Another Intense Week

This week has been pretty intense again.

I'm settling in the flower shop and practically living in this corner of a supermarket entrance for the most part of my waking time. :)

Thank goodness, they have a free WiFi there and our old ASUS notebook works well enough to keep me online for the boring time, when nobody needs my services.

As I have to work long hours from Sunday to Thursday, there is not much time for anything outside the shop.

But being busy always makes me super prolific. So, not only does our home look cleaner and I cook regularly, but I even reorganized my room and put up an extra table for jewelry stuff.

For now, I don' t actually find the energy to make anything. So, my plan is to use the hours that I will spend in the gift shop for making jewelry. Let's see, how it works. ;)

Because of the life intensity I didn't add anything to my diary for 10 days, but, yesterday, I resumed writing in it again. I feel a real need to do it.

Yesterday, I stumbled upon this article. Seems, like writing has many great benefits not only for me. :D

And playing with art supplies, most definitely, has them as well.

Last Saturday, I gathered leaves in the town and, since than, have experimented now and than using them and acrylic inks on the canvas I started last week adding some texture.

To see more inspiring creativity jump over to these sites

Paint Party Friday

Creative Every Day

And you know I'm always happy to hear from you, right?

Please, feel free to leave a comment here or contact me at ritajc(at)inbox(dot)lv

Another Experiment - Eco Printing

A couple of days ago, one of the participants of the A Piece A Week challenge, showed us an image of her hand bound journal with eco-prints as covers. I had never heard of eco-printing, but being an eco freak I couldn't help but do some research, if and how I could try this method as well. After I stumbled upon these detailed instructions by Cassandra Tondro, my hands were aching to try it out. As usually, I didn't have more of the suggested supplies and tools than I did. Besides: after the long winter, we still don't have green grass not to speak about colorful leaves or flowers. But today, I found tiny spring flowers during my morning walk with the dog and just had to give this process a try. So I did, what I could with what I had :)

First, I tore some water color paper in smaller pieces using the suggested method: folding it back and forth and dampening the folds.

Then, I soaked the paper in warm water for more than an hours (honestly, I forgot about it).

After that, I arranged the tiny flowers and leaves on one of the pieces of paper (sorry, forgot to shoot a pic), covered it with another piece of paper, put a folded newspaper beneath and on top of the "sandwich" and ... ironed it for a while.

When I could not stand the suspension any more, I stopped ironing and opened the sandwich. Ta-dah! Behold my first ever eco-prints!

An additional plus from the ironing: the prints are almost dry by the end of the process. A minus: need to clean the iron of the black newspaper ink now. Next time, I will put a piece of paper towel on top of the stack :)

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