Tomato Rolls

Odd title for a journal page I know, but tomato rolls always give me happy thoughts.  Again, strange I hear you say.

It's a meandering story with lots of tendrils.  Tomatoes, make me think of my muvver whose time to leave me was in 2011.   She was a very strong but gentle women who was well respected and loved in the family and before she passed she saw and held a great grandchild and a great great grandchild.

She was first married at nineteen, she told me she was far to young.  Her husband, Osbourne (his surname) was in the services and was quite often posted away so my Mum was left with meagre means to live on.  So she decided to grow tomatoes, this she said helped her through the rough times when all she could afford was a loaf of bread.

At fifteen, she took me on a tour of the castles in Scotland.  No hotel, no place to stay, we would find somewhere when we got there.  At the time I was horrified, this unsettled me that there was no plan.  Remember this was in the days before the internet so you couldn't just do a search to see if there were places to stay.

We ended up staying in a lovely B & B and used that as our base.  Each day we would go out and visit a different castle or place of interest armed with tomato rolls, mushroom soup, some tunnock bars and a flask of tea.

These memories stay with me and even to this day, if I am out for the day I am more than happy taking with me some rolls, tomatoes and a fruit knife.

And how did I create the page?  Using, alcohol pens, tissue paper, water soluble crayons and a pen.

NUTURE. GROW.

I  was looking through my stack of Cloth, Paper, Scissors magazines and came across an interesting article called Visual Journaling by Melanie Testa (issue 24 May/June) . In it she shared a little of her process, one of which is using tracing paper in her journals.  When she is out and about she takes sketches of things of interest e.g. a bird or a flower, then she comes home does the research and draws it again, this time on tracing paper.  This allows her to be able to use that sketch again and again.

She uses tracing paper not only to sketch on but also to paint on.  Now this initially made me a little nervous.  Putting paint onto tracing paper will instantly cause the paper to distort. However Melanie suggests, "You can also play with the tracing paper's ability to stretch and expand while applying the tracing paper to your work."

Being a girl that uses what I have to hand I decided to try working on tissue paper.  I knew this would throw up more of a challenge but I was well and truly inspired and ready to go and here's the resulting page.

Within the page above I have created a background from left over wet ink and paint from other pages I had been working on so it was basically all ready to work on.  I sketched then painted my one year old jade tree onto the tissue paper then painted it using my Kuretake paints, I love their vibrancy.  Whilst waiting for the paint to dry I cut out some graph paper and outlined a couple of words to link to the plant.  I love my little jade plant, I found it on a cold December morning in 2015. I brought it home as a small branch.. Many people believe that the more these plants flourish the more affluent you will become or perhaps it's you won't be short of money.  Whatever the believe, I used to have one for coming on 40 years and then it just gave up the ghost.  No amount of water, sun, re-potting helped it.

I hope you enjoy the page.