An Artful Journey Retreat

The Presentation Center

 I was lucky enough to attend the 2014 An Artful Journey retreat at the Presentation Center in the mountains near Los Gatos, California.  This is the second time I have been able to attend and it was, again, a wonderful weekend.  Lots of familiar faces, great teachers, beautifully organized by Cindy Woods, this retreat is among  my most favorite art workshop experiences.

my little, light-filled cozy room in Lower Saint Anthony

 Once again I took a journal class from one of my favorite instructors, D.J. Pettitt.  D.J. is one of those incredible people who can take something quite complicated and time consuming and teach you how to accomplish it in short time, with wonderful results!  How does she do it?

D. J. Pettitt explaining how she paints nests for our projects

She had wonderful photos of birds for us to use for our covers, but I had to use my own photos (of course....never pick the easier way, oh, no!  Not me!!!).  Besides being a truly talented painter, D. J. is also an amazing photographer.  The photos of the raven and the hummingbird that she generously shared with us were beautiful.

front cover, Indian fish eagle

Back cover, African wader of some ilk

I managed to create this journal in three days.  I finished at 3:54 PM on the last day, just six minutes short of the end of the class.  Of course, I had returned after dinner the night before and did several more hours of work on day two to make it possible for me to meet that deadline.

There is quite a lot of sewing involved in the construction of a journal ala D. J.'s style.  You sew your pages to a fabric hinge and then build the signature with these fabric hinged double pages.  You can wrap your signatures in what D. J. calls a "signature wrap", which is just added fabric pages that you collage together and then wrap around one signature or all of them.  You could make signature wraps for each signature, if that was your choice.  I also made fabric collages for the inside of both my covers.

Some pages have added fabric detail, some just have stitching to add texture.

All my pages were gessoed and then were washed with thinned acrylic paint, textured, combed, distressed....all sorts of various techniques were used to make the pages more interesting.

The spine of the journal is made of fabric and the signatures are sewn onto it and secured with buttons.  These are Victorian brass buttons I found on eBay or etsy.

detail of the front inside signature "wrap" and the first page of the journal

detail of the inside front cover and the outside of the front signature "wrap," which is cut from a piece of vintage quilt

D. J. Pettitt photograph, filched from her blog

Here I am in a photo from D. J.'s post on her class at An Artful Journey.  You can read her entire post here.

hallway in lower Saint Anthony cabin

 I loved every minute I spent in class, but to be totally honest, it was the camaraderie with friends old and new that made my weekend at the Presentation Center so remarkable.  My "roomies" in lower Saint Anthony, Jenny Messerle and Glenda Hoagland are women I already knew and loved.  Being assigned to the same cabin with them was the extra special frosting on the cake.  Both are delightful souls---kind, generous, open, wise and beautiful.  Besides, they are both amazing artists and I find being around them and their art truly inspiring.

Tres amigas

It was a magical weekend, from start to finish.

Handmade Journal for My Africa Trip

I wanted to make my own journal for my trip to Southern Africa in the fall.  Frankly the idea was daunting but having taken Mary Ann Moss' online class, Travel to Venice, I felt that it might just be possible I could turn out a journal that would make me happy.

I found fabric for the cover that delights me!  It has guinea hens and geometric designs and is in the colors of Africa.  It is just what I wanted for the cover of my new travel journal.

I decided that this time the journal needed to be big.  On my last safari trip I had a terrible time deciding which photos to use for my daily pages.  There was so much to see and I had been lucky enough to take lots of good photos, but because of the small size of the journal I worked in, many photos had to be excluded.  Not this time!  I have (probably) way too  many pages.  Better too many than not enough, right?

I used five signatures of six pages each.  The paper is a mixed lot----some vintage, some pages composed of vintage ephemera,  some heavy book weight text and one sheet in each signature is 140 pound cold press watercolor paper, my favorite.  I used what I call signature "wraps" for lack of a better work on each of the signatures.  It's the stripy paper you can see in the above photo.

Here is the book completed with the spine sewn in the Double Diamond stitch that Mary Ann taught in her Travel to Venice online class.  It nearly drove me bonkers working with five signatures at the start, but by the second set of diamonds it all came together and was much easier.

some of the vintage ephemera I used through out the book

these are vintage postcards

I used the original end papers from the old book I cut apart to use for the construction of the journal.  I liked the old design so much and I knew they would fit perfectly as I used the covers (cut from the book text) for the substrate of my covers.  The title page has a copy of a vintage luggage tag for Victoria Falls, which I will be able to visit on my trip. 

This is a real bill from Zimbabwe.  I bought several of these from a local shop (Fabric of Life) that sells lots of free trade imports from all over Africa.  It seemed so improbable that there would be an actual one hundred trillion dollar bill that I just had to have a few.  I put one in each of the nieces and nephews Christmas cash envelope and they were a big hit.   I gave one to Nonie for her journal and saved the last one for my journal.  What you can't see from the photo is that I sewed it in upside down.  Alas....
If I'd wanted the journal to be perfect I'd have bought it, right?

This transparency here is one I printed using one of my photos from my last trip to Africa.  I believe this shot was taken in Tanzania.

I used another copy of a vintage luggage label for the last page of the journal.  My trip will end in Cape Town next October so it seemed appropriate.

Now I have to be patient and wait for autumn!  That will be the hard part.