Artist Trading Cards

It was ATC night at the Bizzy B scrapbook store tonight. My friend Marilyn and I went along to find out what it is all about and were kindly welcomed into the group. They meet on the second Friday of each month to swap cards. About a week beforehand, you email in to advise if you will be attending and planning to swap. You can choose to make every card the same, or make a variety. The rule is, if you don't bring ATC's to swap, you don't get any from the other group members present but you can still attend whether or not you bring cards. If you make cards, you have to make an extra one to donate to the store. It's a social evening and a chance to share information and art.

ATC's are small cards measuring 2.5 by 3.5 inches in size. Each month, there is a different theme. Tonight's was "house and home" and nine women exchanged cards, although there were at least 16 of us in attendance. Everyone's art was completely different from the next person's and it was fascinating to see what everyone had made. Some people used stamps, some fabric, different types of paper stock, paints - you name it, it is possible to incorporate just about anything into an ATC. One woman's cards featured origami that could be changed from a house to a couch to a piano - amazing!

My favourites were the ones made by a woman named Sue who took a picture of her own home and then made 9 different cards using that photo together with themes such as "fly away home" - which was a goose carrying the house on its wings, "mobile home" - a turtle carrying the house on its back, "home sweet home" - a cupcake with the house in the design - you get the idea. Very clever and beautifully done.

I was too shy to ask to take pictures of the cards made by the group members tonight but I did take some shots of some of the cards they had on display in the store before we got started. Some appear to have the theme of "time" but I also loved the one about the manual typewriter! (My apologies to the artists for not giving their names, I didn't realize until later that people sign their cards on the back.)

Marilyn and I were definitely inspired to try our hand at this art form next month. Stay tuned!

The Musical Ink Book

My friend Jon, the photographer with the book project entitled Musical Ink (http://musical-ink.com/musical_ink.html), which features musicians and their tattoos, had some stickers made up with the MI logo on them. He suggested that people put the stickers in various places and send in photos of what they've done, to be posted in a gallery on the Facebook page for the book.

I thought of places where I might put the stickers he gave me - on the wall in a bathroom stall? on the bumper of a car? on a telephone pole? - but all my ideas seemed rather ordinary and not too imaginative. Then I decided I would make an altered composition book for Jon and that got my muse going!

Here are some photos of the finished book:

I decorated the front and back covers with black and white designs, to mirror the B&W focus of Musical Ink.

For the front inside cover, I used a photo of Jon from his personal website (http://www.jonblacker.com/Home.html) and superimposed text from the MI website describing the book project over top of that image. I was quite pleased with how that experiment turned out!The inside back cover was decorated with scrapbook paper I found at Michaels, which I trimmed to feature just the guitar with angel wings, to which I then added the centre part of the Musical Ink logo, cut out from one of the stickers.

I also found some really cool rock and roll stamps at Michaels and used them to mark various pages. As well as the stamps you see here, there were also musical notes, pictures of guitars and drums, sayings like "Rock Star" and "Rock 'n Roll" - all added in black ink, natch.

I then wrapped the finished book in silver paper with stars on it and added a cut up sticker as decoration on the wrapping paper.

All in all, I was quite excited about the finished result (I always think you've made something good if there's a little part of you that wants to keep the piece you're intending to give away,and I did think twice about giving this one away) and I think Jon was too. At least, he said he did!

If I Was a Kid...

When I was a young 'un of a certain age, I always wanted a bike with a banana seat and those plastic fringe things that hung from the handlebars, something like this:

If I were (a bit younger) kid today, I'd want one of these bikes that we saw at Canadian Tire on the weekend:

because (a) Tigger is the coolest, and (b) check out that cool tail that one of your folks could hold on to if you needed a bit of stabilization. Awesome!

What Happened to Spring?

Here in Ontario, for the past few days, we've been wondering what has happened to spring. April was one of the warmest on record and May seems to be trying out for the role of coolest - what's up with that? On Sunday, some of us woke up to a dusting of snow. Farther north, up around North Bay and Timmins, I heard they got several inches worth - that's just not right!! This isn't Alberta, after all.

Here's the photographic proof - my sister and I paid a mid-morning visit to a garden centre on the way to take my mom to brunch for Mother's Day and here's what we saw - a little bit of snow and an icy birdbath:


We were heartened by a visit inside the greenhouse, where everything was toasty warm and blooming, blooming, blooming and then more so when we got to my mom's house and found the lilac trees showing their beautiful best.


Hopefully it won't be too long before we can bring these flowers out of the greenhouse and into our flowerpots!

Pretty

I'm off to a meeting tonight so won't have time to blog. On this day of sunny skies but temperatures and wind cool enough to put frost warnings into effect, I'm thinking of spring. I forgot to download the photos I took yesterday containing glimpses of that season to cheer us up so instead I'll share this pretty photo of tulips that I got off someone's blog a few months ago.

My apologies to the photographer, I'm using their photo without permission which is not good and I'd like to give proper credit to them but I don't remember whose photo it is. I love it though, so I hope they will forgive me and that you will enjoy looking at it as much as I do.

Happy Mother's Day

Happy Mother's Day to my mom and all the other moms out there who are doing the amazing and truly admirable job of being a parent.

Flamboro Spring 2010

I went to the Flamboro outdoor antique market this morning. You might remember my posting about last spring's visit, the day of the torrential rain and hail. http://http//cynfulcreationscanada.blogspot.com/2009/05/outdoor-market-season.html

Sadly, this year's weather was not much better, only instead of hail, we had a special weather bulletin in place warning about the strong winds expected to develop over the day!

The forecast was not encouraging when I woke up this morning, but as I was showering and having my breakfast, the weather was definitely improving so I headed off to the show. There were plenty of grey clouds and it had rained quite a bit overnight but there was actually blue sky in sight and the sun was shining when I arrived, although the temperature was quite chilly. But you could tell rain was coming. As a result, and perhaps for economic reasons as well, there were only 4 outdoor vendors set up this morning. Four! Usually there are dozens.

I went into one tent and the woman whose booth it was had her arm above her head holding on to the frame of her tent covering, trying to keep it stable in the very strong wind. I can't imagine how she was going to stand like that for the rest of the day, let alone serve customers!

There were two buildings full of vendors as well but even they were much reduced in number over last year and other shows I have been to. I had looked at everything within an hour and a half and by the time the torrential rain started, I was ready to leave.

I didn't leave empty-handed, although it was close. I had only spent $4 as I was about finished seeing all there was to see (on three old magazine supplements from the British Sunday Times for $2 - one each from 1963, 1965 and 1972 - and 4 milk bottle caps for $2) and thought that would be it, until I saw this old portable typewriter - the Brother Activator 889.

It was in pristine condition, complete with instruction book, sturdy plastic bits to hold the cartridge in place while not in use and a hard plastic carrying case. I had been looking for an old typewriter, as I'd like to use the typeface for artwork, so this one is ideal. It might need a new ribbon, which I'm sure I can pick up on eBay somewhere. (it has one of those old ribbons, with red ink on the bottom and black on the top - very cool!)

All in all, a disappointing start to the outdoor antiquing season but hopefully I'll have better luck with my shopping excursions as the weather gets warmer and slightly more reliable. Plus I've got three weekends of flea market shopping in France to look forward to at the end of August!

By the way, if you're interested in old typewriters, you might want to check out these sites I just found on the Internet (who knew?), both called the Typewriter Museum: http://www.mrmartinweb.com/type.htm. and http://www.typewritermuseum.org/.