I watercolored the lettered and doodled page I made and posted here with the Gasai Tambi Pearlized paints...they are beautiful and shimmery. Even the white, which I assumed wouldn't be very pigmented is lovely. They will color over dark paper and letters though, so when I added some blue background by just painting over the whole thing, some of the black lines and letters were affected.
I still like how it turned out and my next thing will be to try them on a black paper project :) You can see how the light reflected the mica in the paint on the lower right corner. Here's a close-up to show the shimmer.
Here's a link to Jennifer McGuire's lovely work with these watercolors...that woman can make me buy anything!!
And, because today was my son's first day back to school as A SENIOR, I have to post his pic. He let me take two before it was time to quit :)
It's almost Mother's Day and I'm feeling all nostalgic. My mom turned 80 this year and had a fall that landed her in the hospital and now rehab facility to get her strength back. I'm so grateful that it wasn't more serious and relieved that there's hope she'll be able to return to her home with help. This is a woman who was meant to be a mom...my mom. She's a perfect fit for me. I can't say more than that. This spring has also marked some eventful happy passages in our family. My youngest, Ben, turned 16 and now stands 5' 10". I'm sure he still has some growing to do, but passing his older sister was a minor goal of his and he did...now his goal is to pass his dad at 6'1"...I guess we'll see about that one! It's weird to remember that when I was 16, I started dating his dad and that, by the end of our first summer together, we'd be planning our future together. Now we're here 32 years later with a nearly grown son and a daughter graduating from college. Crazy how fast time flies, am I right? But how lucky was I to find him so soon and to be able to celebrate 25 years of marriage. Here's the pic of her grad cap that she decorated with my craft supplies, did you spot the Stickles in silver and purple? My favorite supply, bar none, is Stickles!
The quote is from Hamilton, the musical, that both my kids are obsessed with right now. It is catchy and they've got me and the hubby hooked too. Here's a little snippet from PBS if you want to know more. The writer and star of the show, Lin-Manuel Miranda, took all kinds of dryly-told facts from a biography and turned them into an amazing musical that keeps you glued to the story until the tragic end.
This is my newly-minted 16-year-old in his first musical, which just closed last weekend. He's in the front on the far left and is a Victorian Scrooge ghost ancestor in The Addams Family Musical. They did a great job overall and he did a fab job dancing and acting for the first time ever. Especially since he said the first day of dance rehearsal, "Turns out I can't dance."
Handsome, ain't he?! Hee, hee.
And here's one of my ridiculously grown-up daughter who stole a friend's trench coat to dress up and pretend to be Alexander Hamilton...I wasn't there but I'm betting there was singing involved during this little episode.
So there you go, all tied up in a neat little package of Hamilton and musicals and kids and rites of passages, in which I realize I'm too young to be this old :)
I'm actually enjoying watching these kids grow and become and reach and achieve and learn and just be. It's a privilege.
Happy Mother's Day to all, and if you're not technically a mother, I'm guessing you've mothered someone at sometime in their life, it's kinda what women do. We love. And that sums up mothers in my book.
And this is where I'd put a video of Sunrise, Sunset from Fiddler on the Roof if I didn't think it'd make me all melancholy...but feel free to sing it to yourselves. I'm laying bets the husband will be singing it at graduation, just to be ornery.
I'm not sure who started this little clever idea, but since it's a thing now, I'm jumping on the bandwagon! Star Wars has been big in this house since my toddler son spotted Yoda on a box of cereal back when Episode 2 was coming out. He didn't know Yoda, Star Wars or much of life in general, we are talking toddler here...but he knew he liked that box. And that in turn sparked a whole obsession with Star Wars and I was convinced that marketing to kids really does work...because once he spotted Yoda on cereal, he then saw him on fruit snacks and other foods, along with the toys. Thanks, Kellogg's. Here's a page I did of our trip to Disney World in 2008 at Hollywood Studios and they had a whole Star Wars section. I'm sure it has expanded and grown, but at the time, it was good enough for my 8-year-old son to be thrilled.
You can almost see the silver spray I used on the page. I love that film strip from Tim Holtz too. It's pretty simple, but Ben had the sticker, so that pretty much made the page for me with the pics.
We had SW everything in the house, Legos, toys, books, costumes, food, and some of it still remains. I admit I just bought the SW graham crackers a couple of months ago. We also had a few SW parties and used the Star Wars cookbooks a few times.
This was our fave.
They have recipes for Wookiee Cookies (our fave), C3-PO pancakes and Han burgers. It's worth a check at the local library for these fun books...or buy them at your local bookstore if you've gotta have them! And yes, there's a Princess Leia Cinnamon Buns recipe...here's the pic from that.
Here's an idea for an easy way to celebrate May the 4th day at your house. This is from the blog I Should Be Mopping and if you like Mace Windu, I'd use purple chocolate melts for your light sabers if you want to be authentic. I heard Samuel L. Jackson decided he'd ask for a purple lightsaber, since no one else in the SW universe had one. And they totally gave it to him...that's awesome. I'd ask for pink myself.
Of course, my favorite anecdote from the Star Wars Obsession Years is when my son informed me that we should've named him Anakin...or change our name to Skywalker. Sorry, bud, but thank goodness we did name him Ben, after all Obi-Wan did use the alias Ben Kenobi in the very first movie. Whew!
Happy Wednesday! And May the Fourth Be With You Today!
If you're like me and you took a break from blogging and regular life during the holidays, welcome back! It's nice to let things slide for a few days and just enjoy the family and laze about. So I did. Hope Santa was as good to you as he was to me—I still have a few gift cards to spend, so I'm looking forward to that. I just completed this page about my son using the JCPenney portrait that I had made. It's 10x10 and I bought it specifically to scrap. I love the different pictures they put on it and the background is actually his shirt.
I used this Carta Bella gaming paper, foam Thickers, a wood @ symbol and wrote a few words and called it a day. Often my journaling can be brief, even though I'm a writer by trade. How about you? Do you journal a lot or a little? I just think a title and a the pics can say it all...sometimes. Happy Monday! Chark
