So, it’s been a long time, but Sarah is still hosting the ‘deskers’ and I have a little vacation (this week and the next) to fill with whatever I want – a lot of creating going on – and I thought it would be fun to join in this wednesday to see if all my former desk-collaborators are still there. HI THERE, MY FELLOW ARTISTS & DESKERS, I plan on visiting you this week and am curious to see what you’re all up to.

For now, here’s how my workdesk looks today

WOYWW #882

It’s a rather big project I’m working on: making 80 “prompt/inspiration cards”. I got a list of “prompts” from a woman in an art journal group on Facebook. I printed those prompts and selected eighty of them. Next, I spend an afternoon making gelliplate-prints and glued those on old playing cards.

Next, I dived into my stash of scrapbook papers to glue on the back.

I’m still cutting out and gluing the prompt-sentences, and it will cost me another afternoon or so to finish the task. I might decorate the cards even more, depending on the time I have left ’cause there are more things I want to work on this week as there is: my CHRONICLES!

For all the ones who knew me from former years: yes, I am still journaling and keeping my ‘Chronicles’ going.
For the ones who don’t know me yet… I am an art journaler, I bind my own journals to fill them with all kinds of things (‘mixed media’)
I work in different journals but there’s one ‘theme journal’, The Chronicles, that I keep going since 2010 and that can be seen as a red thread… These are handmade visual year-journals in which I create a weekly spread. It’s sort of a visual diary and on its pages I comment and reflect on my days or just try to capture the week in words and pictures,

My friend Lena took photo’s of me with all my Chronicles journals the other day, ain’t this a fun picture?

Here’s the latest week spreads.

Chronicles Week 13
Gelli print background, collage (the three little pictures = details of my art, older work) and yes, I’m a bicycle race fan…

Chronicles Week 14
Painted background, washi tape, gelliprint cut out ‘eggs’ (it was the week of Easter) and I painted the heads of me and my friend on cut-out figures.

Chronicles Week 15
The big portrait is cut out of a magazine: famous bicycle racer Wout van Aert

And that’s it for me this week. Hope you enjoyed seeing me and my art again… enjoy your week!

Photo: @LenaSchreijenberg

Photo: @LenaSchreijenberg

*inspired by Ingrid Jonker: “moenie slaap nie”
Photo: @LenaSchreijenberg

I had a busy month but I managed to keep up with my Chronicles art journal. Here are the past weeks

Week 9

Week 10

Week 11

Week 12

I wish you all a happy Easter.
Paint an egg or two, eat an egg or two and
keep on rockin’ in the free world!

Photo: @LenaSchreijenberg

…last week, I took some of my old scrapbook albums with me when I visited my parent, so they could flip through all the layouts. I have a lot of albums and before I put them in a bag I flipped through them myself… OH MY, that was fun! I got inspired right away to dabble into that way of creating again…

There are still some challenge blogs to be find online so I went to find Challenge YOUrself – one of my faves hosted by Sharon Fritchman. I loved the challenge that was up there right now but I also learned that the blog will be closing in june… so I took the opportunity to play along right away and create a layout for this month’s challenge.

Challenge YOUrself #147 – Celebrating friendship

The theme for this month’s challenge is “Celebrating Friendship!” Feel free to interpret the theme however you like, as long as it clearly conveys the message of friendship. Additionally, please remember to include a photo of YOU on your project.

I had this silly photo – edited with a photo filter – of me and my co-worker who became a good friend over the years, and I just HAD to use that…

I had so much fun creating this layout’; I’d forgotten how relaxing and cheerful this playing without pretension is so I might create more of these.
Thanks for stopping by my blog,
enjoy your day,
do something nice,
visit a friend,
act silly,
laugh.

“Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.”

~ Timothy Leary ~

I’m pretty up-to-date with the week spreads in my Chronicles art journal.
Here’s the latest weeks

Chronicles 2026 – Week 4

Chronicles 2026 – Week 5

Chronicles 2026 – Week 6

Chronicles 2026 – Week 7

Chronicles 2026 – Week 8

Thanks for stopping by to look at my art journal pages.
Je t’embrasse

Photo: @LenaSchreijenberg

When I finished, I send Pamela the photos with a guiding letter in which I explained my work and methods. To show you the process and results I guess I best translate that letter for you:

“

Hi Pamela,
After we met and agreed to do “something” creative together, you came up with the first prompt: “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue”. It didn’t take me long to agree on this theme for our first project because I immediately saw the potential of ‘old’. In my atelier, I keep a small box containing tiny scraps of old archive documents. At work, during restoration, I sometimes come across tiny pieces of paper whose origins are no longer clear. I do re-attach larger, torn pieces to the original in the right place, but these small pieces, sometimes with just a single letter visible, are untraceable and end up in the trash. Except when I find them, ’cause I take these orphaned pieces home with me and put them in a box.

Because the scraps are so small, I immediately thought about working on very small collages, and I had to make four of them. A ‘quadritch’. A few years ago, I made a few of those small collages and I always found it enjoyable and satisfying to create on such a small surface. Those collages often ended up in series of three and I felt like doing something similar for our first project. I had a nice, thick piece of watercolor paper lying around. I tore a strip from it, which I then divided into four pieces. Each piece is approximately 7,5 x 12 cm and these pieces served as the basic background. You can clearly see the torn edges…

I focused on “old, new, borrowed, and blue” in each collage. While working on each collage I deliberately didn’t think about the next one or the fact that I wanted them to be a series, because if I did, I might start thinking about a “procession” and immediately limit myself in material or color choices. I numbered the pieces of watercolor paper on the back so I would work in the correct order (that is: “correct tear edges in order”) and created them one by one. I thought that afterwards, when I’d finished them all, I would automatically find the coherence in the series.

Something OLD

I choose two tiny pieces of old archival material to start with (I’d guess the paper/parchment is from the 17th or 18th century) and then I delved into my boxes of scraps of paper; they had to be OLD scraps of paper. I found a lot of them. I finally created a composition with the following:

• A piece of parchment with some faint, old Dutch text still visible.
• A scrap of paper with some ink/parts of letters still visible.
• A larger piece of yellowish paper that is almost falling apart from its age and softness.
• A tiny piece of blue wallpaper from the hallway of my childhood home.
• A piece of torn cheesecloth, given to me by an artist friend I met when I had just moved back to Middelburg (2014).
• A red strip of paper cut from an old cigarette pack, from a box of empty cigarette packs my father collected as a teenager in the 1950s and which he gave me to use.

Something NEW

In December, I ordered a few square punches and two stamp punches. I used these for the first time to punch out the pieces of paper for this collage so it couldn’t be “newer”…

The clean squares have an architecturally “modern” feel, so I chose to punch plain coloured pieces of paper. I punched the pieces from a page of a Snoecks book/magazine. I have volumes of Snoecks issues and I chose to flip through the one from 2001 because that was the year that my beloved and I bought a house and moved in together.

A white line ran across a mainly black colored page and I punched out sections where the black area would move slightly while the white line continued.

Something BORROWED

I had to puzzle over the “borrowed” thing for a bit… who could I borrow something from, and what? I quickly came up with “tools,” which I could then also give back… but my beloved and I are two in our household, and everything is shared, so “borrowing” within the walls of our house doesn’t seem like “borrowing”… until I dove into his desk drawers! Look… I found an old toy car!

“Honey, can I borrow that?”

“Um, for what? OK, yes, but I do want it back.”

Exactly, that was the point!

I smeared some brown paint on my palette, drove the car through it, and then across my paper. Look… tire tracks!

Something BLUE

The ‘blue’ was quickly found. I love drawing ‘stones’ on that thick watercolor paper, I even have a special journal bound with thick watercolor paper to fill with paintings of ‘cairns’ (There is a lot to find and read about ‘cairns’, structures of stacked stones, on the internet. In principle: Cairn is a modern Scottish term, a corruption of carne, which was already used in the sixteenth century to indicate a prehistoric construction. Carne itself comes from the Gaelic carn = “heap of stones”).

The pile of three blue stones (or, if you prefer, eggs – because that’s what it looks like too) turned out well and to my liking, but the painting was still missing something… so I splashed and splattered some more with the paint which caused that ‘streamer of splatters’… oops!

This is the series as it lay on my desk, and I knew it wasn’t finished yet… although you can see from the tear lines that the four pieces fit together, the whole thing feels disjointed.

I left it as it was and only revisit it with a fresh eye a week later. I’d already figured I’d have to tie it all together by using the same color and/or technique throughout the collages, but how? It couldn’t be anything with color (too flashy and distracting). So, black. Stamps? No. Thin lines with a pen? No. I grabbed my trusty old sewing machine: black stitching would add extra shape and texture. I set the stitch to zigzag and sewed a line here and there.

For each piece, I looked for the right spot in the composition to add stitching, and—hooray!—I was also able to conceal that “splattered” string by stitching over it. I used the same size zigzag stitch on each collage. My intention was to pull all the end threads through to the back and weave them in, but when I placed the four pieces side by side with the threads still hanging out, I thought it looked fantastic so that I decided to let them hang.

Here’s the finished series.

“

I know Pamela was pleased with the outcome, and I know she herself created something completely different (which wasn’t surprising ’cause when two people create with a same theme, the outcome usually is quite different.) but she has to show that for herself if she wants to. You can find Pamela’s art on instagram.