Inspire Your Heart with Art Day!

Welcome to Magpieheaven. When Danielle May of Unruly Paper Arts invited me to join in an Inspire Your Heart with Art link up, I was really excited! January 31st is the celebration of inspiring our hearts with art - as well as being my wedding anniversary! All we have to do is share a piece of work that gives us pleasure - no rules, no restrictions - today it's creativity for its own sake and it's all about having fun and creating from the heart! Once we've linked up, we can visit at least three other participants and enjoy what they have been creating and leave them a heartfelt comment. I do hope you will join in too, link up a project that has given you pleasure, or take a look at what the other 'Unrulies' have been up to here.

Recently I was invited to take part in a Facebook Artist Chain and in looking back over past work, I realized how much I used to enjoy art journaling. It is ages since I took down a journal from my shelf so I decided to remedy that! My dear crafting friend Lucy had created a beautiful journal for me as a gift.

I took the cover as my inspiration and decided to step away from the cold winter into a flourishing Secret Garden of my own!

I was really indulgent, using layers of my favourite paint colours: PaperArtsy Frescos in Hey Pesto and Beach Hut, Cherry Red and Yellow Submarine and my favourite stamps and stencils!

A while ago I created a journal page with scenes from Pre-Raphelite paintings behind little doors. I really wanted to re-visit this, but this time I used a shuttered window stamp by Crafty Individuals, stamped onto masterboard. You can probably see that I had lots of fun stencilling and stamping onto the card, using PaperArtsy Mini and Darcy leaf stamps. Who is that peeping between the shutters? The poppy is cut from the top layer of a paper napkin and fixed with PaperArtsy Satin Glaze.

On this window, napkin ivy swirls around the window. I had so much fun with all these layers of stamping, painting and stencils. I can see a Tim Holtz diamond stamp there; some Gothic script from a PaperArtsy Mini and the hint of a butterfly from a wood mounted stamp my son bought me when I first started to craft!

Because this project is just for me, I used a little face I'd created the other evening and scanned into my computer to print out for projects. Here she is an image transfer over book text.

Inside the shutters there's a sentiment from a Darcy Wilkinson stamp plate...

'Turn your face to the sun and the shadows will fall behind you.'

Here is the face peeping through the other window.

My favourite childhood book was 'The Secret Garden', which I read again and again. I so enjoyed watching Mary Lennox change from a sour and unhappy orphan, lost and alone in the cold and uninviting Misselthwaite Manor to a happy child with glowing cheeks able to love and be loved by those around her. It's a little bit old-fashioned now, but this story still presents us with a believable heroine and shows how contact with the Natural World can transform us.

 Mary's self-taught gardening skills give her a purpose and open up a magical world of friendship and hope. I was quite a lonely little girl myself so bad-tempered Mary; Dickon always surrounded by wild creatures; Colin the querulous invalid who, like Mary learns to love and hope and Martha the little housemaid - even the grumpy old gardener Ben Witherspoon who mellows as the story progresses - became my friends. I dreamed of finding that tiny brass key, half hidden by leaves and opening a creaking wooden door to enchantment. Thank you so much for stopping by Magpieheaven today. I'm really looking forward to seeing what others have created for this Inspire Your Heart with Art Day.