Fall CCB blog hop

If there’s one thing I love about living here in Luxembourg it’s the beautiful colours of Autumn when the forests turn from green to red, yellow and brown, and as long as the sun is shining it’s an absolute pleasure to drive through the leafy forest roads or walk with the dog first thing in the morning.
 
From today some of the Canvas Corp Crew are going to be blog hopping and showcasing projects inspired by Autumn.

It’s quite normal on my morning walks to pick up leaves, twigs or interesting things I find along the way and a lot of these end up in my inspiration jar for sketching at a later date.

I was inspired to create by the teasle seed heads outside my studio window which I leave standing throughout the winter to give a nice structure to the garden as well as feeding the birds.

I thought it was about time I added some sketches of my nature finds in a journal and of course I had to make one for the purpose. So here it is, an Autumn-inspired junk journal for sketching the things I’ve found on my morning forest walks with Cooper.

Junk Journal

I’ve painted on a piece of Stretched Natural Canvas cotton and given a mixed media finish with paints, gesso and texture paste. I also added a pretty piece of Avocado Burlap along with some Grey Burlap die cut into hearts. The hand-stitched binding I’m thrilled with only because it’s tricky to make it look neat enough.  Painting on canvas cotton is so satisfying and looks beautiful when it’s given a shabby chic treatment.

The inside has four signatures each with eight pages made from magazine paper, music score and plain old copy paper. I did use kraft paper for each outer page just so it would look neat from the outside, but I look forward to using these pages as much as the rest. 

I hope this has inspired you to make yourself a junk journal or nature diary. Please visit the other Crew members to find out what they’ve created with Canvas Corp products. Please visit the next designer who is…

Christine Santos

So do have a “leaf” through each blog (that was truly terrible) to discover their Autumnal projects and don’t forget to leave them some love as you go. The next on the list is Christine Santos.

I’ll be back soon with another blog post but for now happy hopping.

Jaine x


More Than A Card Not Quite A Whole Book

You know that thing when making a card seems a little bit mean to be saying “thank you for inviting us to stay for the weekend” or “we had a great time at your party” and it’s a bit late to be making a whole mini album which you know they’d love but you just don’t have the time? Well I think this might just hit the brief in terms of more than a card but not quite a whole album.

It’s my old favourite the one page mini book, the one where I start off with one big sheet of paper, in this case it was an A3, and coloured the background with a marbled effect using spray and folded it up into my mini album.

Here are a few photos which hopefully show the folding technique.

The resulting book has 8 A6 sized pages so enough for a few photos and some writing.

I wrote a little tutorial for the marbled background which you can see on the web site of Canvas Corp Brands here by clicking this link.

As you can see I created enough coloured paper to use for die cutting the stars.

I hope you try it for yourself. If you do I’d love to hear.

Jaine xx

Moving Into The Purple Orange And Black

It feels like since coming home from Ireland my life has been on full speed and in the blink of an eye Autumn is well and truly here with its colour changes and unpredictable weather. It’s a beautiful time of year though and we’re so lucky to live surrounded by forest so we can watch the changing season.

With Summer over we had our Autumn meeting of the Mosaik group and a few members were keen to make a junk journal. I put together a kit of materials and they loved it. The kit included book pages, paper bags, ephemera and patterned papers as well as tags and ribbons.

I love making mini versions too which will fit in my A6 Travelers notebook cover and they make a great place for jotting down notes or ideas on the go or somewhere for a quick sketch. This one is made using the mop up papers from my messy craft projects.

Even though the pages inside are grungy and messy it doesn’t mean the outside has to be too and of course I went mad on the decorating. I used the contents of my September box from Paper Pen and Plan and made a mini Halloween themed junk journal.

I’ve never been a big fan of the colour purple but since it’s been the most popular colour from my TN cover range I thought I’d use one myself seeing as it matches perfectly with the green and orange. I have to say the colour has warmed on me and I’m really loving it now.

The inserts are made by Ali-Beth of Paper Pen and Plan too and she makes sizes to fit most TN’s and planners.

At last I’ve found some time to fill out a page in my sketchbook from the Sketchbook project. Naturally mushrooms feature on the pages. I’ve become a bit obsessed with mushrooms from drawing them to foraging and eating them.

Finally for this week, the November issue of Craft Stamper is out and this month I’ve written the Masterclass feature. I used a stamp from my good friend Magda Polakow which I adore. If you have trouble finding a copy it’s available to buy here at Mags UK

Have a good weekend

Jaine xx

Junk Journaling

This week I’ve been playing in my junk journal which is in my travelers notebook. I find this very quick to work in as the pages aren’t big and it’s not one of my best journals so I’m not afraid of messing it up. Great for experimentation and letting go. This one I’ve used the Dylusions paints from the shop.

After a conversation with Clare from Paper Pen and Plan we both came to the conclusion we really missed our Messy Mondays so she decided to bring it back but this time in the Facebook group so everyone else could join us. To join in visit paperpenandplan on Facebook.

Since posting my junk journal in the group I had a couple of questions about the paper I used and I thought I’d post a little show and tell here but it was so long and picture heavy I decided to make a little video instead showing how this……….

became this……..

So here’s the video.

https://youtu.be/o_gPspGNZT8

Have a good weekend

Jaine xx