zine winner and ICAD preparedness training :)

many thanks to everyone who entered the drawing for the very awesome daisy yellow zine, issue #11, it was great to see some old friends there and meet new ones, as well! i've consulted the fine folks at random.org and the two numbers chosen are #12 and #15, which means the lucky winners are:

♥diana♥

and

♥phrogmom♥

congratulations to you both, please email me at llaurenb @ hotmail [dot] org and i'll get your names to tammy so she can send your pdf copies! (please note if you already purchased this issue, tammy will be sending you a refund, in lieu!) if you don't happen to be one of the lucky winners, you can still grab a copy at the daisy yellow etsy shop, and it's well worth the trip!!! 

♥♥♥

and now, onto ICAD 2014:

(vintage gardening notebook divider painted with white acrylic craft paint; machine stitched grid with various illustrations glued on; rub-ons by basic grey (mostly cut apart and re-arranged to fit grid); leather flower sticker by k and co; sparkly nature stickers by hallmark)

if you've followed daisy yellow or my blog over the last couple of years, then you'll probably realize it's almost time for the annual index card a day project (aka ICAD) a super-fun exercise which takes place in june and july, and is designed to help us establish (or re-establish, or just amp up) a daily art practice. i have absolutely LOVED participating the last two summers, so of course i'm pretty psyched! tammy's been posting some warm-up exercises to get us all in the mood, plus there's a great FAQ here, and of course there's a totally drool-worthy flickr group! there's even a choice of super-cool, totally colorful graphics by miss tammy that you can post on your blog if you're participating. this one's my fave:

i've been playing around with some of the warm ups, which, unlike ICAD proper, don't have to be done on an actual index card. the photo at the top of this post shows my "grid" from creative warm up #5. strangely enough, quite by accident, i did wind up working in a space that's pretty close to 3x5! i decided to use this divider from a cool vintage gardening book as my base, so i painted out the text at the bottom of the page, which just happened to be around that size! how cool is that?! something that's been taking up quite a lot of my daydreaming time lately are the improvements we're hoping to to make in our yard and garden this summer: we want to replace the old fence on one side of the property; we need to re-grade around our basement windows; we're planning to plant a few more trees out front, etc etc; so i suppose that is how this evolved into sort of a visual wishlist! here's a photo where you can see the whole page better:

i've also made a portable ICAD creation station, as described in warm-up exercise #4. it's actually my collage "treasures" box* full of lovely small-scale vintage and found items, PLUS my portable travel-journal tool kit, with some additional drawing and coloring instruments. i've added a nice supply of index cards: plain, ruled, and a few to which i've randomly pre-glued interesting backgrounds. somewhere i think i still have some uber-bright neon green ones... i have to find those before sunday, for sure! :)

as far as how i'm going to keep and store the finished cards, i'm 99% sure i'm going to punch the cards and add them to a (big honkin') book ring as i go along. that's what i did in 2012 and it worked well. last year i started out with a small plastic index card holder box, but outgrew it within a month and ended up punching them later. but i'm still deciding about 2014.

are ♥YOU♥ going to ICAD this summer? i know, i know, we all have too many commitments already, and if you have kids, the summer means they'll be home all day long. but it's only one card a day, and it's soooooooooooo much fun! plus, this is such a great way to try new techniques, explore different media, play around and just generally step outside your creative comfort zone in a really really GOOD way; there's NO pressure to end up with a beautiful finished product... this is just for ♥YOU♥!!! plus, did i mention there's a kid version this year??! c'monnnnnnnnnnnnnn... give it a try!!!

*ok, technically it's an empty fabriano box in which the awesome miss amy mailed me a little present last year; because she totally knows i'm the kind of gal who swoons over a beautiful box, and saves it to store treasures!!! thanks, amy! ♥♥♥