A Birthday Card

Hello and a warm welcome to Magpieheaven. Autumn for the Magpies of Magpieheaven is just full of birthdays: my son, my daughter and my brother-in-law all celebrate birthdays at this time. As I've no doubt said before on this blog, greetings cards don't come easily to me these days.Nevertheless, I wanted to make something special for my son Isaac that worked in the small space available on a card. Recently I won some blog candy from the lovely Lesley Ebdon, so I took a beautiful red card blank that had been part of this. I really liked the idea of a coloured card blank rather than the usual cream or white, so things were starting well. I gathered together some bits and pieces I had created as experiments over the last few months. There was an experiment with an alphabet decorative strip, both the letters and what was left behind. I rejected these eventually, but I'm sure I'll be able to use them on another project.

I liked the scraps of master-board and hand-made paper, which I thought would look good layered. The corners of the card were embossed, so I decided to accent this with some Treasure Gold. I painted a Prima Mechanical with Turquoise Fresco and then added a touch of Sapphire Treasure Gold and a red gem at the centre.

The Lynne Perrella image on the top layer was stamped onto painted tissue. Tearing her down the middle seemed right, matching the fragments of Artistic Outpost quotes on my master-board.

As I worked, a line from T. S. Eliot's poem, 'The Wasteland' kept running through my brain:
'These fragments I have shored against my ruins...'
Although The Wasteland is a difficult and - at times - bleak poem it does have an unusual  beauty about it, the way Eliot uses language and quotes from so many sources: mysticism, literature and popular culture creates hope and order out of the chaos, I feel. He created out of the 'ruins' a new kind of art and re-kindled interest  in almost forgotten dramatists like Webster and Thomas Kyd.

The moth in her frame is a piece of Tim Holtz tissue with a Glossy Accents glaze and the little leaves are fragments of my master-board. I wanted the card to create the impression of a gallery! Eliot becomes in a sense a curator of an art gallery or museum, displaying through the rich descriptions of his poem, scraps of parchment, lengths of tapestry and even some curious stone carving. 'The Wasteland', first published in 1922, beautiful and strange, grew out of the ruins of post World War 1 Europe and it was in a sense the beginning of Eliot's quest for understanding of a world recovering from the terrible ravages of war.

 My card for Isaac grows out of little treasured scraps that I could not bear to throw away and I've created it at a time when once again our news media carries stories of wars and rumours of wars, but all around us there is still great natural beauty and incredible courage and human kindness. This card comes with loving wishes for my son's  birthday on the 24th when he will be 24 and  with appreciation of his companionship and kindliness. Thank you for dropping by Magpieheaven today. May you find beauty, peace and poetry all around you this week wherever you are.