A Little DeeTour: July Calendar Journal Page

Hi Folks!

Sorry I was missing in action last month. My husband was home for a while after working away a lot lately and we had work commitments so I didn't get any time to craft.

Well rather late with this months calendar journal page, due to lack of time energy and Mojo!! I finally managed to get all three at the same time yesterday so went ahead and did my page.

No plan as usual, I just started messing around and sorting stuff out!! putting off is another word for it! hoping inspiration would hit! lol. So I gave myself a pep talk 'just do something and see where it leads'!! well this is where it lead!

I sprayed turquoise, lime and yellow dyslusions onto one of my calendar journal 12 x 12 sheets and sprayed it with lots of water. Not being organised, as I didnt know what I was going to do, I grabbed the first sheet of 12 x 12 I found and blotted some of the ink off the original sheet.

Original sheet with ink and water sprayed on. Not sure where the swirls appeared from. The sheet was blank when I picket it up!!! must have had some type of imprint from a page I did a couple of months ago!! I love the unexpected!

Second sheet I blotted with - it turns out a grabbed a sheet which I had gessoed so the ink reacts differently on it! Loved it once it was dried!

Then I blotted more off the first sheet with a scrap blot off book I use so I don't waste any ink!

Well in my usual contrary fashion I liked the second sheet over the first so decided to use it this month. The other one has been dried and put aside and will no doubt will put in an appearance in a later month!!

Next I found some squares of printed paper which I had cut out previously and there was just enough for the 31 spaces. So I edged them with some distress in and stamped randomly on them with a marble background stamp using mustard and aqua archival ink. Then did a bit more stamping with a crackle background stamp using gold ink. I played around with placing but this worked the best.

When I was messing around before I started I came across a kids toy set I had bought ages ago planning on using it for a project. It hadn't worked for what I wanted so it had just sat under the desk totally ignored. I went through it and threw most of the contents out but it had 2 stencils in - one with an alphabet and one with a whale, octopus and jelly fish on. The lovely stylised octopus caught my eye and I thought I would try and do something with it.

So I blended through it using 2 different colours of distress ink and then stamped over with a water droplet stamp.

The background looked rather bland behind him so I stencilled through a wood grain stencil to create a watery look. I could have put more on the background but I wanted to keep as much of it showing as possible as I really liked it.

Octopus still didn't look right so I drew round him and added some shading.

Letter tiles were added for the title and I found a saying which I liked, printed it off and stuck it on.

Some more distress ink blended round the edge of the page finished it off nicely.

So my rather watery July page!