Floral Tributes... Mixed Media Monday

The completion of the latest calender in our 2010 round robin altered book swap just so happens to coincide with the theme for today's Mixed Media Monday challenge: Floral Tributes.
The theme of Shelley's calendar is Bloom.  And it certainly does just that - in fact it pours forth an endless display of colour and texture and artful collage. The page above was created using a Cavallini paper with postcards and birds.  It had flowers too - but they were not strong enough - so i cut some floral sprays out of a different paper and glued them on.  I dry brushed some gesso to blend the images.  A few red french postage stamps add some extra colour.  I added the letters M-A-Y - since i had the book for the month of May.  (yes i am late to mail - it will go out tomorrow!)

For my second spread i pulled 4 images of peonies from an Asian art journal.  I spliced them together to fill the tall pages of Shelley's calendar.  When i was joining them together - i left slits so that i could insert two vintage images - they have journaling on the back.  Some chinese text and butterflies complete this page.

For my third spread i wanted to use this vibrant wrapping paper with yellow, blue and pink roses. it doesn't quite show, but it was a 24" by 36" piece of paper - and it was torn up and all scrunched up to fit - with a ton of gel medium to adhere. Each page in the journal had a quote on the lower right hand corner.  So in this case i left it visible to read.  Then i added my own "poetry" - the little pink words dot the page.  I took a flower book and cut out phrases to create the poem, which neither rhymes nor is particularly pretty or profound - but it suits the page!

This spread was fun - i used a pretty square napkin as a base - overlapping a bit in the middle. I added two lovely ladies in floral outfits - courtesy of the Anthropologie catalog. I covered their legs with scraps from another floral napkin in similar colours.  Then added some floral sprays to their heads.  The words are cut from a garden book and relate to attracting birds to your garden.

This fifth spread was almost completely copied from a journal image i saw online.  I was struck by the simplicity and clever use of ephemera cut into unrelated shapes - like the flower pot and leaves. I added journaling about our trip to San Francisco over Memorial Day weekend.

This is a glimpse of the pages before they were collaged upon. The book was a nice size - about 12 inches tall.

Here is Shelley's beautiful cover.  She is a master of adding depth and texture - just using paper.  In fact she requested that we keep our pages flat - ie no chunky embellishments.

Here is one the "chapters" she created - one for each season. It was a joy to create in Shelley's beautiful Blooming calendar.  Now i absolutely must get it packed up and in the mail to Aileen.  I have her Frida Kahlo book to work on next - then my OWN calendar comes home to me - for our mid-year break.