Watercolors and Vacations

For about 20 years ago (Eeeek! I'm OLD!!!) my mom and I used to go on vacations together evere summer, just the two of us. We packed everything we needed in the car and then we just drove around in Sweden, rented a new cabin each night, talked, cried, laughed, argued, had an absolutely wonderful time and grew really, really close. I think those vacations are the reason I these day consider my mom to be my very best friend and soul mate. (That and the fact that I DO have the best mom in the world, as yes, she DOES read this blog so what else can I say? LOL)

Anyway, this particular summer (probably the summer of -91) I brought my watercolors and we spent some time painting together.





In this particular case we'd placed some food items between us on the table and were painting the same objects, just from different angles.





We also did the same thing with some rocks and an elder flower.





Afterwards we held our on private art exhibition on the cottage couch. LOL Unfortunately it was quite dark in that end of the cottage and this photo is scanned more than ten years ago on a really crappy scanner (the original photo is packed away in a box somewhere where I can't reach it ) so the image quality is REALLY bad, but still...

The two 1½ paintings on the left are mine and the two 1½ on the right are my mom's (the very right one is the view through our window)





And here is a close up of the vegetable from both sides.

Beware of Cats and TV!!!

The instruction says "This page is a sign. What do you want it to say?" and well in my case it's not so much want I WANT a sign to say, I NEED a sign like this. LOL







And *faint* it's painted with non-sparkly water color! LOL

There really should have been three cats though, or even five. :o( I've lost three of my fur babies within the last 6 year (the last two within 2½ years). I miss them all badly!!!

The two I've still got are crazy enough to still require a sign like this though. And BTW, the text is supposed to be lopsided (like it's been knocked over by the crazy kitties).





And while I had my water colors out I couldn't resist doodling on the flowers on the cover. Bad idea! The red/turquoise flower looked kind of okay until I added the stupid red lines but well, the pink felt one turned out bad from the start and then just got worse. LOL





Well, what can I say, I was watching TV, one of the main characters died in a fire while trying to rescue a child (and his wife had just found out that she was pregnant). It was sad, I got distracted and you really shouldn't try to paint on fuzzy fabric materials anyway. LOL

But the cats sign still looks nice (no one died in that episode. LOL)

Faded Ink

For this page I choose to sample my ink pads. The idea was probably to sample substances you usually don't use on papers but ink is a substance too and I really WANTED to sample all my ink pads. Originally I had intended to sample my make up as well but the ink samples took up to much space and I like how the page looks now so I don't want to mess with it.

Unfortunately the pads themselves are a bit to soft to work really well as stamps, bBut I kind of like the old, faded look you'll get from this. SOME inks like "Faded Lavender" (second one on the first row) is a little bit TOO faded for my taste though. I think it's gone dry.

I particularly like my Distress Inks (the three, non-black, ones to the right) They're mostly used to make things look old, vintage and worn. I feel a bit tempted to use them for something now.

I'm also quite fond of my good silver ink pad even if the flowers I stamped on the cover of the journal didn't stick. (I blame that on the cover, not on the ink)

The journal has landed!

Remember I promised to show the photo my brother took of the flying journal with his cell phone?





Here it is! Now my own photo from the balcony is actually better than this one but that doesn't really matter. This is still a documentation of the journal throwing process.

(And I'm not going to be more longwinded than this, just to shock you. LOL)

REALLY Old Stuff!

Talk about OLD stuff! These drawings are from 1980 when yours truly were just eleven years. I still thought they would be fun to share here though.





I'm not just from the land of Abba, I'm from the land of the Sámi people and their reindeers too. Although, to tell the truth I live a lot further down south than they do (or rather where they originate from, these days the Sámi people of course live wherever they want and I actually believe the majority live in our capital, Stockholm, and I don't live a lot further south from Stockholm, just a tiny bit.) and I don't have any Sámi connection what so ever (I AM however the queen of long parenthesizes and longwinded explanations) that explains this drawing.

*phew* I need to catch my breath for a while now. LOL





Sweden also happens to be the land of the little red cottages with white corners. The very characteristic red color called Falu rödfärg/Falu red is made from pigments from a copper mine in the town Falun (hence the name) and it's very commonly used since it's both cheap and conserves the wood well.

*phew* Did I say longwinded explanations? LOL I hadn't planned for this update to turn in to a lesson about Sweden. LOL What I had INTENDED to write was that it looks like I'd started to use things like perspective when I was eleven, I just hadn't fully got the grasp of how it worked yet. But it seems like my brain accidentally slipped today and caused this unnecessary long post. Oooops! Sorry! LOL

Money, money, money...

... must be funny
in the rich man's world
Money, money, money
always sunny
in the rich man's world
Aha-aaaa
All the things I could do
if I had a little money
It's a rich man's world

(after all, I DO come from the land of Abba. LOL)





Since I don't have a lot of money, money, money I thought I should try to make some of my own, just as I did as a kid. Maybe this wasn't the best method? I'm not sure the stores will accept these (especially not the Danish coins. LOL) Next time I will have to try my scanner instead. LOL

Weekly Update - 7 weeks

Is it just me or do the weeks go SUPER fast at the moment? I feel like I'm doing one of these weekly updates every other day or so.





Not much has happened to the front of the cover since the day before yesterday... eh... I mean last week. The chain is still intact, the flower is a bit damaged but both ants are actually still alive. *shock*

Even less has happened to the test page and the fruit sticker page so I promise not to bore you with those. LOL None of the fruits I bought yesterday had any stickers.





I've still done some wrecking today though, even of the destructive kind, it just doesn't show on the outside of the journal.

You know these days it doesn't bother me at all to poke holes in a page, and that EVEN if I've painted on the other size. I've changed! LOL It WOULD still bother me if it would have been one of my favorite pages though.

And actually I HAVE changed some, even outside the actual journal wrecking. I've made two decisions this week (VERY tiny to most people but still important to me) based on some of the insights I've gotten during this process. Nothing I feel like sharing in the journal though. And well one of the reasons is that you have to know me and my background story and current situation REALLY well for it to make any sense what so ever. LOL

Just playing with colors

I just HAD to experiment a bit more with my sparkly watercolors, but now on a better paper. I love how the colors turned out but I'm less pleased with the doodles.





I really like how the black frame looks though. From certain angles it's completely opaque and black and from other angles you can see the underlying colors sparkle through.

Besides from being sparkly and shimmery this painting is also covered with tiny splashes of gold. You just have to take my world for how pretty the colors are IRL.





And speaking of doodles. I made another one of these while watching TV last night. Perhaps I should do some wrecking instead? LOL

Old Stuff

I've decided to start a new category in the blog; "Old Stuff". I've been going through some of my old sketches and paintings (while looking for paper to use for doodles and color experiments and such.) And I thought it could be fun to take pictures of everything and show here on the blog.

Now keep in mind that the perspective might be a bit skewed because of the angle I've taken the photos in and some of the subtle hues in the sketches might not photograph very well. Also the sizes of the original varies which means some of the images have been shrunken a lot.

In an effort to be nice and not overwhelm you completely I will not show everything at once but there will be an "Old Stuff" update every now and then. Nothing will be shown in chronological order though, it's just in the order which I've taken the photos, to make things easier for me.

So should I stop taking and actually post some pictures then ? LOL



Cat -95



Quick doodle of one of my guinea pigs "Lillgisen" -97



Cat -95



Domherre/Bullfinch (undated)



Kitten -95



Cat -95


Yes, I like cats. Didn't you know that by now? LOL

Explosion of colors!

I LOVE this page! Unfortunately it's one of those pages you really can't photograph very well. You just can't capture the hues of these colors or how they shimmer and sparkle. It looks absolutely amazing IRL.



with flash


lamplight only


For those of you that don't have your own copy of the journal, the circle and the text are printed, the rest of the black shapes are painted by me. And the ant-holes are of course from when I when I were supposed to cut through several pages.





It looks really good with the chain, doesn't it?

I really loved working with all these colors. I'm one of those color-matching people that are really picky with colors and I have beautifully color-matched home in white, pink, green and roses (yes, roses is a colors, didn't you know? LOL). I also have very color-sensitive eyes that can pick out very tiny differences in hues and sometimes I even find mismatched colors stressful. (It's like a good music ear but with eyes and color instead) But because of this it's really fun and liberating to mix colors a bit wild and crazily in the journal. This is something I have to practice a bit more.





The downside with my twinklies (that's what those shimmering colors are called) is that they bleed through the journal paper. On the other hand, sometimes that can create fantastic looking backsides. (I haven't actually started to work on this page yet, but I still had to show how it looks)





The colors bled through to this side as well but this one I decided to finish tonight. I started it the bottom left corner and I think I did fairly okay. (In case you can't read it because of the ant-hole, the first word is "close".

Weekly update - 6 weeks

Yay! This time I've actually DONE some wrecking since the last weekly update. April has been a bit slow when it comes to wrecking (at least compared to the very, very busy March). On the other hand April has been busy when it comes to a lot of other, non WTJ-related, stuff.

Anyway...









Remember that I promised you to finish the paper chain after I'd sent the journal flying? Here it is!

I've seen people tuck their chains in to little plastic pockets to keep them safe (but flat) but I decide to firmly chain it (silly pun actually intended LOL) to the journal and let it dangle loose, a fragile victim to future adventures. (And how many of you believe that the chain will end up in a little protective pocket before next weekly update? LOL)





This is how the journal looks today, chain and all. (note the poor ant)





I realized that it was a long time since I showed to the progress of the fruitpage. I still eat just as much fruit (I will grab a couple of persimmons and maybe a pear after I'm done blogging) but unfortunately most fruits come without stickers, only two new stickers in the last three weeks (and one of them I found at my mom's during Easter) I wonder if a fellow wrecker is nicking all the fruit stickers in the store? LOL





And since I've forced the fruit sticker page upon you I can just as well bore you with the test page as well. After all, this IS the weekly update (not that I show it EVERY week, I don't want to bore you TOO much, just a little bit. LOL)

Spring has sprung!

I've had a hard time deciding which word to use for this exercise. At first I had planned to use the word "katt" (cat), which of course is a word with a lot of meaning to me. I had even planned to create a painting made from the word cat in different colors.

Then I started to think that maybe the word "frihet" (freedom) would be interesting to use,. Maybe it would make me think about all of those things freedom means to me.

And these last days "trött" (tired) have been the only word on my mind. *yawn* (One of the funny things in life when you're suffering from CFS.)

But today my mom and I went on a wonderful trip looking for spring flowers and then I decided that I wanted to dedicate this page to trying to capture this day and use the word "vår" (spring), my favorite season of them all.







The flowers I've used for the border are the first spring flowers here in Sweden. First comes the yellow Tussilago ( Tussilago farfara). The next one to follow is the blue Blåsippa (Anemone hepatica or Hepatica nobilis) and then last of the three, that we just saw a few of today, the Vitsippa (Anemone nemorosa). As you can see the names Blådsippa and Vitsippa are quite similar, the only thing that differs are the colors "blå" and "vit". (I think you're all clever enough to understand those colors without translation. LOL)




Maybe I SHOULD have used the word cat instead? LOL My cats love to participate every time I take photos. In their minds nothing can be as important to take a photo of as a cat. LOL This little lady, almost crawling in to the camera, is the same furball that wanted to take a shower with me and the journal earlier.

Killer penguins!!!

This weekend I took the chance to get some help to do the "Ask a friend to do something destructive to this page" challenge. Both my sister-in-law and her niece were VERY willing to help be out with that one. LOL And they both took their chances to draw some really destructive stuff.





The niece, Vanja, started by drawing a really destructive guy and lots of other destrucicve stuff like a rope, a gun, drugs and a razorblade (and a teddybear! LOL). I've seen a photo of the guy in question and the resemblance is actually VERY good (besides the fact that the tattoo is on the wrong side which is why she turned the page in to a mirror LOL) And before you start to worry, "niece" doesn't mean that she's child, she's 22. LOL

Vanja found it very therapeutic to work with my journal (yes, she's pretty tempted to get one of her own now. I'm good at brainwashing people LOL)





And that sister-in-law of mine has a REALLY destructive imagination. LOL I mean what else can you say when someone draws an Easter painting with killer penguins???? (Maybe that I start to fear for the safety of brother. LMAO)

As I said before "Glad Påsk" means Happy Easter but when it's painted with dripping blood I'm not sure that the Easter will be very happy. *shudder*

There's an emo angel in the upper left corner looking down at the scene where a carnivorous penguin called "Slaktarn (The killer) is flying away (Eeek!" Killer penguins can fly!) with a chicken crying for help, a vegan penguin is just a about to kill a Daffodil and a third one has just killed the Easter bunny.

I'm not sure if my sister-in-law found it therapeutic or not but she's ordered her own journal the same day. LOL

After they drew this Vanja wondered if I STILL thought I had the most wonderful friends (as I mentioned a few posts ago) and my mom said that well, I might have wonderful friends but I didn't get to pic my relatives. LOL But destructive paintings or not, I still think both these girls are quite wonderful (and I'm not saying this JUST because I've invited them to read the blog LOL)

Flying Easter wreckings

Yay, I know you've all been waiting for it! The journal throwing!!!







It was fast and pretty uncomplicated. A fall form a second story balcony didn't do that much harm to the book. And no, that's NOT my sister-in-law, that's my brother. LOL Hopefully he'll remember to send me the photo he took with his cellphone so I can add it to the blog later.





A few of the pages got a bit crumpled but the biggest "damage" was that a button fell off from the "white stuff page". I guess I can live with that, and if not I can always glue it back. LOL





And talking about damage, the ants on the front page are starting to look a bit tired. LOL





On my way over to my mom's this Friday I borrowed a pen from my brother and did the "Lines while in motion" page (No, I wasn't the one driving. LOL) A drawing IS still made of lines, isn't it? LOL To the left a chicken and to the right a "påskris" ("Easter-twigs" = birch twigs with colorful feathers attached) both typical Swedish Easter decorations. "Glad Påsk" means "Happy Easter".

This isn't the prettiest page I've ever made. LOL But I was too busy discussing journal wrecking with my brother and his wife. (The blue stuff is paint on the back of my "sea of circles")

Ghost visitors?

It seems like I've gotten a whole bunch of "ghost visitors" (most likely URL-spamming bots) lately. They're showing up in my Live Traffic Feed but not on my stat counter so there's something iffy about them. And I find it highly unlikely that sites with counterstrike hack are linking to my blog. LMAO "Visitors" like this are so annoying! I prefer real people, thank you! And people that are actually interested in the blog as well. I hope they'll stop coming her soon! (Well, one can at least HOPE!)

Okay, now I'm done ranting, now I'll go back to preparing the latest wrecking photos. LOL

Happy Easter!

I'll spend my Easter with my family and I'll try to see if I can convince someone (my Sister-in-law most likely) to help me out with the journal throwing. I just wanted to wish you a Happy Easter first!

Wreckly update - 5 weeks

I've been on an unplanned, involuntarily and not fun at all break for a couple of days more. One of my cats got really ill and I had to put him to sleep yesterday. He was 15 years old and had been on medications for a year already so I guess this was kind of expected but it's still just as painful. :o( But well, this is not a personal diary kind of blog so I'll prefer to focus on the journal wrecking instead. It keeps me from thinking too much as well. (Or well, journal wrecking DOES of course make me think but not the sad kitty thoughts)





This is how the journal looks after 5 weeks. Today I decided to put a cat sticker on the cover in honor of my Bissen. Now he was a blue color point Ragdoll so he doesn't look at all like this cat but his style was still the same. There's also a sticker below that says "To err is human, to purr, feline".

As you can tell, the journal is looking less and less flat these days (and I still haven't had a chance to do the journal throwing or anything else very destructive)





A couple of days ago (Monday???) I did this list of 12 more ways to wreck the journal. It's me though so don't expect things to be REALLY destructive. LOL Still some of them might be quite hard (at least to me).

1. Cut borders along the edges of some pages

2. Wash a page with soap and water (since the washing machine ruined the page a bit too much. LOL)

3. Wash a decorated page with soap and water (Now things are getting more difficult)

4. Doodle on all pages (This one I like more LOL)

5. Decorate a page with words and objects that starts with the same letter

6. Paint a page with make up

7. Create a painting made of dots

8. Decorate the journal with ribbons (I have PLENTY of ribbons! LOL)

9. Paint/decorate in orange/brown and 70's (Just the thought of this one makes me cringe - A LOT. I HATE those colors and that style. Most of the people that love style today didn't have to grow up during the 70's. LOL Even writing in orange is really yucky)

10. Dedicate a page to friendship (I have the most wonderful friends)

11. Fill a page with Quick Kutz cutouts (like the ants, not the holes but the actual ants)

12. Distress a page with Distress Ink


I kind of wish there were 12 blank pages to actually DO all of these. LOL






This is today's wrecking. Can you spot a VERY faint hint of turquoise inside the circle. IRL, you can at least KIND OF see it in the right light.

I knew from the first time I saw this one that this one would be really hard. We don't exactly have that much of color staining candy in Sweden and if we do I wouldn't know what it was anyway. It's not the kind of candy I eat a lot of. LOL On the rare occasions I DO eat sweets I prefer chocolate.

Anyway, yesterday I discovered that my mom had found some really suspicious looking candy for the Easter eggs and I was right, those awful, scary looking turquoise eyes really DID stain my tongue a bit. It wasn't enough to actually stain the journal a lot though but at least I tried.

To continue the theme I decorated the page with awful turquoise eyes (they're not SUPPOSED to look pretty). I had planned to save the last candy eye to use in the photo but I accidental ate half of it. LOL They didn't taste as awful as they look (even though I really felt like brushing my teeth afterwards. LOL) so you have to settle for half an eye. LOL

Now I have to go edit my personal description. Not fun at all. :o(

Weekly update - 4 weeks +

I'm baaaaaack!!!





As you can tell the journal looks pretty much the same as it did last time I showed you the cover. Exactly the same actually, but at least it's a new photo. LOL And at least it looks different from what it did at the 3 week update.

I know it's gone 4½ week now but this IS how the journal looked last Thursday, and actually how it looks today as well.

I've had an absolutely wonderful time with my friend (lots and lots of chatting) but we just didn't have enough time for journal wrecking. We thought about it for several times (I know she even had plans for the friend-wrecking page involving a Stanley knife and a cutting board) but we'll time ran away from us. And since she'll move back to Australia now I will have to find some other friend to do the wrecking for me.

And nooo journal throwing either were done, both because of lack of time and the fact that I got a lumbago which messed up our plans.

Eeeek! I haven't done any wrecking for a loooooong time. I'd better do something about it! If not my journal might start to feel too safe. LOL