The ZEN adventure

I'm gonna get right to some pics tonight...LOL

A woman that works with my husband hosts a Ladies' luncheon every year. She has a lovely yard with small Koi pond, and beautiful plantings, so she has the party out in the garden. Each year she does up a different, very involved theme. She also usually has a few crafts for everyone to do. This takes her weeks of planning and working, but this year she decided to have a ZEN theme, and make the party ZEN for herself as well... She hired ME to teach the crafts instead!

We had several conversations, and decided on an altered coffee filter book in a Zen / Asian theme. I gathered up lots of images to work with and anything that looked Eastern in spirit. I played with all the goodies: nifty papers, rubber stamps, fibers, beads and so forth. I came up with what I considered to be a pretty nice little art piece, and I helped oversee the attendees in working on their projects.

I pulled the Chinese Zodiac charts for everyone to figure out their own birth year. It was a nice way to personalize, if they wanted to. I am the Dog! So here was my cover:

I used the filters on the side, so they resembled a fan. When they opened you saw the two pages at one glance.

This would be the first inner page.

And page 2:

Where the coffee filters open up, we did tags / bookmarks. Here are the ones for the front pocket.



Page 3 and 4

Even though these background papers were not specifically Asian in theme, they worked together.

I thought that overall they gave an Eastern flavor in just the colors and textures.

Another tag. This one was a fresh egg roll bag from my favorite Chinese restaurant downtown. I bought 25 bags for $2.00. We just cut them apart and glued them on a tag. I thought the picture was lovely and the translucent quality of the bag itself lent a really neat look to the tag. It's really too bad that we *HAD* to go eat Chinese to get the bags for a project. I mean, suffering for my ART.... (What ELSE can I use for art that I would HAVE to go eat Chinese again for??? LOL)

Next two page layout

I did some embossing with stamps and played around with 3 dimensional items on some pages as well.

Harder to capture in this photo, but the Geisha was on pop dots away from the golden wings.

I had searched for some Chinese proverbs, and also downloaded an Asian look font. Printed off the proverbs in said font, and voila! "Deep Thoughts" of Zen like thinking for every page, LOL.
The last two tags.

Here is the back cover.

Here are the other sides of the tags



I thought the project as a whole turned out really neat. Once I got into it, there was no stopping me.
Then I found myself so inspired by the Geisha pics I had found, and that Geisha with the golden wings that I just KNEW that I had to make the hostess a Geisha Fairy jar.

Of COURSE I made MEEEE one, too! LOL
Here is the Geisha Fairy:

VERY colorful

Gaudy pretty

I just LOVED her though. I was so happy I made one to keep in my own growing fairy jar collection!


So there you have it.... The ZEN adventure!
I thank Megan for inviting me to come teach at her lovely Garden Party. I appreciate the opportunity.

Tomorrow I spend the day with my little Colten. He is off preschool on Wednesdays. It is my birthday, so he said "I will be looking after you all day on your birthday, Momma!" It is looking like we're meeting a friend for a nice breakfast out at the Greek place for feta/gyro omelettes and then to the park to play! Maybe a little window shopping. Sounds like an awesome day with my little man. I am sure he will be telling EVERYONE exactly how old I am!

He is pretty devastated that there will be no actual party for me though! He said "Momma, tomorrow we can go get your CAKE!" I told him that we might do a little celebration Saturday night out at the cabin, and have Grandma and Grandpa come. But he thought it was sad that I would have no cake on my birthday. That's just the sweetest thing. I had to hug him for that one!