heart the art double-header!

it's been a couple of weeks since i posted my heart the art pages, hasn't it? the reason being, i had hoped to take a *WONDERFUL* photo of the nieces and nephew on easter sunday to use on my week 14 page, AMAZED. sadly, i only took about a dozen pics that day... (too busy playing with the little varmints in question!) ...and wound up with only one photo of all 4 kids together! this was taken at the "little" supper table, had distracting elements on the table and in the background, and while it was pretty good of the girls, featured quite an unflattering image of my brother knelt down in the very center at the back!

what to do...what to do...

first i converted the whole thing to black & white and bumped up the contrast, which helped make the plates & cups & tabletop recede and brought the sweet faces into prominence. but it was still a really BAD picture, and my thoughts of being able to just layer some text over the offending bits were dashed. so i printed it on photo paper and set about covering everything except the kids in gesso. they looked a bit "disembodied"...but on the plus side it gave me lots of lovely room to do my journaling! when that was done, it looked pretty good, but was entirely black and white...which is much too tame for these whippersnappers!!! i wanted to make a funky ribbon frame like this (!), but i hadn't left enough room to go all the way around the edges. when i pulled out my ribbon box, i found a snack-sized baggie with tiiiiiiiiny scraps that i keep telling myself to throw away and it hit me: layered ribbon-scrap photo corners! (obviously, lol!!!) et voila:

(sei patterned paper; misc. ribbon scraps; may arts butterfly; heidi swapp & michaels $ spot rubber stamps; stewart superior india ink pad; liquitex gesso; kodak premium photo paper; uniball pen; gluedots, tombow mono adhesive runner, staples)

this week (#15) our word is SEARCHING.

(ranger cardstock; sei paper; snoopy cut from a magazine; dymo labels; ek success rub-ons; michaels sparkly foam star stickers)

the thing we are searching for, at the moment, is an answer to what is making lovely husband jeff dizzy. ordinarily, i would say it's his overwhelming love for me... :) ...but this has gone a bit past that now, and we think it's the leftover consequence of a bigtime ear/sinus infection he had at the beginning of the year that sort of kept coming back now and again. apparently, the inflamation has not gone all the way away, and he has got increasingly dizzy and even a bit nauseous. medication alleviates it somewhat, but it makes him very sleepy, which is not particularly helping him with his main goal, which is to be able to go to work and then DO THINGS whilst he's there. so we're still plodding along with doctors and so forth. hopefully an answer will present itself pretty soon. (i will keep you posted!)

this concludes my super-sized bonus round of heart the art pages, but why not check out the flickr group for more loads of art journaling fabulousness!!! ♥♥♥