How are we all?
But we also have a specific, hmmm, I guess you would call it a task, for you to all play along with.
You can even add a tag to your tag, as a form of independant advertising!


It is a project filled with hope.
My blog is the-oltremare.blogspot.com. (Oltremare means "overseas" in italian.) It's kind of turned into a mommy blog, but sometimes I share my art, too. I also keep a tumblr at oltremare.tumblr.com, i like to think of it as my little pieces of internet magic.
I'm into almost anything domestic: cooking, baking, gardening, sewing. . . but my main love is making art. I never really know what to call my art; it's kind of a hybrid of collage/scrapbooking/art journalling. Mostly I just love to cut and paste, and I love using vintage or found materials. So I am super excited to be a guest designer here, since I really love the spirit behind TAIF.
This was a fun challenge for me. Recently I've been creating some 12x12 art journal type pages about my son, and motherhood, so I decided to use that format for my "green grass" project. This piece evolved a little from my original intention, but that's one of my favorite things about collage. I always feel strongly that the materials show me what they want; my compositions are usually a process of discovery. It's so fun to just let go and let the art flow.
Thanks again for having me here! This week's theme is so fun, I can't wait to see what everyone else creates!"
Salutations! My name is Jessica but the blogging and flickr world knows me as jek. I currently have two blogs out there, one about life, crafting and living creatively and the other about making arts and crafts with your children. Both of which have scrumdilly in their titles. I'm a children's book specialist and a student of Human Development and I'm a little bit manic and a little bit Doris Day. When Kara asked me to be a guest designer for the Lace prompt, I jumped on it! I have a box full of beautiful vintage lace that belonged to my grandmother. It was itching to be played with. In this box is nestled a party of lace. Pale pink, blue, minty green, yellow...all sorts of colors and widths. I have been meaning to do something with it but always pushed it aside until now. What was I going to do?
I woke up one morning and stood in my tiny kitchen with a cup of tea wondering what I could do that would be pretty and inspiring. I would look from the open box of lace to the dull gray sky outside and sigh. Our lovely Los Angeles weather had finally turned somewhat wintery on us. The lack of blue and color was dismal and if you know me, you know i am a bit of a color fiend. As I took another sip of my green anji tea, I had an idea, or at least an idea of an idea. Why not take care of two things at once? I am nothing if not a manic multi-tasker. I would create a pretty science project using tea and lace. It would start out as a bit of prettiness on my kitchen shelf and hopefully, it would turn into something else. So I brewed three new cups of tea. A darjeeling, a chamomile and another green anji. I popped the tiny glasses of tea on my tiny kitchen shelf and dropped a snippet of lace into each one. As the tea brewed, so would the lace and in the end, I would have some tea-dyed prettiness to play with. I then spied a bit of left over coffee and dropped a bit of lace into that as well. For the next four days, the tea cups of lace acted as a mood lifter for gray skies. So pretty.
Finally, I took out the small pieces to dry and wondered, wondered, wondered what I could do with them. After many trials and errors, I was left with only itty bitty scraps and in desperation I had it! Documentation. Out came four metal ringed key tags, the mod podge, scissors, a sharpie. a scrap of wood and four tiny nails. So here you go, an itty bitty portrait of tea colored lace, labeled, hung and documented for future art endeavors. Enjoy!