Open the Gates to my...

I have finally completed the creator of The Circle of Friends 2010 Journal. This year Sandi selected the theme,

Open the Gates to my....

We just had to fill in the blanks. For some reason this was really hard for me. Other members had already done Heart, Life, and Garden. I just could not come up with something that really caught me. I received my Paula's Kit Club and inside was a fabulous extra stamp featuring bugs...so I started playing with an Entomology idea and that for some reason got morphed into a dark piece. I seem to be leaning towards this theme these days, I wonder what that says about me LOL. So here is my


Open the Gates to My Dark Side Journal Entry.

The front, or as I like to think of it, Gate is a light grey paper with a spider web transparency. The Birds are from a silouet kit that I traced and flipped so they would look at one another, appear to be flanking the opening to the gate which is a piece of German Scrap. And I finished off the front with my title and black brads to connect the pages.

I wish it opened a little bit smoother. Hopefully with time the stiffness will decrease and it will open nicer.



I spent a ton of time on my lady. I created her using Photoshop. She is an image of a Paris Showgirl with a full skeleton (there was a ton of manipulation done here to get the bones to lay just right, I am still not really please with the skull) and on top of all of that is the dress which I filled with the bugs from my most recent Paula's Kit Club. To finish her off I painted the dress with a light grey twinkling H2O. So even my "dark" ladies shimmer :)

The background is a calender page, a sky scene done in grayish sepia tones that I added more grey to with a color wash.

Behind my lady is a rub on spider web. The tree, Tim Holtz, is black embossed. The bat is from a Paula's Kit club and the skull image at the bottom is a fabulous stamp that I got from the company that is now Paula's Kit Club.

To finish off the inside I added a chip board tombstone painted in similar grey shades and stamped with a crackled background stamp. I also added a bit of shimmer to it. My new favorite stamp, or at least one that I've been using a lot of recently, is the harlequin patterned stamp that I covered the edges with. And last but not least I added some German Scrap to the top and bottom. Alas it is almost impossible to see because it is black and so is the background I photographed this on...sigh...

As always I can't leave a back blank so I grabbed a coordinating decorative paper and slapped it on the back.

The skull is from Alpha Stamps and I was originally going to use it on the inside but couldn't get it to look right so I added it to the back, I think it's a nice touch. If one can call anything nice on a dark piece like this.

Well that's that for this journal. I learned a lot when I was making my lady but I had a really hard time with this one. i hope Sandi likes what I did.