Here is a round up of some wicked cool tutorials from around the web! Enjoy! Inky Background Step-by-step directions on how to get the cool inked and sprayed background you see on this layout. Wavy Tissue Paper Background This is a lovely and easy tutorial from Anja Wade on The Cocoa Daisy Blog. Paper Pieced Map Kelly Purkey has an awesome tutorial for putting together a paper pieced map. So darn cool! Rolling Pin Printing From the brilliant mind of Miss Alisa Burke, rolling pin stamps. Love it! Groovy Printed Papers This printing idea from Daisy Yellow is so cool... Read more →

I was shocked by the number of commenters on this post who expressed surprise at my project being rejected for publication. First of all, thank you! Your kind words always make me feel so much better. And second, I get rejected all the time. I just don't blog about it. Rejection is just a part of the game. It comes with the territory. So let's have a little chat about it. Being Rejected for Publication No matter who you are, no matter how talented you are, you will submit for publication and get rejected. Being published in a magazine is... Read more →

I'm on a family vacation in Maine this week. Staying at a beautiful house on the ocean. Feeling like a lucky, lucky girl. And I've got fun posts lined up for you all week long! Enjoy! At CHA I gave a brief lecture about how to create videos for YouTube and online classes. Among other things I showed a short cut from one of my It's Sew Easy class videos and I figured I'd share it here too. It's Sew Easy clip from Julie Balzer on Vimeo. And I don't think I've ever shared all the projects from that class... Read more →

Dina Wakely and Samantha Kira are two very accomplished art journalers living in Arizona. And they have hatched a wonderful challenge. You can read all about it here. Essentially, they are challenging you to get out of your art journal and start playing on canvas! The challenge is to complete two canvases (larger than 8x10) each week. Click here to see what I did last week. This is what I did this week: Let's talk about the one on the left first. I took this canvas that I did last week... ...and covered it with gesso. I couldn't decide whether... Read more →

If you're new to Art Journal Every Day, all the posts can be found here. Please read this post first. There is a flickr group for sharing right here. Remember, it's just ten minutes of nourishing your creative self every day! No need to finish anything or even like it. Just play! You can sign-up to participate in August here. So last week I covered a page I made over seven days, in less than ten minutes each day. (You can check out Sherry's super fun take on it, right here.) Today I thought I'd share a page that took... Read more →

Woo! I finished my Week in the Life album! This is the formula I ended up with: layout: 8.5x11 layout (you can see where I shared just the layouts here) hourly sheet: This was a free download from Ali Edwards' site. A breakdown of the day by hour for you to keep track of your activities. photo collage: For the sake of ease (since I was printing at home anyway) I decided to just do photo collages instead of printing a ton of individual photos. file folder with photo captions: My little half pages are all made of file folder... Read more →

A long time ago I carved a little alphabet from white Speedy Cut. It was a cute alphabet set and included numbers and symbols. I use the numbers in my art journal all the time and here's a layout from 2009 that uses them: I liked the set a lot, but I decided that I wanted a bigger alphabet -- something more like printing blocks. This time I used pink Speedy Carve. Here you can see the numbers in action on a layout from earlier this year: (made with the January 2011 Cocoa Daisy Kit) Well I recently used those... Read more →

For the last two years I have taught a Journal Quilt class at The City Quilter every month. It's an ongoing art quilting technique and quilt design class. It has been a wonderful experience and now I'm saying goodbye to the class -- at least for a little while. On Friday we got together for our final class. Lots of amazing artwork was shared and we did a little ATC swap too! I know it's probably unfair to say, but I have the world's best students. So talented and so inspiring! Love them so much! I'm going to miss this... Read more →

I hosted a little Crafternoon at my place this weekend. Two of the funnest and funniest guys I know... ...offered up their master crochet skills to the rest of us. Seth walked in gave me one of the most gorgeous handmade gifts I've ever received. And after trying out crochet for myself, I'm even more impressed with his mad crochet skills! The scarf is gorgeous and super long and I adore it! I can hardly wait for it to be cold enough to wear it! We had a room divided at the Crafternoon. Crochet-ers on one side... ...and scrapbookers on... Read more →

If you're new to Art Journal Every Day, all the posts can be found here. Please read this post first. There is a flickr group for sharing right here. Remember, it's just ten minutes of nourishing your creative self every day! No need to finish anything or even like it. Just play! You can join the linky list for July right here. You can sign-up to participate in August here. I know that I keep saying, it's just a ten-minute-a-day commitment. Well, I wanted to put my money where my mouth is. So this week I timed myself and worked... Read more →