2017 Documented Life Project: Finally December!

I was cleaning up my workshop this past weekend and realized I never photographed and shared here the final month of 2017 in my Documented Life Project. So, for posterity's sake, here we go!

Often due to the way the calendar falls, two month's land on one spread, as was the case here with the last few days of November and first few days of December. All the better to share a sweet picture since we kicked off the week with Olivia marching in the Thomasville Christmas Parade with her twirling group, Apex Twirling Academy. That Saturday was my birthday as well as a Hurricane Irma rescheduled FSU football game that we attended with a large group of my girls' marching band members. I don't always show the calendar side of these spreads since they can be a little boring, but sometimes I'll cut random magazine images that grab my attention to add some color to my calendar days, thus the lovely bowl of avocado and squash!

And speaking of magazines, that's where these fun boots came from, walking across the first art journaling spread of the month.

And yet again, another magazine clipping! I loved that jar and used it to bring a little sparkle to an otherwise not fun week due to a little oral surgery I had to endure. I cut things from a variety of magazines including Redbook, Good Housekeeping, Southern Living, Better Homes and Gardens, and Magnolia Journal. I'm also a home decorating magazine junkie, but those are sacred to me and have yet to see scissors. Though I have been thinking about doing something with all those fun doors of the month in HGTV Magazine. :-)

This page on the left and below is probably one of my favorite from the whole year. I started out collaging some random scraps of paper and then wasn't quite sure what to do next (I really struggle with choosing focal images....). I dug through my bin of stamps and found a plant-looking one. It was just the grassy looking things, which I stamped in black and then hated it. So after letting it dry, I painted it with a random selection of paint I had sitting out and added the sunshiny flowers and, voila, I loved it! The deer on the right is from an old Papaya Arts planner I took apart when it was out of date. This week represented our last week in Tallahassee before we headed home to Jacksonville for the Christmas break.

This spread came together nicely for me in regards to color. The art journaling side started out looking quite differently! It was an old ad, which you can see peeking through with a little "merchantile" and coral coloring at the top. Can't even remember what I started out doing, but clearly it went a different direction as I ended up with much softer colors through a little bit of paint, some napkins and a bird cage. We went down to South Florida to visit my dad the first part of this week and did a fun day at Lion County Safari. Can't believe that place is still there and better than it ever was! We had a hysterically funny several minutes thanks to an ostrich who really wanted the stuffed animal that was sitting on the dashboard of the car. He apparently was convinced he could get to it through the windshield and entertained us trying to do so. I have it on video somewhere!

Our Lion Country Safari goat friend, who the girls name Bert, above. I posted these two pictures to my Instagram feed and Lion Country Safari actually commented and said "Martin won't mind his new nickname! Thanks for visiting!"

Christmas Day brought us our usual Christmas morning walk out to Big Talbot Island's Black Rock Trail to Boneyard Beach. We had to go extra early due to the timing of the tides, and we caught a beautiful sunrise. Magical way to start the day.

And this last page closes out 2017. Both my 2016 and 2017 projects divided out into three books each, so I covered the covers of each volume in pretty papers and have all six of them sitting on a shelf in my workshop. Now, I'm working on 2018, and am only, oh, about seven months behind... Thanks for stopping in today! See more of my 2017 DLP project here; see 2016 here; see 2015 here; and see 2014 (my favorite!) here.

2017 Documented Life Project: November

Back to the Documented Life Project today! Finally getting near the end of 2017! I'll admit I haven't done much art journaling the past couple months (been busy at the jewelry bench!) so it's nice to go back and reflect on these. The first week of November took me to our state Volleyball tournament. I fussy cut this big flower out of a Better Homes and Gardens magazine. I really love using magazine images as a focal, and sometimes even a full page from a magazine as the base of a journal page.

Second week of November here. I loved the stars for Veterans' Day, and they started out just by me plopping a wet stencil (from a July page!) into my second journal. I pulled it out and added just a few touches to it and called it done. One little Easter egg here...there is one thing has has appeared on every one of my pages this year. Can you figure out what it is?

Thanksgiving week brought us a nice week at home. The Sunday prior to Thanksgiving included our Chi Omega slating of new officers, and I received two sweet cards from my two direct advisees. I incorporated them into my book in this spread and the previous one. :-) Love those sweet young ladies.

The poppies above close out the month. I cut them off the cover of a Garnet Hill catalog! So did you figure out the one element that appears on each page? Thanks for stopping in today. See more of my 2017 Documented Life Project here. See 2016 here; 2015 here; and 2014 here.

2017 Documented Life Project: October

Hello! Thanks for stopping in today! Getting close to wrapping up sharing my 2017 Documented Life Project. Let's take a look at October. I started off the month with meetings in Daytona, our Fall board meeting and the October Council of Presidents (COP) meeting. Our statewide Student Government president this year is an incredibly sharp fella from Santa Fe College named Jacobi Bedenfield. He's definitely been one of the most impressive SGA presidents I've seen in my 25 years in this field. He had the opportunity to address the COP this week and did a fabulous job. This month I continued sharing pages I created in Pam Carriker's workshop.

The second week of October brought more work travel, this time down to Orlando for our annual Florida College System Press Association conference. This is a gathering of students who work on their colleges' newpaper or literary magazine. And this journal page is my favorite from Pam's workshop. Those boots started out as a stencil for the base and then I just added to it with it more paint and some black and white pen work. I love them!

The third week brought a rest day! Yay for a Monday day off! With no travel this week, I was able to relax a little more. Lunch with friends, an afternoon at the shelter, and our annual Chi Omega New Member/Alumnae dinner. And another page from my Pam Carriker journal. This egg stencil was really cool. It came in different parts to layer on top of each other.

The last week of October brought more travel, but this was not work related! I was selected to participate in Chi Omega's Nancy Walton Laurie Leadership Institute in Memphis! I really enjoyed the workshop, meeting new sisters, young and not so young, and had an opportunity to visit our national headquarters. I'm really grateful for the opportunities Chi Omega has given me. I feel like I'm getting even more out of my sisterhood as an alumnae than I even did as a collegiate! For the journal page side this week, I love the way Pam taught us how to work color wheels into our pages.

For the month's closing art journal page, this was another page from my Pam Carriker journal. This page actually started out with me just using up extra paint on my pallet. Then I saw this face stencil of Donna's and added her to the mix.  Thanks again for stopping in today!  To see more of my 2017 Documented Life Project journal, click here. For 2016, click here; for 2015, click here; and for 2014, click here. Thanks to the ladies at Art to the 5th for originally creating the project!

2017 Documented Life Project: September

Hello, there! Thanks for stopping in today! Continuing in sharing my 2017 Documented Life Project, September started out with a beautiful Labor Day weekend--this photo above is from our dock looking upriver...

...and then Hurricane Irma hit...while last year Hurricane Matthew left us a tree in our roof, this year Irma gave us nearly a foot of water on our ground floor, about six or seven docks in our backyard, our dock in shambles and damage once again to our roof. While we got the flood mess cleaned up within a week or so, the rest has taken a bit longer. The roofers actually just finished the roof this past week! And we've not even begun to work on the dock. We're hoping to be able to just repair what we have instead of completely rebuilding. We're lucky that we have any dock left! Most of our neighbors' docks were completely destroyed.

I love the ways the greens played off each other in this spread. On the right, that's just one magazine page that I tore apart and popped in there. Making things as easy as possible!  You can click on the photo to see it larger in Flickr.

I started incorporating some of the pages I created in Pam Carriker's workshop this month. This "window" started out as transparency. Pam was using them to teach image transfers, but I actually liked using the transparency itself!

Clearly I struggle with faces. :-)

And these last two were actually one spread that I pulled out and used as two here. We were creating in a Strathmore mixed media journal, but I ended up pulling each page out and using them here in this journal, finding ways to incorporate both the front and back of each page. You'll see more in October's pages!  The faces here were printed on tissue paper, so they just basically dissolve into the page. Very cool technique. Now if I can just get my printer to print on tissue paper correctly...

Thanks for stopping in again today! To see more of my 2017 Documented Life Project journal, click here. For 2016, click here; for 2015, click here; and for 2014, click here. Thanks to the ladies at Art to the 5th for originally creating the project!

2017 Documented Life Project: August

I started out August in my Documented Life with a trip up to Donna Downey Studios in North Carolina for a workshop with Pam Carriker! I've admired Pam's work for a while and have her book Art at the Speed of Life. I really liked her way of finding small pockets of time to work art-making into a very hectic schedule! I'll be sharing some of my spreads created in her workshop a little bit later!

Week two of August included the redheads third week of band camp and their first official high school performance, before high school even officially started! I also had a quick trip over to High Springs and Camp Kalaqua for our state Student Government Executive Board retreat.

Close up of the first week's art side spread above. I used molding paste through a stencil here. I learned this technique from Albie Smith in one of my Artful Journey workshops. I had forgotten how fun this was and what great texture it creates.

The third week of August brought us the official start of high school! Early days! School starts at 7:30am, so we are out of the house about 6:45am. I was able to see the ladies off that morning, but then I had to head down to Ocala for a meeting, so I missed the first day home stories in person. Made the best of it by having dinner that night with my sweet friend Vanessa.

Close up of the second week's art side spread above. I really had fun with this page.

The fourth week of August brought us the solar eclipse -- so cool! The schools closed early that day so everyone could get home and watch safely. It also brought us the girls first high school football game and marching band performance! Three hours away on a work/school night so we didn't see that one in person, but they had a blast.

Close up of the third week's art side spread above. This page quickly came together from things I had on my work table. I started with a magazine page, topped in places with some tissue paper that came in my Brave Girl box that had just arrived. I added some deli paper I had been using as under paper, grabbed a stencil and paint that were sitting nearby and then some washi tape and a bit more of the tissue paper, cutting out the words. Really loved this page, thanks much in part to that tissue paper!

This last week of August/beginning of September thankfully brought us our first home football game and marching band performance. As luck would have it, we had a lot of rain, so it was a late start, but successful none-the-less! That Friday was a half day, so we took the opportunity for a long weekend at home in Jax for Labor Day weekend.

Close up of last art side spread for the month above. This page also came together from scraps on my desk. That square photo is an Instagram print from one of my Boca Grande photographs. The little splotches of paint up around it are actually paint splotches from my paint pallete that I pulled up off the pallete. That was a very fun discovery I learned in Pam Carriker's workshop earlier in the month. With the right, slick, pallete paper, you can peel the leftover paint off and use it!

Thanks for stopping in again today! To see more of my 2017 Documented Life Project journal, click here. For 2016, click here; for 2015, click here; and for 2014, click here. Thanks to the ladies at Art to the 5th for originally creating the project!

2017 Documented Life Project: July

July in my Documented Life Project includes Denver, this incredibly handsome dog that we fostered for Jacksonville's Animal Care and Protective Services. I first told you about him here.  He enjoyed watching the fireworks along the river with us from our backyard (unlike our Isabelle, who is definitely not a fan of fireworks). We enjoyed a nice day on the dock for the 4th.

The end of the second week of July, the redheads and I went up to the Washington, D.C., area to spend a long weekend with my sister and her family.

My sisters' girls enjoyed having the "big girl" cousins around for a few days. We spent one day visiting a couple Smithsonian museums along the Mall, another visiting the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum at Dulles Airport (truly a must see....so much cooler than the Air & Space Museum on the Mall), and the last day just hanging out at the pool.

The last part of July brought the start of band camp (the redheads first) and their birthdays.

Thanks for stopping in and for following along with the Documented Life Project! To see more of 2017, click here. For 2016, click here; for 2015, click here; and for 2014, click here. Thanks to the ladies at Art to the 5th for creating the project!