After all the fluorescent brights we saw in the summer color trends, it’s so nice to be back to a jewel-toned palette.

A few of my favorite fashiony-type places have said the big colors this year are mustard, oxblood (deep red), and plum.  Whew.

Today, make something with your fall colors.

You don’t have to follow the runway trends, of course.  You can do something with your own favorite autumn colors, too.  Try to restrict it to two or three, to give yourself some limits.  Or paint your colors and try to remember something with that color and write about the memories each one evokes.

Just play with color today, and see where it takes you.

Maybe we played the Bobbing For Apples game differently.

We didn’t go for time, or the most apples, or any competitive thing when I was a kid.  We gave the apples wishes, so that if you got one, you’d get your wish.  Everybody won.

Today, make a page of bobbing for wishes.

Talk about bobbing for apples if you’d like.  But make a wish, too.  There aren’t enough wishes in the world.

For my page, I made an envelope (shaped like a bowl) from waxed paper, and stuck it down at the edges.  There’s a slit in it so the apple drawing could fit, and on the back:

A wish.

I can’t sew to save my life.

I’ve injured people sewing.  Not just myself (and there was an incident involving seven stitches and my index finger), but also random passers-by.  (My husband took a broken needle to the cheekbone just for standing too close once.  I’m not kidding about injuring people.)

This, however, doesn’t stop me from loving handmade quilts.

There’s just something about patchwork.  It’s homey and handspun, and each of the little squares tells some kind of story.  I drool over art quilts, and the traditional ones just blow my mind.  I’d love to make one of my own, if it wasn’t a sure recipe for disaster — both for the quilt and my person.

So I did what any reasonable person would do, when this prompt came up on my Autumn list:

I made one out of paper.

Most quilts are largely geometric.  (Or, at least, the traditional ones are.  Art quilts..well, all bets are off.  They’re awesomely creative.)  So they’re easy to translate into paper — just cut squares, triangles, rectangles, or strips…and “piece” them back together with gel medium or a glue-stick.  Easy-peasy, and it looks like you spent way more time on them than you did.  Plus, it can use up all those little bits of paper that you’ve been saving from other projects.  Bonus score!

A few pointers:

* This one, above, is a log cabin-esque thing.  All it is is strips, radiating out from the center.  They can get fairly big fairly quick, so cut a few strips and start playing with placement before you start gluing, or it can take over in a hurry.

*  After you’re done, a final coat of gel medium or other fixative will keep them from pulling up.  Because of the teeny little pieces, turning the pages in your book can cause them to de-adhere.  Or at least they did on my page, until I painted over it with medium.

* Using a thin-nibbed pen to make “stitching” lines makes it look more quilty.  Mine was kind of blah until I added those.

* Add at least one zinger color.  (The peachy-pink plaid in mine, for instance.)  It makes everything kind of “pop”.

Your prompt:

Whether you paper-pieced your own quilt on your pages or drew one in, or collaged in a picture — write about your winter linens.  Or winter linens you want.  Or a favorite quilt you had or saw or wish you could have.

You could even go a step deeper and write about what each of the “patches” are in your life, if  you wanted to.  What pieces make up the quilt of your life?

Now, if I could just figure out how to sew without personal injury….

I have to admit something here.

One of the few things I’m “meh” about, in regards to Autumn, is the fact that the longer days are slowly sliding toward longer nights and less sun.  I don’t mind the grey days, or the rain, or the sometimes-frosty night hours.  But since I’m really affected by the light of day, I get lethargic, like a bear who really wants a nice cave for several months.

On the plus side, it means cozier times.

I’ll admit that, too.  I do love a blanket and the quiet of night with a good book and sleeping dogs.  I just wish there was a little less of it.

Today, write about the longer night-times.

Do you notice them?  How can you tell we’re moving into the shorter-days period of the year?  What do you do when it’s dark and chilly outside?

For my entry today, I had some supplies to play with.

In the whole spirit of using what you have, I grabbed the pot of black gesso.

Usually, I only use this for lettering and such, because when it says “black” on the label, it’s not kidding.  It’s black.  Like, opaque black.  Sucks all the light out of a room if you’re not careful, black.  But I’m out of the white and can’t get to the store for a week or so, so it seemed like as good a time as any to play with it as an actual base.

Also on-hand:

* I tried out some stencils I got from blitsy with some Dyelusions spray inks when they first arrived.  I’d sprayed stars and such on several random pages (you’ll see more later on, in fact), and finally hit one of the testing pages today.  The stars fit with the whole night-time theme, so I left them and just painted around them roughly with the gesso.

*  I also tried out some iridescent medium that I picked up on a whim once.  I love the look of jaquard’s “Lumiere” paints, but mine dried up long ago, and I thought this might give me a similar look.  And I’m pleased to report that it definitely does.  Instead of mixing it with the pigment, I just put a thin layer over the gesso, and while you can’t see it well in the picture, when you hold the page at an angle, it completely shimmers and looks like a million semi-metallic stars.  I’ll be using it again, for sure.

Everything else was either sharpie or washi tape (to bring some of the color over on top of part of the page that ripped when blotting the iridescent medium — because there are no mistakes in journaling), and a white-out pen for the thicker lines and dots.

So play with the long nights today.

(Or wait until it’s dark out, to stay in theme.)

A whole lot of my day lately has been putting food in jars.

I just learned how to do the whole canning thing, and it’s rare that my evenings (and mornings, and afternoons, to be honest) aren’t spent listening to the sound of boiling water in the canner or waiting for the jar lids to ‘ping’, indicating that they’re sealed.  I’m fascinated with the idea of being able to take all this stuff I grew this summer and keep it, so that in the dead of winter, I’ve still got vegetables straight from the garden waiting for my table.

(Including a whole lot of stuff being made with the two hundred pounds of green tomatoes that were picked last-minute before our first hard freeze a few days ago.  Yes, I said two hundred pounds. I don’t do things half-way, apparently.)

 Today’s prompt is inspired by that activity:  What do you want to “put up” for the winter?

Take it literally:  what are you preserving?  Are you also one of the crazy canner ladies with tomato goo in your hair and a shelf full of pretty produce in jars?  Draw it, or write about it, or take an inventory or take a picture.

Or take it metaphorically (like I did here):  What ideas or lessons or qualities do you want to keep, from this summer or this autumn, so that you can pull them out in the middle of winter and find them with fresh eyes?

For today’s prompt, I did a little jar-shaped pocket.

I painted in the background with acrylic and washed over it with ink, then drew the Mason jar on thin watercolor paper, and cut it out.  I glued down just the edges on three sides, and then made little slips of paper, each with a different autumn memory, idea, or lesson on its own slip.  When the jar dried, I tucked the slips “into” the jar/pocket, added some words, and went a little nuts with the watercolor crayons and oil pastels.

I plan on adding a few more slips (there are about eight right now), and I think it’ll be fun to flip through this book in the dead of winter and be reminded about all the things from autumn-time that I wanted to remember.  (Things like a description of the smell of the spent garden, an idea I had for a festival booth at the fall carnival, and the date of the last day I could comfortably go barefoot without my toes falling off.  That kind of thing.)

So think about it:  what are YOU putting up for the long winter ahead?

(sidenote, too, bee-tee-dubs:  I’ve got a very big Work Thing on Thursday.  So I may not get tomorrow and Thursday’s prompts edited in time to get them posted.  I’m going to try, but depending on how well the work-stuff is flowing, I may be pre-empted by Meeting.  I’ll try to still post the prompt, but it may not have pretty pictures for a bit.  Just wanted to let y’all know. :>)

From tiny acorns, mighty oaks grow.

If you’re lucky enough to live near oak trees this time of year, you’re probably blessed with a plethora of acorns right about now.  Tiny seeds in little hats litter yards, sidewalks, and streets.

It’s amazing to think that from that little tiny thing, giant trees are born.  (Plus, they’re just interesting to look at, aren’t they?)

Today, your entry is two-fold:

Draw some acorns.  Either from a life reference or a photo (if you have no oaks nearby).  Focus on the details and what makes each of these tiny seeds interesting.  It’s such a simple shape that even people who think they can’t draw…can draw them.

Then, think about the big things that you can plant.

What seeds can you plant this fall that can grow huge and strong if you let them?

Since I had one of those short pages to contend with, I used it to make a minibook to hold all the “seeds” I’d like to plant someday.  (Not shown filled, here, but every inch of that paper is covered with writing now.)

Technique:

I cut a piece of regular ol’ packing paper (not the tissue, but the slightly thicker newsprint that things sometimes arrived packed in) to a width just slightly smaller than the short page. I sprayed it with two kinds of spray ink (dyelusions and the ranger spray ink, for the record), and then folded it in half to smoosh the two colors together.

Once it was dry, I folded it in half, and then in fourths the long way, and used gel medium to coat the back-side of the short page.  I stuck down the wrong side of the paper, tucked the “spine” edge of the inked paper in the crease, and then gel-mediumed the opposite back-side to the next page.  (Which sounds unnecessarily complicated — it’s really pretty simple when you try it.)  I liked that it didn’t go down smooth — the bumps and bubbles and creases looked a lot like the skin of a leaf to me.  Also, since the spray inks are water-soluble, the gel medium picked up some of the fugitive color and gave a glaze-like look to the rest of the page, which held it all together, color-wise.

Finally, I had one acorn drawing left, so I used a piece of raffia, stapled to the top of the page, to make a kind of bookmark for the minibook, like so:

If you’re not into the whole grungy thing (personally, I like it when things look cobbled together in an art journal, rather than “finished” or polished, but that’s just my preference.), you could sandwich the raffia between two layers of paper (your drawing and a backing), and avoid the staples altogether.

It’s kind of fun, and adds movement and interactive bits to your page.

So think about it today:  What would you like to grow in your life?

What acorns can you plant right now that will, in time, grow into mighty oaks?

Autumn’s the perfect time for planting.

It’s another Friday!

By now, you know the drill:

Pick something off your list and go do it.

Bonus points if you journal it when you’re done.

I’m heading to the orchard this weekend for sure  (been thwarted the last two weeks by Life), so there’s much appley goodness on tap here.

Enjoy your weekend!

Sometimes, even when you start with one idea in mind, another thing altogether happens.

That’s what happened with today’s prompt.  I’d intended to talk about hot chocolate and pumpkin spice lattes, because you always know when it’s heading into deep fall because the Starbucks cups change over to the red holiday cups.

Yeah, um.

About that.

Confession time.

I don’t like hot chocolate.  And pumpkin spice lattes kind of make me gag.  I know people love them, and I *try* to like them, but I’m more of a chai/caramel macchiato/spiced cider gal, myself.  If I’m freezing, I get the cider so I can steal its warmth while it cools.  Everything else I drink iced, because hot stuff burns me in about a tenth of a second flat.

So I couldn’t really see doing a whole page about hot chocolate, and when I drew the cup, I kinda started doodling on it and realized it looked a whole lot like my graandma’s good china.  Which took me to thinking about how, on the weekend breaks from school, I’d go stay there sometimes, and we’d have coffee with the good china if it was too cold or rainy to go outside and play.

So the thing just up and morphed on me.

Which is the awesome thing about an art journal, really.  Whatever you make of a prompt, or a page, or an idea…it’s okay.  Things unfold as they should.  Instead of making some kind of homage to the red Starbucks cups, I had an hour of remembering pink floofy dresses and delicate china cups.

Which, let’s face it, is better.

Your prompt today is the same.

With the cooling-off temperatures, a cup of warm comfort’s on the menu.  What warms you up?

Feel free to go off on a tangent.

That’s what tangents are for.

Can you believe I’ve never jumped in a pile of leaves?

It’s true.

Sadly, I had really horrible allergies as a kid, and even being around a pile of leaves was a sure recipe for ending up in the ER, unable to breathe and puffed up like the marshmallow man.

So I’d watch all those great fall commercials on TV, with the father stylishly raking the leaves, and the kids and the yellow lab jumping in the piles, and wish that I wasn’t so broken so I could play in the leafpiles, too.

Instead, I’d examine individual leaves.

I did the scientist thing:  I’d pick up one maple leaf (the most common tree in our neighborhood), and painstakingly look at all the details.  All the dark green veins and the subtle, mottled color variations, and the way the edge was serrated and smooth, all at once.  I’d put the prettiest ones in one of the volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica that my parents got from somewhere, and even though they never kept the exact fall colors, would take them back out and admire them again in the middle of winter before they disintegrated (as leaves are wont to do).

The changing of the leaves is an integral part of Fall.

Without the profusion of color and the sudden palette changes, it just wouldn’t feel like autumn at all.

Today, do an old-fashioned leaf rubbing or two.

Grab a crayon and some paper, and take impressions of some of the leaves in your neighborhood or yard.  Color them in, if you want, or leave them as-is.  Write about your experiences with leaves, or what the colors remind you of, or the last time you jumped into a pile of them.

And if you find a pile, jump in it an extra time for me.

The things that bloom in Autumn are less showy than those that explode in the summer.

The character’s different.  Petals are fewer or thinner.  Stems are hardier, to stave off the frost for as long as they can.  They bloom quickly, pollinate fast, try to get it all in before the snow flies.

Around here, that means a lot of mums, a lot of goldenrod, and the last sunflowers of summer.

What’s blooming around you now?

If you’re in a city, look at your local florists’ shops.

Take just a moment to notice what’s different.

p.s.

Apologies for being a day late — I scheduled this for next Monday instead of yesterday by accident.  So we’ll have just the three prompts and the weekend this week, but will be back to the full week again next week.  Technology, sheesh.  :)