by Lenna. You will have seen the ones I made for myself in earlier blogs, the latest one being the red one yesterday. Today I discovered I had only made 19 pages so I made a last and only purple one, using the very last remnants of the collage made for Caryl's album. Now there are 20 and here they are:

I'm going to pack them up soon and mail them off to Lenna. Another project I can cross off my list, but there is still plenty left to do!

More pages for the Circle Swap

I've spend part of today working on the last 5 pages for the Circle Swap organized by Lenna. Read more about it here. I'll gradually show you the other pages I've made already but following on from yesterday's post I finished the red pages today. They use the same background fabric/paper collage as the Oriental 4 x 4.

This makes the total for my Circle Pages 20, the maximum amount, and it means I will receive 20 pages back to make an album out of, when the swap is finished which is not till September. Until that time I can feast my eyes on all the art which will be coming in for this swap on the blogspot Lenna has devised for her swaps: Creative Swaps

More Circle Swap pieces

As promised, here are two more pieces I made for my own circle journal, while working on the pages for Lenna's Circle Swap of which you can read more here

After the yellow and blue pages I showed you 2 posts ago, here are my orange and green pages. The orange one uses an area specially selected from one of my fabric collages, which has a medieval looking woman peeking through on the right hand side. I added a transparency of a French quotation which incorporates the word Paris. I finished off with the quotation: see the sights in a great city.

As you may have noticed on my earlier post the pages are finished by layering my fabric/paper collage with a circular page from the actual circle journal and zigzag machine stitching around all the edges. I then punch a hole on the same place as on the journal page underneath.

The green page has been taken from a green fabric/paper collage I made recently both for this project and an ATC swap on Atcards. I used a whole collection of green images I had collected from various magazines and old books and added napkins with a green theme to the top layer. I'm not really a lover of green but I do have a strong predelection for that acid lime green colour which you see when the first leaves start appearing on the trees in spring. That colour makes my heart sing!

Then cut out the circles from the back so that it was a surprise what I would find on the front. I like doing that kind of thing as I generally seem to get better lay-outs that way than if I carefully planned it. It's a metaphor for my life, I just like surprises and am an impulsive decision taker (with no regrets!!).

This circle had an image of cypresses in Italy as its main focus so I added a fabric image of an Italian poster from an event in Rome (from Alphastamps) and added the quote: Thou Paradise of exiles, Italy! I love it here in the Scottish Borders but if I had to choose to live somewhere else, it definitely would be Italy!!

Circle Swap Journal

I've been working on some circle pages for Lenna's circle swap. I won't show these to you yet as I'm still making more but at the same time I also made some pages for me to keep for my own journal. I'll add all the colour pages I receive back in this swap to one of my circle journals so I will have such an amazing colourful circle! Can't wait.!!

I actually have 2 circle journals as believe it or not, Lenna send me my 7Gypsies circle journal and it took more than 2 months to get to me. I panicked and bought another one on Ebay. So I have loads of pages to play with. I made my pages in a variety of colours as I already had some backgrounds from previous projects which fitted the colour bill so worked more on those. Ended up with green, turquoise, orange and one yellow page so far. Want to do more in red so that I can mail 20 pages to Lenna in due course.

The pages I made for myself have a travel theme as well as a colour one. I might well end up making a separate album for these with my own art, all colour and travel related. Just need MORE TIME!!!!

This yellow one has a fabric image of Florence (from Artchix, but unfortunately they no longer sell their fabric sheets) overlaid with a transparency of Michelangelo's Davids head. Also a vintage gold trim (from an old convent in Belgium via Ebay).

My turquoise circle also has trim, blue this time, and from a vintage pack from LostArtCreations. I added a paper figure from a blue dress (no idea where she came from) and text from a vintage book which was oh so appropriate. You will recognize the background from my January Journal Quilt fabric/paper collage. I always save every little scrap just in case!

More circles tomorrow!

Blue Poppies

No new art just yet, as I'm still working on a large quilt (now beading) and some art for my Circle Swap but nothing is ready to show. Instead I'm treating you to a picture of my lonesome blue poppy. We bought this about 5 years ago but it does not show itself every year. Instead it disappears for a couple of years and just when I'm getting worried it might have disappeared altogether, it suddenly pops up again. I bought this in the Dawyck Botanical Gardens, a subdivision of the Botanical Gardens in Edinburgh and only 1/2 hour down the road. Of course what I really wanted to achieve was a field of blue poppies as can be seen in the Gardens but this is what I've got and it looks stunning just by itself. If only it would stop raining it would look even better!!!

yellow Inchies

Today I could not resist working on something other than my very large quilt so I made a background of yellow which I used for my Yellow Inchies swap on the CChix Yahoo Group and I'm saving the rest to make colour circle pages for a swap I'm doing with Lenna. This definitely will be a lot of fun. Lenna has bought a load of circle albums, mailed them out to the participants of the swap who will make a multiple of 5 pages based on colour (choice of which one is ours) which we will mail back to her and which she will swap out in September so that we will all end up with a very colourful circle album. The sign-up is full but if you want to have a look at the pages when they come in to Lenna, you can follow the progress of this and other swaps organized by Lenna on http://creativeswaps.blogspot.com.

Anyway I left most of the yellow background till the circle album arrives with me and I can use one of the pages as a template for size. and today concentrated on making the yellow inchies. These have to be fabric, so I choose a yellow fabric, ironed it onto Fast2Fuse and then applied as many yellow threads and yarn as I could find onto it using some of my decorative machine stitches. Then cut them to size and sewed on brads or buttons (some Czech glass and other in the shape of tulips). Two of the buttons have shanks so they stand out a bit on the fabric which means my scanner focuses on them rather than the background, hence the poor quality of the scan!! Finally I ironed fabric onto the Fast2Fuse back and hand stitched around the edges. They look really summery and tone in perfectly with the daffodils outside which are at their very best at the moment, as are the yellow flowers of the mahonia which also smell gorgeously.

All our seeds are coming up in the potting shed and greenhouse which makes me feel even more that summer will be coming. We've planted nasturtiums, sweet peas, marigolds and tomatoes so far!