Spring flowers and good news(warning long post!)

Mom had her surgery Thursday and everything went pretty well. Some great things happened, like she was moved to be the first case by her surgeon, so while we had to be there at 5:30am we weren't there all day. The outpatient surgery had numerous cases that day. If they hadn't moved her time up, I feel it would have been an extremely long day and Mom doesn't do well when she hasn't had anything to eat as she is a diabetic. This is actually why her case was first. She opted for spinal anesthesia which has fewer risks overall than general, but the disadvantage was it took a little while for the feeling to come back in her bottom half, limiting her ability to move that is already impaired from the stroke. They kind of rushed her out of there because they were so busy. If my brother and his wife had not been there to help, I don't know how Mom and I would have managed to get her in the car or out of the car and into her house.

I stayed with her until about lunchtime on Friday, when she sent me home. As the feeling came back, it became easier for her to move and it seems that the surgery is making difference already in her knee pain. Of course it is sore from the surgery, but she said even yesterday that the sharp pain from before was gone.

I finally got the spring flower book done for Priscilla and dropped it in the mail on Wednesday evening. I stayed up late to get it done and packaged up, so was up at midnight Wednesday night scanning the pages before I had to get up a 4am to go get Mom to the hospital. So anyway, please excuse that the scans are a little crooked!




This is the front cover, with the pic above showing one side of the attached tags and the one below the flipside of them. The background is collaged strips of paper that were gessoed over with some paint glazes also. The flower was one from a package of chipboard elements that were too glossy for the look I wanted so I glued watercolored book page paper over the front and then sanded to distress the edges using sticker letters for SPRING. I like to save unique clothing tags to reuse and the big oval tag is one of those. I gessoed it to cover the advertising, then stamped, used some paint glazes, and added images. The book is tied together with strips of torn vintage pillowcase fabric.


Note: you can click on each picture to make it bigger so you can see it better.



Above is the first spread of pages. All pages started out as gessoed cardboard saved from the packages of printer paper at work. For this background I used some green, yellow, blue glazes and then stamped leaves with a multicolored stamp ink. The central images and words are from a vintage children's schoolbook. Small snippets of paper gleaned from my messy craft table surface surround these images. See, there is an advantage to not being a neat freak! Uh-hmm! The left hand page has some vintage green trim for an accent, both pages some ric-rac and then on the right another of those chipboard flowers that I distressed. Also used some clear flower stickers. Handcolored the black and white illustrations with watercolors pencils.


For the next set of pages above, I started out with horizontal strips of torn paper as for the cover, also gessoed with some light gesso stamping. On the right page is a transparency glued over some scrapbook papers and on the left a poem from the same children's book. The middle strips of paper were floral wallpaper so I used some of the flowers in that and added more paper flowers and punched green hearts for leaves. Drew the greenery with markers. The floral swag between the punched birds is one of those glittery temporary tatoos.


This spread started out as more of the floral wallpaper as a background. The girl under the umbrella was from a piece of scrapbook paper. The flowers and grass at her feet inspired me to blend her into the background with more handpainted grass, flowers, and color splashes of acrylic paint. The roses in the teacup and the one in her hand are more of the clear stickers. The words are again from the kids textbook.




Here the background is scraps of book text and other paper scraps glued down, gessoed, and then acrylic glazes washed over them. The bird and nest are clear stickers, the flowers are rub-ons, and the tree was drawn by hand and color with markers. More text from the vintage children's book for the poem. The awning across the top is more watercolored book paper.



The last spread above is collaged bits of 2 different watercolor painted book pages. I did up a good many of these by tearing out pages from vintage books and then playing with my watercolor paints in different combinations and deigns. For one of these I had done several colors in polka dots and the other was a rainbow that went across the page. Of course, I gessoed to blend, one of my favorite things to do. The lady was an image from a collage sheet from Aileen at Outside the Margins. Her antennae are cut from some glittery paper. The roses, butterfly, and her butterfly wings are more of those clear stickers. The flower circles were punched out from scrapbook paper and surrounded with Stickles glitter. Again the wording from the children's book. To finish off the background, I used markers to added different circles of color.



The back page of the book was done pretty much like the front, just a different, smaller chipboard flower.