A wee bit of color for The Funkie Junkie Boutique Challenge blog!

I am scooting in at the last minute with a very small book for the "Little Things" challenge at the Funkie Junkie Boutique.  For those who've read here recently, I am once again diving into making books of various sorts (though not yet of the expected variety).  This wee one is the smallest I've made yet - 2.25 inches tall by 2.25 inches wide by 0.75 inches thick....  secured by a magnetic wrap.














Spring seems to be visiting other parts of the northern hemisphere at the moment, and I imagine we too will experience this wonderful phenomenon soon, or so I hope.  At the moment, however, we have moody dark skies filled with rain, snow, hail or some oddly comic mix of the same.  I dearly love the skies here, even with this type of weather, but even I long for a little bit of color amidst all of this atmosperic drama set amongst a very dun, muddy stage here in our rural farming area.

Whilst in my studio yesterday, in what I might charitibly name "cleaning up" but really was just noodling around, I came across a curious and fascinating book The Secret Lives of Color,  by  Kassia St. Clair.  She chronicles the discoveries and tales of colors and their various manisfestations in hues and shades.  Did you know, for instance, that Payne's gray (one of my favorite pigments) is named for a civil engineer turned water-colorist, who mixed this fabulous concoction of Prussian blue,  crimson lake, and yellow ochre?

At any rate, perusing the book took me to my own watercolors.  Wanting to see what they did with dry embossed paper, I dug out twelve embossing folders and promptly ran small swatches of Sthrathmore watercolor cards through my machine, and then applied to each one color of a rainbow order, made with one of my palettes - which had a rather motley collection of colors, many of which were of the quinacridone family.  Nonetheless, off I went....

until I had twelve little swatches of colors..... red, red-orange, orange, orange yellow, yellow, yellow green, green, green-blue, blue, blue-purple, purple, and purple-red (forgive the placement, per my usual failure to negotiate proper placement with Blogger).

The swatches were mounted on a small accordion book of smoke grey.  The back was stamped and heat-embossed with a small "splat" stamp from Stamper's Anonymous in black....



and each end piece stamped with a larger version of "splat", heat-embossed with white.




I constructed a small wrap of black mat board, covered with panels on which I had splattered various colors of distress stains, followed by a spray of matt finish fixative, and secured by two small magnets.

Each color swatch was labeled with its initial, die cut from the Tim Holtz "Alphanumeric Tiny Type Lower Case" set, and painted with Glossy Accents for a bit of shine.  I do not regularly look at, or post on, Instagram, but seeing the hashtag symbol in this set gave me the name for my small book!

Thank you for your visit, and if you'd like, please do comment below - I always love hearing from you!  As the title indicates, I am entering this into the current "Little Things" challenge at TFJB.