More Lacing and a Bridge Story

Thanks for all the nice comments on my laced up card yesterday.  The reaction caused me to dig out this layout from Jan. 2008 where I used the same technique on a 12x12 page.  The layout was about a beach walk which Clara and I took and the unusual discovery she made:  a piece of the Bay Bridge!  This bridge spans the San Francisco Bay and connects the city of San Francisco with the east side of the bay. Although the bridge actually hits land at the Port of Oakland in the city of Emeryville, it is usually referred to as the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.
While not as famous as the Golden Gate Bridge, it has some interesting history.  It is featured in the 1967 American movie classic, The Graduate, about a young man trying to find himself in a rapidly changing American society.  If you go to the 7:30 minute portion of this utube video, you can see Dustin Hoffman driving on the Bay Bridge, supposedly heading to the East Bay.  The scene contains a notable error because the top deck on which he is driving only goes into San Francisco, not the East Bay.  Traffic heading East travels along the lower level in something that feels a bit more like a cavern.
More recently, the Bay Bridge made news when a portion of it collapsed during the 1989 Loma Prieta Earth quake.  Here's a couple photos from that day:
First from the San Francisco Chronicle

And a bigger view from NISEE, U.C. Berkeley (trying to give proper credit, although this photo shows up a lot of places so I'm not sure of its exact origin):

My layout, though, came from an incident in 2007 when a container ship named the Cosco Busan hit the San Francisco Bay Bridge, causing a major oil spill. You can read the Wikipedia account of the accident here. Interestingly, the ship also knocked several large pieces off the bridge.  As reported in our local paper in this article, a very large piece of the bridge washed up on a local beach.  While not as big as the bridge fender featured in that article, leave it to Clara to find her own personal piece of the Bay Bridge! That's what she's proudly holding in the layout.  We considered ourselves lucky that pieces of the bridge and not too much oil made landfall around our parts.
Up tomorrow: some thoughts on hipstamatic photography and my Journal Your Christmas album for this year.

Corner lacing card

This week's challenge over at the Gingersnap Creations blog is "stitching." You can see a variety of wonderful projects at this link.  Since I'm sewing challenged, I decided to create this card with one of my favorite stitching techniques:  corner lacing.  When I want to use this technique, I start with a template like this one:

I use it to punch holes into the paper I will lace on. Then I pull waxed linen thread or other fiber in and out of the holes in alphabetical order.  It's quite easy, and I love the effect it gives.  Let me know if you give it a try; I'd love to see the results.

Crazy Tim Cards

Needed to step away from my art journal for a while.  I decided to check out Linda's Compendium of Curiosities Challenge this week at Studio L3.  The technique is alcohol ink splatter, which is something very different than my typical style. Didn't have the special tool required for the technique but used a turkey baster!  Love alcohol inks, but prefer other techniques to use them, I think. I just don't think splatter and mess are for me. What about you?

Wanted:

Shimelle has offered many wonderful writing prompts in the current class.  One of the recent ones was to write journaling in the form of a want ad or ebay offering.  I chose to create a want ad.  Here's the journaling:

Wanted: More hours in the day. Preference given to hours between midnight and 6:30 am for sleeping or late afternoon to accommodate the need to be in more than one place at the same time. Hours for diet and exercise desireable but must be accompanied by motivation. Hours for housework or computer surfing need not apply.

From a design standpoint, this art journal page is all about contrast.  Strong contrasting colors and contrasting shapes. 

Very bold, but I really want someone to answer my ad!

My Favorite Veteran

Today (Thursday) is Veteran's Day in the United States. I've posted before about my dad's service and how proud I am of him. If you click on the label "dad" below, you'll see some of my prior posts about him, including journaling about the photographs from his time in World War II. I did eventually create scrapbook pages with those photographs and there's an excerpt up top, but they're simple pages and I've already posted the journaling.
So, instead, I wanted to share this art journal page with a story about the first time my husband met my father.  I've been wanting to do this page ever since blog friend Sian posted about her husband meeting her grandparents.  I wrote the journaling on the page in the style of a play, in response to a prompt from Shimelle's class.  From a design standpoint, there's a visual triangle going on with the three stars, direction with the eyes looking at each other and a discordance color scheme that still works because of similar tones and lots of neturals.  
Enjoy!

The Meeting


Act I (A University apartment)
Girl: I really think you should meet my parents.
Boy: Alright. I'll come over for brunch when we're home for Winter Break.

Act II (A suburban home)
Father (handing a tie to a young man): Here. Put this on. A man likes to see his future son-in-law in a tie at least once before his daughter's wedding day.
Son: Thanks Dad.

Act III (a different suburban home; it is clearly still morning)
Scene 1: Camera pans over an older man pressing drinks, many drinks, onto a young man in an ill-fitting tie. Young man protests occasionally buts keeps drinking. Music plays in background.
Scene 2: (same home, that evening)
Daughter: So, dad, what did you think of him?
Father: Seemed nice. He drank quite a bit though. (Pauses) But at least he was drinking good stuff.

An Art Journal Page with Notions

When faced with the challenge of making an art journal page with the design supply "notions," I was a little apprehensive. I really liked this background and how the rectangles looked on it. I looked up a definition for notions and found that it included zippers.  I thought "this could be fun!" because I really liked the way the zipper looked on the page.  I looked for quotes about zippers and found this one:
"The way to a man's heart is through his zipper."
Perfect.
It's from a bumper sticker. If you want to find bumper sticker sayings for your cards, layouts or art journal pages, check out this link. Although, be forewarned, bumper sticker sayings seem to be more raunchy and offensive that t-shirt sayings.  Let me know if you find a favorite.  For some more traditional notions pages, check out today's Gingersnap Creations blog.  Lots of eye candy there.

Memory Flashes

One of Shimelle's recent journaling prompts was to use "memory flashes" to get to the heart of certain events.  I chose the moment we realized that we would be able to adopt our daughter, Clara.  The journaling along the bottom reads: "Thoughts and emotions from when we learned that Clara would be able to join our family."  The first bird (Paul) says "I knew I would never let her go, no matter what."  The second bird (me) says "complete fulfilled content relieved."  The third bird (Henry) says "I'm happy.  I said, 'I like this baby.'"  The fourth bird (Clara) says "I'm joining my forever family."  
Yeah, it made me all teary eyed to write it.  It's amazing how that journaling trick works!
From a design standpoint, the birds are made using the butcher paper collage technique and the background involves underpainting.  The placement of the birds involves ideas of grouping and repetition (or something).  I'm learning soooo many design ideas in Dina's class that I can't keep them all straight. But I really like this page.