Cheerfulness

It’s time for a new challenge at Try it on Tuesday, so for the next two weeks our challenge is Say it with flowers and you will find plenty of wonderful inspiration from my Design Teamies over at our blog too!

I was inspired by one of my friend’s blogs, the lovely Christine from Foxgloves and Bumblebees, who blogs about Floriography which looks at “The language of flowers” which I thought linked well to our Say it with flowers theme. So as it is spring here, I choose crocus and looked up their meaning, which is “cheerfulness” and created this page – I hope you like it!

To create this page, I started by applying Twisted Citron and Mowed Lawn Distress Ink by stamping the ink pad onto an acrylic block, spritzing with water and pressing the block onto the page. I gradually built up the colours and dried each layer of ink with my heat gun before applying the next, to create a textured effect of drips and smooshes. Then I fussy cut the crocus which is an image from an old calendar and used the leftover paper, from the image, to die cut the letters using a XCut die set from Docrafts and my Big Shot machine, I also cut some into tiny squares. Everything is stuck to the page using a glue stick and then covered with a thin layer of Liquitex matte gel medium so when dry I could shade them using a Cold Grey Faber-Castell Big Brush Marker and outline them with a white Uniball gel pen. Then I added some fine splatters of black and white DecoArt acrylic paint using a paintbrush. To finish, I stuck some purple and green square gemstones onto the page and a postage stamp with crocus pictured on it.

This postage stamp is from Poland and was issued in 1967; it was part of my hubby’s childhood collection which he kindly gave to me for my art journaling (grin!).

It was fun looking at Floriography which is the term used to that describe the Victorian flower language. For crocuses, I found that they mean youth and cheerfulness. If you are interested, here are some fun facts about crocus:

• The crocus is one of the first flowers to emerge in the spring.
• They are often referred to as the light bulb flower because of their shape.
• It is a symbol of cheerfulness as it celebrates the return of spring by bringing the landscape alive with colour after winter.
• Saffron from the crocus flower is used as a spice to season foods.

As T Stands for Tuesday I’m sharing my cup of green tea and a slice of birthday cake that I made for some friends; this was a Victoria sponge cake filled with strawberry jam and buttercream icing covered in dark purple fondant icing just like the purple colour of the crocuses on my page – Happy T day everyone!

Challenges

Over at Art Journal Journey, I’m delighted to be hosting my Hello Springtime challenge this month and as I created my page with spring in mind, I’m pleased to join this challenge – I hope to see you there too!

I’m pleased to join the Close to Nature challenge over at Moo Mania & More with my springtime page.

Thanks for joining me today! If you have any questions or comments, I would love to hear from you.

Here is a list of all the materials used to create this art journal page:

• Tim Holtz Distress Ink (Twisted Citron, Mowed lawn)
• Faber-Castell Big Brush Pitt artist pen (Cold Grey IV 233)
• Uniball Signo gel pen (White)
• DecoArt Crafter’s Acrylic (Black, White)
• Docrafts XCut A5 Die Set (Folk Alphabet XCU503286)
• Old Calender
• Postage Stamp from Poland issued 1967 picturing Crocus
• Hobbycraft Self-Adhesive Gems (Assorted Square 5666141000)
• Liquitex Matte Gel Medium
• Pritt Stick
• Zig Memory System 2 Way Glue (Dual Action Glue Pen)
• Stix2 double-sided tape