Deconstruction/Reconstruction Mixed Media

After watching Leandra's video for the latest Paper Artsy "Deconstruction" challenge, I picked up the March/April 2015 issue of Somerset Studio, and just happened to open it to this article from Barbara Runde:

In addition to the title, the paper weaving in this piece immediately caught my eye, as I love baskets and woven things:

Aha, then!  Perhaps an idea for this challenge.  I took several pieces of 6" square from a 7 Gypsies paper pad in my stash.  On one piece, I made 1/4" slits across, stopping on top and bottom edges by about the same amount.

I took the other pieces and cut them into 1/4" wide strips.











and then wove them through the first striated piece, after grunging some of the strips with Weathered Wood Distress Paint:

I needed a substrateI , thinking I would use the woven look by incorporating texture paste through stenciling (Tim Holtz Burlap) and various distress stains to try the blue/brown palette Butterfly at Words and Pictures  uses  so successfully.

Though lovely, not a good fit to this project..... so turned next to a dried baby wipe that I had used to mop up all the dark and shimmery stains from the background for this make.

 It was too small to cover the white space in the journal, which had been gessoed and edged with Pumice Stone Distress Paint.

So I cut it in two.

and stained some coffee filters with various golden-toned Lindy's Stamp Gang sprays.

Once dry, these were cut into strips to cover the bare middle, and layered to echo the feeling of weaving.

I was starting to like this.

The weaving covered too much of the lovely background, so I trimmed it down and stamped in Coffee Archival with a new Finnabair for Prima stamp, which looks like a woven pattern to me.

As you can see, the fluffy lace ruffle from the page behind peeks out here, so I needed some type of non-lacey ruffle to mask that on this page.

I cut some cooking parchment paper, folded it and stamped with the same Prima stamp, which is quite faint because of the waxy surface of the paper.  I then fan-folded and crumpled the parchment, and once it had lots of wrinkly texture, applied it as my border.

 To complete the piece, I stamped along the inner edge, again in archival ink, a saying by Rumi that seems particularly apt for the making of art:  Stop weaving and see the pattern emerge.

I am posting this at Brenda's blog party and in the Paper Artsy Deconstruction challenge.

Thanks so much for stopping by, and please do leave a comment - I love hearing from you!

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