New year, new me?

 Well I doubt it - faaar too long in the tooth for that (so much so I have come to the age when toffee = danger). But I am going to try my best to blog twice a week if I can. Last year was pretty woeful - especially December.
And to get involved with a few more challenges. I want to do more faith related art - I have bought a Bible with big margins to express yourself in but am frankly too terrified of spoiling it to start that yet! But I am planning to be part of some reflective journalling type stuff. Maybe.

To dip my toe in, I have joined in one of the lovely Nat's challenges which I have long admired and never participated in.
This month there is a colour prompt

and here is where I went with it

The blues are a lot nearer green in real life but it is still more blue that green. I used it far more as an inspiration piece than colour!
I began with a top folding card and added some patterned papers. The bottom layer was a bit short so a Crate Paper border was added. That paper is the same one that the two "blue" circles was cut from and it has ended up nearer the correct shade that the rest is in real life (stop apologising, woman)

The next layer is a random piece of cream cardstock that I used to wipe off a load of glitter paste I had used with a mask. it left it nice and sparkly. Same with the cream circle in the pile.

I used some just out of the envelope Lawn Fawn circles, along with some Spellbinders ones that nest quite nicely. This combined with the wipe the dust off its so old ribbon centre and cream ribbon that got sandwiched in .

I then used two dies - "thank" usually has an "s" on the end and is from Clearly Besotted. "You" is PTI. The top layer was cut from some rather lovely cream glitter card from Card Creations.

VERY late last night I decided that more pearls were needed as per the inspiration photo and so I got out some Bisque Liquid Pearls which makes quite a good cream (a colour hard to find in glitters, pens etc). Not all the blobs are quite as accurate as they might be....

What I did do in December, and I have really almost finished it (but not quite) is an Advent journal. I used a study by Bernice Hopper and Diane Marra called Pause, Ponder and Prepare which they did in November but I stored until December.
I used one of those cute 4x4 instagram albums

which I have added to, but not much (will photograph it soon).
I added some die cut pieces to all my 4x4 cards just to start me going. In hindsight I should have used all bright papers as I then wrote on these making them hard to read!. But I love playing about with see through pages as you can see with these Day 1 photos

I wrote out the bible verse in script writing with a special pen (aka baby writing by Phil), my reflections in my normal writing and then a verse relating to the Christmas story in gold pen, trialling how I might write in my Bible

I have added the stickers to the see through page as well as some Cameo cut numbers in gold foil. Not all the pages have stickers yet. Many of them don't have splatters but all are written up.

And now I am EX-hausted - except I need to blog on the Quirky Kits site - I have one done there already

See you Friday (maybe!)