LAST TIME I SAW PARIS: PLAYING WITH PARCHMENT

Right around this same time last year, we were packing up to head out on that long-awaited trip to Paris and southern France. You might recall from my post here, that one of my favorite things about France was all the little flower shops, whose goods spilled out onto the sidewalks everywhere you looked. So, when I discovered that my latest class assignment was learning how to make buckets of coneflowers out of baker's parchment, well, my mind couldn't help but wander back to those flower stalls in France.

To make the flower petals, we took a sheet of parchment and smeared on several different shades of craft acrylics, letting them overlap and blend together in places. After the paint dried, we were supposed to cover it all with a thin layer of ModPodge, but that kinda slipped my mind until after I'd cut out a whole heap o' petals. Fortunately, they still turned out ok -- at least, as far as I can tell.

Our original class supply list had called for "tissue paper with words on it", and the only one I had been able to scrounge up was meant for baby gifts -- all gooshy and pastel. When I found out what we were actually going to use it for, I had to say "Oh heck no, I don't think so!" I bought a package of black with white dots instead. Then, just by chance (because my bag was starting to weigh a ton) I was pulling an umbrella and a sketch book from my purse, when out popped the cutest little zebra-print gift sack -- just seconds before I was to begin cutting out the flower cans. Talk about synchronicity! No telling how long the sack had been in there, or where it came from in the first place.

Since I had only used a tiny fraction of the polka dot tissue, I just couldn't resist adding a little window awning, like the ones you see on so many French shops. Unfortunately, that left me with no room on the page to journal, other than on the flower cans themselves. Maybe that was for the best. As they say, sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words.