Art Journaling.....evolution of an idea.

This week's challenge from The Documented Life Project was to incorporate a flap on to your tipped in page. It seemed my mind was a blank (rather unusual), and I couldn't think of what I wanted to make my page about. Then I looked around my office and saw some tags I made a long time ago. They depict certain wishes I had for my home and life...some of them silly, some way out, and some very longed for. They came from a set of tags I made for another project. The project is interesting and you might like to try it someday. It was inspired by the book Twenty Wishes by Debbie McComber, and you can find out more about it in this post. Here is the whole set, minus one that somebody decided to swipe out of my studio when it was up at the shop:

I started thinking about how many of these things have come true since I made the tags, but sometimes not at all in the way I thought and wished and hoped they would. I thought I knew how things were supposed to go, but I guess God had other things in mind, and the way was not an easy one. It's hard to change your thinking when you've been trying hard to do what you think God wants you to do. That reminded me of this verse:

I made this page late at night and was too lazy to wash out brushes, so I made the flowers and bug with a Q-Tip and acrylics, and used markers and an ink pen for the rest.

Then I glued the tags to some really cool green stitched "paper" that is more like interfacing. I got it at Papyrus, which is a very hard place to leave empty handed if you are a paper lover! Since I wasn't sure the glue would stick well to the interfacing-ish paper, I zig-zagged around them with the sewing machine. Then I zig-zagged it to the journal page. I'm trying to embrace that the stitching is not perfect...I've made a lot of headway in loosening up, but sometimes I struggle. Hey, it's in my planner, not on the wall...relax.

Here are the fronts of those cards. I didn't change them a bit. Finished, warm, happy, and relaxed were words I wanted to describe our home all those years ago.  Now I have that, but not in the way I thought it would happen. As they always say, God can see the big picture, but we can only see a small part. I'm learning that sometimes I have to go with the flow, making decisions that I feel are right, and trust God with the outcome.

Pulling out the tags....

Pulled alll the way out. That's a long page!

Here is the other side of the tags, with a picture of my new home glued in place.