Ispirato

Here’s another recent card. I wanted to share an easy technique I like to do which I call “strip-piecing”. It involves making a quick patchwork paper background that can be cut into different shapes and sizes and used in your cards … or in your scrapbook pages, for that matter.

 I start with an A4 sheet of lightweight cardstock for a substrate. If you are in the US you use standard letter size cardstock or heavy paper.

 I then go through my stash of 12″ x 12″ scrapbooking papers and choose seven or eight of them that look good together. I cut each paper down one side so they are the same length as the longest dimension of the cardstock … that is, the cardstock A4 or letter-size page is laid down in a landscape position and the scrapbook papers are cut the same width. I think that is 296mm for A4 or 11 inches for letter, right?

Then I use a guillotine, or you could use a craft knife, mat and ruler, to cut the scrapbooking papers into strips of different sizes no bigger than an inch wide. I don’t measure. I just make sure the strips are uniform top to bottom. The width of the strips is varied to add interest.

Using a glue stick, I start at one end of the cardstock and glue the strips butted up against one another all along the page. Put each strip upside down on a scrap piece of paper so you can apply glue to the very edges. Alternatively, apply glue to about 1/3 of the background cardstock, making sure you have good coverage at all edges, then quickly piece strips to that area. Then work your way along till finished.

Finally you should have a beautifully decorated piece of cardstock. Don’t get too attached to it the way it is. You need to chop this up into smaller pieces. As you can see in my square card above, I just cut a rectangle and used it as a background to a sentiment stamped on coordinating scrapbook paper. Once you make one page of strip-pieced paper, you probably will want to repeat the exercise with another set of papers in a different colorway.

I find strip-piecing is a good thing to do when I enter the studio and am not sure where to start. It gets me active without too much cerebral effort and I enter the “creative zone” quite easily.

If you like to decorate your own papers rather than using printed scrapbook papers, this is a lovely technique for showing them off.

 My creative time in the last three weeks has been focused on making greeting cards. I bought lots of stamps last year: Pipe Dreamink, Stampin’ Up! and more, but hardly used them as it was such a hectic year. I was also recently gifted lots of wonderful stamps by a special friend moving interstate who wanted to downsize her collection. The result has been a big stamping revival in my studio. When I owned my own stamp company, Studio Astarte, I restricted myself to using my own stamp designs so cards and creations could be used as samples. After a break from stamping, it has been fun to come back to it again - and the new stamps have been great inspiration. Studio Astarte designs tended to be ‘old world’ and ‘arty’. Now I’m not abandoning that style, as you can see from the collaged dragonfly card below, but it felt good to make some greeting cards that were in a different style, like the one at left. I made a lot of happy cards.

I try not to deliberate too long over the design of a card. A quick card is a good card. When I find some papers and stamps that work together well in one card, I then usually make a couple of more along the same theme, but with a different layout to keep it interesting for me.

One of my areas of interest is the study of ancient goddesses and the cultures that worshipped them. I belong to a goddess study group that meets monthly. We discuss different topics at our meetings and we aren’t strictly into goddesses, but archetypes and myths in general. For example, we recently each chose a fairy tale (mine was Little Red Riding Hood) and told the story to the group then discussed how aspects of the tale metaphorically echoed aspects of our own lives. (Try that exercise for yourself!)

Last week, instead of meeting in somebody’s home, we met at Gaia’s Garden. This is a privately owned garden behind a home in East Kew, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia. We are experiencing a drought so the garden was dry but well-kept and beautifully decorated with lots of goddess statues in various sizes and styles. There is a labyrinth planned, and different areas to use for gatherings and events, including ceremonies and classes.

A friend of mine from the study group, Maureen, runs excellent classes about goddesses and mythology at The Augustine Centre and other Melbourne venues. She also is trained to conduct Caroline Myss archetypal readings and personal charts. I am happy to recommend her to anyone else interested in these things. Her business is called Wisdom of Sophia and her website is worth a look, too. Each page has an image and bit of interesting information about a different goddess.

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