Monsters, Circles, Mail-Art and More

Hi everybody!

The past few days have not been so easy here, as I have a flare-up of my auto-immune illness, and am being treated with a crunchy tablet cocktail every morning for breakfast, and on top of that some special injections into my neck to alleviate the pains there. The tablet cocktail always brings a lot of side effects, like dizziness, nausea, feeling 'strange' (yes, even stranger than usual!) and shaky fingers. The first days are always the worst, the medis are being reduced day by day, and I hope soon to feel more normal (?).

I have been trying to keep myself busy, and doing challenges although it is not really as easy as usual. At So Artful the theme is 'Friendly Monsters', and I suddenly thought of my lovely Mexican cotton scraps. I painted a piece or cardboard - what else - and glued the pieces on, and then did my best to sew it zig-zag on the machine. Not exactly well sewn, but sewn! They all look really friendly, and seem to be enjoying an outing with music and dance, so that's good.

At AJJ the theme is circles, and at Moo Mania and More 'Mail', so I have tried to combine the two. I am not really happy with this, I wanted to draw some little circles with gel-pen again, and to write my journaling on it, but I will have to add them when I am less shaky. It should have the message, 'Art, Mail and Music make the world go round'. 

I painted a music sheet from an old book with gesso, and drew the frame with pastel chalks. I made the collage with cut-outs, stamps, tissue-tape, a tissue-transfer bird (to sing the music) and some circles cut from a sheet of DP. I used some mail art stamps to add some more accents.
I am also linking to Artful Times, where the theme is 'mail-art'

I am also linking to Paint Party Friday and Manon's Paper Saturdays

Manu has a photo challenge on her blog Mikrokosmos. The theme this week is 'smell', taking notice of the smells - good and bad- around you. I have made a collage of photos showing sweetly perfumed flowers which I have photographed in the past weeks. In the middle is one of my angels, concentrating on a heart in his hand - the heart of the perfume?
There's a nice quote from Bernard Clive: 'Today, just take time to smell the roses, enjoy those little things about your life, your family, spouse, friends, job. Forget about the thorns - the pains and problems they cause you - and enjoy life'

The original collage:

And three versions digitally altered:

If you would like to copy and use the collage photos, please feel free to do so.

Have a great weekend, take care, and thanks a lot for coming by!