zaubernuss - witchhazel

juggling

years ago my mum gave each of us - my siblings and me - a set of three beanbags each.

we were in that circus phase (especially my sisters and me) where we came up with little dance and acrobatics routines that involved skipping ropes and hoops and music which we then "performed" for our neighbours. (we were all good friends and relatives in the house of 5 apartments where i grew up.)

after years of use the beanbags ended up looking like this:

they turned really soft even though they used to be pretty firmly stuffed. the upper material got brittle and thin and is about to break.

i accidentally came across this tutorial when i was searching for crochet doll patterns - which she has too by the way. i saw it and instantly thought i have to try if these crochet baubles fit around my old broken bean bags. and they did!

i didn't have to change the size or number of stitches at all. i only skipped round 4 of the tutorial because i found i didn't quite like the look of it after i tried it on the green one. and i added another round of hdc (half double crochet) at the end of each hemisphere to make them meet so i could slip stitch them together.

i'm very pleased with them. they are much firmer again, much prettier to look at and also have a very nice texture. the kids love throwing and rolling them... i still have three more to do in pinks, blues and yellows i think...

 

yarn info: i use Schachenmayr smc Catania which is a cotton yarn and great for crafting and a 2.5mm crochet hook.

Astrid Lindgren - Märchen

i found this book at a yard sale recently. well, actually it was a park sale because it was located in a park. the book was a little tattered already and it cost something like 50 cents and it was perfect that i had it already. it doesn't say so on the cover but it's "Märchen" by Astrid Lindgren. i have a newer edition of this collection of tales - i got it for my birthday when i turned 8 or 9 i think.

i compared the contents and the newer one actually has two tales that were not in this one and this old one had one - "Mio, my Mio" - that is not in the newer one. i salvaged that...

so... i love the cover. i adore the tram - the old ones we have in vienna look very similar to it. it rides across a lake in this picture which is an illustration from "Im Land der Dämmerung" ("The Land of Dusk" i guess, i didn't find any translations) - one of my favourites of the short Astrid Lindgren tales. the tram can do that, you know, because "that's irrelevant in the land of dusk. that's irrelevant in the land that is not." i love all the creatures that take a ride, i love the fact that the boy steering the tram, Göran Petterson, doesn't see anything because the conductor's hat is too big for him, i love that the king is aboard too, wearing his crown... 

there is everything in The Land of Dusk, the sun shines all the time in some places, moose talk, candy grows on trees and little boys with paralyzed legs can fly...

(the picture also reminds me of the scene in Spirited Away where it has rained so heavily that the land turned into the sea and the train has to go through the water. i love that train ride...)

anyway, the book is gutted now (i didn't take any pictures of that) and has been turned into something new:

i inked the edges of course... and i filled the cover with four new signatures of junk.

haha!

i managed! i had been wanting to do that with a nice book cover for ages and somehow i got scared whenever i thought i wanted to do it but now i finally did.

it's my first "real" junk journal because all the papers i used to refill it are wastepaper of some sort. most of them are my "mop-up" papers from blotting off spray inks, cleaning off stamps, scribbling off markers, testing colour combinations and new ink pads, etc...

not all the papers have the same size and many of them have torn edges and creases.

i put in some business envelopes that came with bank stuff and bills and such. i like that i can put something in them and then see a peek of it when i flick through the journal...

there is a chocolate wrapper in there too.

and an old receipt my hubby saved for me when he found it in the back of a book... (i still have to cover up the back of that pamphlet i used to protect my work surface when painting once - it's an election folder and the painted front looks funky but i don't want those smug stuck-ups' faces on the back of it in my journal...)

the sun, moon and stars papers came from another work in progress when i enthusiastically started stencilling away and then realised i had some measurements wrong... well, nothing goes to waste!

i put in the negative-piece of a butterfly-die-cutting-session. i just love all the butterfly shaped holes in the paper. the text is columbian and actually about butterflies which i didn't know when i cut them. i love it when that happens.

wonderful what a rich texture can be achieved when one is not paying the least bit of attention to what happens to the paper! when i think it's getting too full or brittle i just put it aside and take a new sheet - which usually isn't new either. i have a huge stack of my hubby's proofs - a couple of hundred of pages with some texture already on them - yay! but then when i take a look at the paper later i'm all stunned. i love this sort of accidental art...

i have started decorating it more already. i'm using the leftovers from the papers i used for the pages to make tuck spots and pockets and i'm adding the illustrations and some text from the book too.

the inside cover has an illustration on it already...

i know some people would probably say something like: "why cut up a perfectly good book?" and "how can you do such a thing?" and the truth is that it wasn't easy at first and i had to get used to it. i was taught that books were something precious that need to be handled with care when i was little. and i still believe that and i teach my kids to take care of books too. i would never cut up a book that is brand new (unless it's really crappy and deserves it and has an awesome cover) or one that is of great value, be it antiquarian value or sentimental value.

but used books that are offered for 50 cents on a yard (park) sale or in a thrift shop don't have much to lose. either they are bought and read and loved again - that's the best case scenario - or they are not bought and thrown away because the previous owners want to get rid of them. most of them are old and broken and never were great in the first place... (there are exceptions though.)

but the other thing that can happen to those books is to fall into the hands of an artist who will repurpose them and give them a second life...

i have this thing...

...for surreal images and worlds. somehow it's something i crave in a way but don't seem to be able to achieve myself. i love fantastic literature - Michael Ende's "the never ending story" being my all time favourite (the book - the movies suck so much they should be erased forever from the movie-data-base.) my wonderful husband did his share to enhance my love for out-of-the-box stories by introducing me to Neil Gaiman's

followed by

apart from the fact that the visual art (by Dave McKean) is just beyond any kind of praise i'm capable of phrasing other than "ahh... oh... baff... WoW!" maybe throw in a dry sob of envy... the stories are just so perfectly clear and closed in themselves, leaving nothing open even though they are about impossibilities.

"coraline" too i find delightfully out of this world - both the book and the gobsmackingly brilliant stop motion movie - as well as "stardust", a graphic novel Neil Gaiman wrote with the illustrater Charles Vess in a kind of symbiosis between text and image, one inspiring the other and vice versa, not just one way.

but still Michael Ende and Neil Gaiman were/are both great wordsmiths and a beautifully executed story hardly ever fails to catch me - Jane Austen does that for me too and she did not in the least write fantastic as in fantasy.

so what is it about surreal images and pictures that i find so alluring...? and actually i don't mean surreal as in the surrealist movement of the 1920s.

a while ago i found some images by Alexander Jansson. (you can also find him on facebook.) i was searching for something on google images - i can't remember what - and there they were. i've heard people call them sinister and i kind of get what they mean but for me that's just one of the reasons why i like them so much... they deliver a great deal of atmosphere - and if it's part of the story why shouldn't it be sinister too...

(mr. jansson kindly allowed me to post this image on my blog. it's called "twin trees market".)

i don't know a lot about how these artworks are created and honestly i'm not all that interested... don't get me wrong - i would love to know how to create this kind of art myself but when i look at and enjoy it i don't need to know how it's done, if that makes sense. i spent a considerable amount of time studying "twin trees market", enlarging it as much as i could so i could find all the details and the secrets hidden in it... i love the thought that the artist while creating this scene knew exactly who these creatures were and what they were doing... and i think mr. jansson does know. i'm not entirely sure but i think this image is part of the "ramone bosco" graphic novel which has unfortunately been postponed. 

this one i found recently and these too. Modestas Malinauskas' skil and talent is obvious but it is so much more than that which makes his paitings so wonderful.

(the vehicles remind me very much of Hayao Miyazaki's "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind", "Castle in the Sky" and "Howl's Moving Castle" which i love for their fantastic and just so different stories and the wonderful animation. "Spirited Away" and "My Neighbour Totoro" are also favourites of mine, but they don't have this steampunky flying-contraptions thing.)

anyway - i looked at Modestas Malinauskas' paintings and almost started crying with a mixture of utter joy and entrancement and incredible sadness and frustration.

it's not that i'm jealous of other artists' work - apart from the occasional annoyance with my own work not turning out the way i want it to. i know that's only a matter of practice and training... no, what i envy is the fact that they seem to have access to the place within themselves where all this wonderful imagination comes from. when i see images of flying houses in clouds, villages growing on an elephant's back or on wheels finding their own way, impossible treehouses, people harvesting fruit twice their size, hovering lanterns with wings and their own umbrellas, weird creatures just being there without any "why" or "how" and so on and so forth - and when these images are so very well done on top of it - my brain goes like "why can't i think of that?"

i know there is a place within myself too where there are stories and places like that, but they are blurry and i can't seem to find a way to make them focus... this simultaneous sensation of joy and frustration makes me feel like a bottle of coke that's been very well closed and then given a good shake. i'm stuffed up and under a lot of pressure and crying seems to be the only way out since i can't find my own surreal space to escape to...

i'm trying though... a while ago i was working on a journal and i didn't find enough paper that fitted what i had in mind so i made my own. i took some pages from a crappy novel and stenciled over them:

i know these blue stars and the moon may not look like much to most people but to me they are a sort of symbol of breaking through a barrier built up by my own brain years ago. when i was thinking of a colour to use i instantly reached for that blue (faded jeans distress ink) and then i put it back saying to myself "you can't make blue stars - stars aren't blue" and then i grabbed it again thinking something along the lines of " yes, i can make blue stars - this is my f***ing journal and i can make blue stars if i want to!" who has ever captured the true colour of stars as they appear on a night sky on paper or canvas anyway...?

when i was little i used to craft all the time. i made matchboxes with flowers on springs that would pop out when you opened them. i painted countless items just for the sake of painting something, i made things to decorate my room (and everyone else's), seasonal crafting for autumn, christmas and easter, drawing sketches of my dream house which had wheels and a roof terrace, hammocks hanging everywhere, mezzanin levels and an elderflower cordial tab in every room... and then when i entered into my teen-years i stopped. all of a sudden i felt frustrated with my own skills, the outcome of my crafting and what stopped me most of all was the suddenly occuring thought:

"what do i do with it? - what is it good for?"

i hate that thought... it ruins everything and i have to fight it pretty much on a daily basis. "do i put a butterfly here? yeah, that looks pretty. but does it have any purpose there? no, not really - it's just sticking there looking pretty. well if it's not good for anything then let's not put it there... but it looks pretty... but why should it be there just to look pretty? can't it at least have a purpose like holding a tag or something...?" that's the sort of thing that runs through my head most of the time while i'm working on books or journals - which are what i work on most at the moment.

the thing is that hereabouts people don't really get the purpose of a junk journal or mini album or art journal i'm afraid. the first question i hear when i show someone my journals or explain what i do is: "and what do you do with it? what is it for?" and then i wonder why i have an issue with that...

the thing is i'm not a painter, i don't do digital art, i can't write weird novels (i try to sometimes though) and i'm not a director and maker of awesome movies...

i do a little mixed media art on canvas sometimes, i occasionally work in my art journal and i make extravagant and time consuming cards as gifts because i usually can't afford a "better/bigger" gift... but making books and journals is my true love and with that i feel like there is more of a purpose to it than there is to pretty decor pieces that sit somewhere and collect dust - nothing against that though.

i don't use the books i make - i haven't really found the right approach to do that yet. maybe i should though - then i probably wouldn't have to bore you reading this with my rambling...

but making them is my way of getting to that place where all the wonderful but blurry images of everything that i like and find visually appealing and stimulating form their own crazy world. a world where all those things fuse together so that flowers have wings and flying with the spirits of my loved ones, where strands of lanterns are strung between all the trees, where every insect and fish glows like a firefly, where people see things as they really are and ride on donkeys that are the colour of rust or forest moss or rose petals...

they are a place for me to collect all the things i like in one place and with a little luck and imagination they turn into stories and "things" that are my own...