LifeBook Week07: Magic Cottage

This week's LifeBook project features a magic cottage, our sacred place, where we can escape from the world. This cottage can stand for anything we want it to. This was one of two bonus lessons this week, taught by Violette Clark, who also showed us around her quirky home, which she turned into a real-life magic cottage.

My dream is to have my own dedicated craft space, which I can decorate to my heart's content with colour and surround myself with art and inspiration. My cottage represents that little corner of the universe I would call my happy place. It's still just a dream, but I hope one day it will become a reality.

For this page, I used acrylic paints for the background, which I spread with a plastic card instead of a brush. I used two shades of blue, a bright green and white to achieve this look:

I used a home-made stencil to make clouds and a dotted texture stamp to break up the background a bit. I glued all my elements on top of this. I drew the top part of the face on a separate piece of watercolour card and used the same shading technique Tam showed us in previous LifeBook lessons. I cut the pieces for the cottage, the arrow and the hearts from gelli prints. The butterflies were cut from a napkin and the words strips were printed on the computer. The words represent what I want my craft space to be like. I used black and white pens to outline everything to separate them from the background and shaded the edges of the page with a purple Gelato to frame it. I also added some purple glitter glue to some of the elements.