Vintage Woodland Revisited

When Seth Apter asked for my favourite own artwork in his survey "Playing Favorites" you find on his blog today, I only thought about it for a moment and then picked this journal page I´ve made back in 2008.

I´ve been in a group of ladies then who exchanged tip-in pages (front and back, not spreads), each in a different format and size (some even round or house shaped) and theme. We´ve had themes like Vintage Christmas, Rainbow, Wisdom, and a lot more - my own book had a raven theme of course ;-)
It was a fun group and I´ve loved making my pages, getting to know the participants and taking the challenge of working in given themes and formats, but in the end my favourite pages have been those for a theme I didn´t understand at first: Vintage Woodland. The lady who had chosen it had described it like this: Forest with birds/eggs; think woodsy and be creative ... well, not easy. I knew I would incorporate birds, so I chose some favourite bird and nest stamps as well as some old book pages with an appropriate theme. And then I stumbled upon a sort of paper that was made from a thin piece of cork, and I immediately knew that this would be the perfect base for my wood; it really looked like soil. I added some vintage postage stamps and stamped and cut out a few leaves, then picked a rusty paper to keep it all together. I arranged all my items until I was satisfied, and then there was a problem: I wasn´t able to just glue my stuff to the cork, so I had to find another way to assemble my pages. I had bought a sewing machine some time ago, but I couldn´t sew - but I had to give it a try here! So I made separate front and back pages, glued everything together and then used my sewing machine in addition to fix it all. When I was ready, I sew both pages together back to back and ended with a single page that I really loved and that seemed to fit the theme perfectly. But was I loved most about it was that I had taken the challenge and tried a technique I´ve never used before. Thanks for the challenge, Patti! I hope your book has been a beauty in the end!