Crafternoons and Crafterevenings

Last week at this time, my mother and I were knee-deep in art supplies, making the best use possible of our brief time together. 

We started her visit by trading arty gifts with one another.  She brought me three new rubber stamps for my ever-expanding collection, and I got her a waterbrush and an inexpensive set of pan watercolors to play around with while she was here. 

We set up our workshop in the dining room:

Mom is now a waterbrush convert!

She's been doing her own altered Rolodex project at home:  She glues a business card to one side of the Rolodex, and then creates a thematically-linked collage on the other side!  So, of course, we had to spend some time on Rolodex cards together, using our newly acquired stamp stash:

My mom is getting a little tired of me taking these photos of her, leaning over various projects, but I just can't resist!

You'll noticed we moved our base of operations to the breakfast area, because the dining room is so totally dim at night.

I know I'm not the only one who loves a good pic of yummy art supplies--a painty palette, beautiful stamps, bright watercolors.

Here is one side of the Rolodex cards I created:

And here is the other side:

Mom and I did a swap; she took the blue card above and I chose this one from her collection:

I also shared with her the strategy of using gel medium to adhere napkins to journal pages for a lovely translucent effect, and showed her the butterfly page from my Gift from the Sea journal.  That sent us to the party store to buy a huge stash of inexpensive napkins to play with in our journals:

Here, mom used a gorgeous yellow and white napkin as a background, then cut out flip-flop images from another napkin over the top of it.  She used pen to outline the shoes for a better effect.  I took one of my famous "Mom at the work table" photos, but didn't take a pic of her page!  I'll share some of my "napkin art journal pages" in a future post.

She was also interested in the paperbag journals I made for my girls using a link I found on April Cole's blog to a tutorial for making little notebooks out of paper lunch bags.  So, of course, we had to make some of our own:

My mom had the idea of using some of our paper napkins to decorate the covers of our little notebooks.

It would be such a fabulous thing if we lived nearer to one another and didn't have to watch our time together so carefully.  But as it was,we had four lovely days to amuse ourselves with the girls, enjoy excursions like Briggs Auction and Morris Arboretum, and PLAY-PLAY-PLAY with whatever creative idea caught our fancy. 

I'm already ready for her next visit!