When I am ‘down and out,’ I tend to withdraw… like a cat. I hide in a small corner and want to be left alone. That is alright for a while of course, but now that I am doing better the time has come to reach out and connect with others again…

One of those people is my neighbor, Mirjam, who is very creative. After she participated in my workshop “Let it Loose” she is art journaling too and we decided to start a ‘circle journal’ together. We both made ourself a blank journal in which each of us creates one ‘half’ of a spread. Then we hand over the journal to the other, who works from there to finish the spread.

Here’s Mirjam’s journal… I forgot to take a ‘before’ picture, but Mirjam made the left page (the ‘blue/purple’ side.) Her journaling says “Would you want to disappear?”

The semi-transparent paper can be moved to cover the text…

… or the figure…

I created the right side as an answer to her side. I added the phrase ‘To Be Or Not To Be’ and made a collage on the right page. (The collage is held together with staples instead of glue, due to this Daily Paper Prompt  from Lauren Bergold who was a guest at Daily Yellow.)

More connections…. last Spring I received an email from a woman, Anne-Marie, who was a fellow-student in my class at the Teacher-art school in the eighties. It was 25 years ago that I saw or heard from her… she’d found me on the Internet and we emailed a couple of times. Anne-Marie lives in a city near mine, and she visited me last month. There was that immediate ‘click’ and we spend a wonderful afternoon talking. She is creative in a completely different field (“special coffins“) – but I inspired her to start art journaling too. She sends me pictures of her work, and because she has no weblog of her own, I want to show you some of her pages here.

Kooi (Cage)

Dreams

A few weeks after Anne-Marie had contacted me, I received an email from another woman I’d known at the art-teacher-study back in the days… she was organizing a reunion. It must be our age that makes us all look back on our youth (we’re all going towards 50… I am one of the first from the group to turn that age… ohmygoodness, now that I think of it – that is next week!)

Anyway, a lot of the old students were found through the Internet/facebook and most of them even live in the region – so we came together in Tilburg for a reunion two weeks ago. Anne-Marie lives there too and she picked me up from the train station. Together, we walked to the tea-room where 13 students from that old class gathered together for a ‘high tea.’ It had been 25 years, but I recognized them all immediately. It was so nice to see each other again! We talked, and talked, and laughed, and talked… it was so much fun!!!

In the week before the reunion, I had made little presents to give to my ‘fellow students.’ I got the idea from Dymphie’s blog. She describes how she made little notebooks from an old school notebook here

Dymphie uses washi tape to decorate hers, but I gave it a twist and covered each notebook with dictionary paper first. Then I dived into my stash with ‘left over mono types,’ cut them all in the right shape, machine stitched on each piece and glued it on the notebooks. I also cut out ‘inspiring words’ to title each book. Here’s how that looked like when I had them all done…

[All mono types - with the stitching but without the words - 
can be viewed HERE in my gallery]

I’m happy to say that the ladies (yep, only girls in my class/at the reunion)
were very pleased with the present!

Because I had met Anne-Marie earlier and knew she was all into art journaling, I’d made her an extra special gift… I hand bound a small art journal.

The background is made with Dylusion ink and stencils, the title is stamped with paint and outlined with machine stitches. I varnished the cover, leaving the long threads from the sewing in sight, and I love how it turned out! Oh, and “AVE” are Anne-Marie’s initials. It is how she signs her work. 🙂

That’s it for today folks… it is a beautiful, sunny, Fall-day and the trees in the park/wood nearby probably have that golden “Autumn shine” over it right now. I promised my beloved we’d go for a walk together so I better go get my walking shoes… hope your day is equally sunny!