Honeysuckle Breeze "Story Time" hour . . .

Hello kiddies, welcome to my Honeysuckle Breeze realm of imagination. I am cleaning up the studio from the chaos of Christmas cards. Getting ready to work on several new projects, but I also wanted to post here tonight. As I reported yesterday, tennis game got canceled.... boo hoo. Then I realized I had never shared with you the visual story in my tag book.

Her name is Clarissa and she was born in the early 1900s. A beautiful child born to privilege. Her parents decided it was time she took a trip back to London, a trip back to her roots where generations wait for her to be introduced to the land across the pond. She was an inquisitive child and relished the idea of traveling in a plane across the ocean to visit her old maid aunt Priscella.

The lock was waiting to be opened. The journey to wander through the bloodlines started. She was ready to begin her story in the city-square in the ". . .Villa -- Down in the City." OK kiddies, that is enough for tonight. Now to the details.

The tag book began as a rebellion to all of the Parisian Craze a few years ago. I had made my journey to both London and Paris and had many photos of both towns. I wanted to honor London in this story. The first job was to age and stain the tags which measure approximately 8 1/4" inches by 4" inches. The next step was to find a "stamp" that would hold the story together as the pages developed. That stamp turned out to be a Tim Holtz collection stamp from Stampers Anonymous which I called "Generations." I wanted this stamp to be utilized on each page. Something like a "finding Waldo"experience. I stamped Generations onto dress pattern tissue and mod podged it onto the pages as they were created. It was definitely utilized mostly as a background image.

I used a photo of a young child from a clip art CD I purchased off E-bay and love the image. On the left hand pages I utilized quotes and ephemera. On the third page I used two photos from London -- the flowers and row house. I used an old poem from a very old book called, "Up At A Villa -- Down in the City." You can see the "old" one (I call her) peeking out among the fragments of poem and the photo of my mother and aunt. The quote for this page was, "bliss and pure joy often are found in the simplest of everyday things."

I had fun using the Tim Holtz "distressable doo-dad" typewriter keys on each page. This one was called "bloodlines" and, after placing the letters on the page, I ended up using diamond glaze to make the "typewriter" keys look more realistic. Enjoy while I go back to straightening up and cooking dinner! Night, Night!