Made It: ICAD Project - June

Hello! On June 1st I blogged about the 61 Day (June and July) ICAD (index-card-a-day) project. I managed to alter one index per day in June, so now it's time for a bit of show and tell. 

Some cards were designed with the help of books:

Fingerprint animals, based on designs shown in Klutz Press' Fingerprint Fabulous (thrift store find). 

Funny faces, drawn with the help of Ed Emberley's Drawing Book Of Faces. 

Some designs were my own though, like:

This design started with an off-center X, then each quadrant within the X was filled in with another X. And so on and so on, filling in X's with more X's. If you have a very fine-tipped marker, like the Pigma Micron 005 I used, then even something as small as an index card can take awhile to fill! When I first started out, the design looked a little like stained glass (minus the colors) - but ended up looking more like broken glass!

Above, a series of circles (traced from stencils) have been colored in where they overlap. Looks kind of like bubbles, I think. 

In honor of Flag Day (June 14th), red lines were made with a rubber stamp and red ink, while the blue rectangle with white stars was painted by me. I then added random lyrics from patriotic songs. 

I wanted to use ephemera on some of the index cards, and ended up adding various scraps of vintage stuff to several cards, such as:

Above, I cut a vintage postcard into strips, wove them together and glued them to part of the index card. The words "blessed", "flower" and "gardens" were on the postcard as well (the word "love" came from a magazine), for it was a scene from a shrine in southwestern Wisconsin. Much to my surprise, I learned that my husband had been to that same shrine as part of a class trip in the early 1970's. 

This turned out okay, but then I started doing more collage-style cards. I think these turned out pretty well if I do say so myself.

An index card was painted and stamped, then a figure of St. Paul was glued on. I recall that I picked up the St. Paul prayer card (not too long after it had been issued in June 2009) while on vacation somewhere, thinking at the time that it'd be good to use in a collage. (the cut-out words on the index card came from the same prayer card). Finally found a use for it, five years later. 

Another figure from long ago:

Don't recall now who the man was supposed to be, but he shares index card space with a paper company sample, a scrap of art paper, and the phrase "Silas had prominent, short-sighted, dark eyes" (cut from a 1930's grammar book). So "Silas" it is!

A themed collage:

Every bit you see - printed waffle recipe, the female figure (from a story about apron patterns) and the phrase "How in the world she managed to make the waffles so crisp" came from either the 1930's or 1940's (yep, the phrase is from the 1930's grammar book again). I like this one a lot!

No real theme to the next card, just a bunch of odds and ends glued down:

In this case, the odds and ends included a scrap of 1880's ledger paper (garage sale find), piece from a Loteria game (the rooster image), a fabric scrap, two paper scraps from a 1943 booklet on money-saving tips during WWII, the name from an ad in a vintage cookbook (Art's) and last but not least, paint dabbed onto part of a page from a 1950's home builder's pamphlet. 

Some of my cards were based on the written word - a short story snippet, a copied recipe, and a to-do list. These fit the bill for doing an index card a day, but aren't all that exciting to view, so I'm not showing them here. 

And I'm vain enough, I admit, to not show off the duds - the hand-carved stamp that didn't turn out so great, the attempt to weave silk ribbon into a design, the spiral that doesn't look all that spiral-y, and a few others. Other cards really aren't duds, just didn't turn out so great.You win some, you lose some, but overall I enjoyed working on this project in June.

July will be a busier month than June was, so I'd better get going and work on ICAD Day 31!