2013: Catching Up

2013 was a busy year!  I made a ton of art and really learned a lot.  I was fortunate enough to attend three very different art workshops and I spent most of the year either finishing pieces that I began at those workshops or making art inspired by what I learned.  In September I took a great workshop with Katie Pasquini-Masopust and I recently finished some of the work I began there.  The first piece is called "Cosmic Duet #1" and consists of two panels that are meant to be hung together.  The second piece is titled "Hot Graffiti".  I love both of them and love, love, love this technique!  Before this workshop I had never painted on canvas before and I love the way it feels and the fact that you can sew it.  How awesome to combine all my art loves:  painting, collage, and sewing!  Elements of this technique would apply nicely to paper too, although to be honest, the thing that makes these pieces sing is the quilting, which you could not do on paper. My mind is off and running with ideas for experiments! 

These are photos I took with my phone camera of the canvases for "Hot Graffiti" prior to cutting them up.  Sorry they are a bit blurry.  I had never used the camera prior to doing this!  Sometimes I feel like a Luddite.  LOL!

.

Far Away Places - Finished!!!

I finally finished the pieces that I started at the Far Away Places workshop in May.  It took me a month and a half, but that's not too bad for three pieces of art.  At the workshop, Michelle advised us to COMMIT. Decide on one thing and commit to it, and the next step will follow.  When I got stuck working on these pieces I tried to follow her advise.  Truthfully, on the project above, I felt like I didn't have a clue and was going to screw it up anyway, so I might as well just do whatever came to mind.  It worked!  I can't say that I accomplished the things Michelle was trying to teach us, but I did end up with a piece that I'm happy with. After working on this piece I found myself with a big desire for more stencils!

My '"far away place" was some sort of mix of Gothic European elements and Indian elements.  Two styles I love.  This piece is 12.5" x 36" in real life.  I blurred out the face because I don't own the photo.  I have no intention of selling this piece or submitting it to an art show, and I don't intend to profit from it in any way. But I am really happy with it and wanted to show it on my blog.  There is a lot of Portfolio oil pastel on this piece, along with acrylic paint and collage.  The acrylic paint goes over the pastel very well, but it scrapes back off the pastel quite easily too.  The substrate is red rosin paper, and many of the collage elements are on plain old photo copy paper.  Considering the delicate (and non-archival) nature of the materials, I felt all these pieces needed to be sealed really well.  The Portfolio's are water soluble so I couldn't brush on a liquid varnish.  I decided to use a Golden spray varnish which worked very well.  I will also frame these pieces so they look nice hanging in my house and are protected from the elements.

When I got back to work on the piece above, I was pretty sure it was going to end up in the trash.  But I persevered and ended up with a piece I like so much that I am going to include it in an exhibition I'll be showing in at the end of the year.  Lynne 's approach to things really helped me here.  She said that if something she tried worked well she would usually do more of it.  So I tried to both COMMIT and DO MORE.  Good advice!  Now I'm getting back to work on the pieces I started in the workshop I took with Sue Benner in April.  Sue had so many great ideas for abstraction that I really want to try.  I'm taking at least one more workshop this fall so I figure all of my work for 2013 is going to come about as a result of multiple workshops.  I've been feeling kind of blocked for a long time now, but these workshops are giving me direction and opportunities to learn and to practice.  I have a lot of hang ups about making art, but my one great "skill" is my ability to follow through and to not stop trying.  Making art is a huge leap of faith and I work hard at maintaining my faith that doing the work will lead to better art.  I'll take care of the quantity, and the creative source will take care of the quality.

Michelle Ward does these great Evidence Pages that she often shows on her blog.  She provided us with little labels for us to use in making our own evidence pages from the workshop.  I'm keeping a scrapbook of things I've done and so I decided to make my own evidence pages, including a folder that I could keep mementos of my trip to Connecticut and the workshop.  Here are a few pictures of my evidence pages.

Award of Excellence!!

Graffiti Lilies

I entered this piece in the 2013 Inspire show being put on by 40W Arts here in Lakewood, CO.  This year the shows theme is recycled art or vivid color.  Happily for me I had this piece in the works.  This is made on recycled inter office envelopes, with newspaper, paint, tissue paper, various pens and grease pencils.  I mounted the collage onto a black fabric background that I pieced out of fragments of cloth leftover from some other project.  The background is quilted and trimmed with black satin ribbon.  I think it fits both of the shows themes!  Much to my delight I was asked if they could use my artwork for some of their outreach efforts and I won an Award of Excellence at the show.  My very first award!

Here is the thing about this piece..... it came together rather intuitively.  This never happens to me and finding that inner voice has been such a struggle.  I just wanted to play around with techniques one day so I started layering paint and newspaper on these envelopes and then tearing the paper back off to reveal layers.  When I decided I was done I had a background that I really liked.  But as usual I had no idea what to do with it.  It hung around on my design wall for several weeks while this teeny tiny little voice in my head kept whispering " add lilies made of more inter office envelopes".  I resisted.  Resistance is my specialty.  But I kept getting the same message and eventually I caved in and went for it.  This is the first pieces I've made that my husband genuinely likes.  The first piece that won an award.  Hmmmm.  I'm guessing that that intuitive voice in my head knows what its doing.  Now I just need to learn to hear it better.

Far Away Places Workshop

In May I flew to Connecticut to take the Far Away Places workshop with Michelle Ward and Lynne Perrella .  These two amazing women have been my mixed media heroes for years.  It's hard to believe that in a very short span of time I got to take workshops with the artists whose work I most admire.  Far Away Places was about imagining some distant exotic locale that spoke to your heart.  Some people chose Russia, Morocco, or a fairy garden.  I wanted to play with elements of Gothic European architecture and Indian opulence.  Michelle was our instructor on the first day and we worked on these accordion books.  Let me just say that Michelle is a stenciling wizard!  She also designs amazing stencils and she brought a huge pile of them and let us use them.  Another wonderful artist, Margaret Applin , was also taking the class and she let me use some of her great stencil designs as well.  Michelle's demonstrations and instructions were like a light bulb going off in my head.  Until I got to work, at which point the light promptly blew out.  Sigh.  I get in my own way so badly.  However, I was by no means the only person who did not get their project anywhere near finished.  I love the colors and shapes I've got going here, but I'm kind of stuck on what to do next.  Here are some better views of the front and back panels:

On Saturday Lynne took over teaching and we worked on these long banners.  I ended up working vertically, so maybe mine is more of a panel.  Lynne showed us how she uses Portfolio Oil Pastels to color faces and other elements in her work.  Both Lynne and Michelle make great use of stencils and masks.  It was so fascinating to watch Lynne demonstrate.  Here is my banner as it looked at the end of the day:

Getting this home in a suitcase without getting is creased was a challenge!  One of the things I love about Lynne's work is the rich color and busy-ness.  There is so much going on in her work.  Endless small details to peruse.  After taking this class I can look at her work and understand better how some of it was accomplished.

On Sunday Michelle and Lynne taught together.  We started by making a grid, either by collaging pager or painting, and then added other collage elements on top.

The grid part was easy.  I excel at creating backgrounds.  I just get stuck after that, LOL!  At some point I will add a headdress to the woman and details in their clothing.  Below is a photo of my work space at the workshop:

As with the Sue Benner workshop, one of the best parts of this experience was meeting the other participants.  I had so many lovely conversations with total strangers.  I dug deep down into myself and dragged my inner extrovert out into the light and it was so worth it.  This was my first time going to the east coast and most of the other women there were from nearby areas.  A couple of lovely ladies came from Toronto.  Something about taking a workshop draws a connection between everyone for a few days.  Its a wonderful feeling.

Three Page Journal Spread

My blog has been languishing again.  Lately it seems like there isn't enough time in the day to make art, much less to blog about it.  I've got a four day weekend going right now and I'm going to get about one day in the studio.  I made this journal spread a couple of weeks ago and thought I'd finally post the photo.  This was an attempt at making the left hand page, which I had painted with some leftover pink paint, match with the right hand page, which had some collaged tissue paper that had been sprayed with Glimmer Mist and some blue and pink watercolor.  I've been doing a lot of work with Medieval elements lately.  This whole spread incorporates leftover bits and pieces from other projects.  The Medieval tile design on the left is a t-shirt transfer and the woman on the right is from images I took from a book of hours when I was collaging the front of another art journal.  Lots of small bits of paper collaged down in between too!  Nothing fancy happening here but I like the result!

Quirky Little Collages

These two small collages (6"x6") were inspired by The Collage Workbook  by Randel Plowman.  I've spent the last several weeks just trying new things, playing with techniques and trying my hand at the styles I admire.  I'm not really sure if I'm learning anything, and sometimes I'm not even sure I'm having fun.  This sort of random practice can be difficult.  I guess I'm learning that I'm kind of a project oriented sort of girl!  At any rate, these two little collages were fun and I enjoy the quirky implications of them.  One thing that Randel Plowman mentions in his book is the concept of background, foreground, and middle ground.  Now I've heard this idea before but somehow it has never stuck.  I would never really have thought of the layers Mr. Plowman uses in his collages in this way if he hadn't spelled it out.  At this point I haven't really tried to work with this concept but it is rattling around in my brain and will hopefully be of use to me.

Learning this way is like giving birth to a huge litter of puppies!  Painful pushing and squeezing and then POP! suddenly you have a small squishy, wiggly bundle and you don't even know what you've got until you clean it off and really look at it.  A few days later all the "puppies" are running around in different directions and are impossible to keep track of or control.  Cute, but maddening!

I don't know why people don't consider being and artist a "real" job.  Its certainly hard enough!  LOL!

Journal Pages With Printed Paper

This journal page began with an ink blot.  Okay, that actually traveled over here when I was experimenting on another page.  I don't let it bother me.  These pages had been gessoed at some earlier time and scribbled into with a stylus.  Ignoring the ink blot, I began by making a grid of warm, analogous colors with my Inktense blocks and a water brush.  Inktense blocks seem to work better on a gessoed page, but nonetheless, this came out looking horrible.  Out came the red paint and glazing medium and I covered both pages.  When that was almost dry I spritzed the pages with a little water, let it sit a minute, and then blotted with a paper towel.  This is so easy and I just love the effect.  Then I cut up one of the papers I had made while playing with my Gelli Arts printing plate and collaged the green elements down.  Deli paper works so well for collage!  After that I made a stamp using cut up pieces of fun foam that I glued to a stiff cardboard base with gel medium.  I used gold acrylic paint with the stamp.  I'm not sure this is done, but since I haven't decided what to do next I thought I'd at least post this much as an example of using my printing experiments for collage in my art journal.

Aqua, Violet & Olive Journal Page

When I am working on art projects I often have paint or ink that I don't want to waste so I will open my art journal and use it on a random page.  This affords me the opportunity to see if I can marry the facing pages to one another.  Sometimes it doesn't work out, but often I can find a way to carry the colors or themes across both pages.  Reading Randel Plowman 's book "The Collage Workbook" inspired me to try making a word collage.  How wonderful to find that I had words in my collection in the colors from the facing page.  This color scheme happened by accident.  The right hand page had been gessoed, and one day I added the aqua/turquoise paint.  Another day I was testing out two handmade stamps I had created with fun foam, so I stamped the violet paint onto the page.  Yet another day I was using my new Adirondack inks on something and "stamped" the wet stencil onto the same page.  All very random, and yet it ended up yielding a color combo I probably would not have thought of but I really like. 

I often wonder what my art journal is for.  I play around, try new materials or techniques etc. but when I am working in the journal I often wonder if I am wasting my time.  I make "pretty" pictures and imitate other artists.  I'd like to see my journal leading me toward the development of bigger more finished/polished art pieces, but so far that hasn't happened.  I suppose at the moment my art journal just serves as a place to work in that creative mental state.  So much about practicing art is a matter of faith.  I have to have faith that the practice moments, the moments that don't lead to a fully formed art project, are just as valid and important as working on something more concrete.  When you are an artist that works full time at a non creative day job, it is easy to feel like your precious and rare art time is wasted if you are not working on a "real" project.  Just screwing around feels like wasted time.  I have to have faith that all this screwing around is teaching me something even if I don't realize that I am learning. 

New Journal Pages

After six months or more of working on a series of stitched pieces I finally decided it was time to wrap things up.  I put away the sewing supplies, sorted the fabrics I was using back into their color coded scrap bins and moved on.  For months I've been saving things I wanted to add to my art journal and thinking about taking a different tactic in approaching my art.  So far I'm incredibly frustrated, but that will be another post.  I've created several new journal pages that I'd share.  This is just one of them, but getting the rest of the pictures sized for posting will take me a little while.  Which is okay, really, as it will give me something more to post over the next week or two.  When I started this journal I went through and cut windows and page edges and other things, and collaged various papers etc. randomly throughout.  The other day one of my co-workers was wearing an outfit in shades of teal and copper that I really liked and I wanted to do a page spread with those colors.  I thought they would like nice on the pages with a window peeping through to an unfinished spread in purple, bronze, and old paper.  I'm sort of channeling Michelle Ward here, as I decided to try cutting out a mask/stencil of a leafy front and apply it in different ways on the page.  Loved the effect!

More to come.  Right now I have to go bug the lovely ladies as SAQA for advice on another issue.  Too much to do, not enough time, and I don't want to spend all day at the computer!  LOLOL.

Fall Arts Harvest Exhibition

40 West Arts is hosting another art exhibition as a part of Denver Arts Week and I will have 3 pieces in the show! I also served on the jury for this exhibition which was an interesting experience. The three pieces that I entered are rather different from my usual work, but are representative of some of the other work I am interested in doing.

Still Not Good Enough - 2012

Sometime back I posted these pieces in order to discuss the fact that I had no idea how to finish them. I simply cannot afford to frame my artwork and I don't even know if they are worth putting the money into if I could afford it. But I like them and really wanted them to get out into the world. Eventually I decided on mounting them to painted hardboard and stapling clear vinyl over the top. They have a sort of grungy graffiti look to them and I felt that the hardboard, vinyl, and staples added to the look. There is also something narrative going on there with the feminist issues and the vinyl..... I'll leave that to your imagination and personal interpretation. These photos don't show the vinyl. I knew it would be shiny and hard to photograph so I took the pictures before adding it.

How Can I Serve You? - 2012

 These pieces were created with scraped acrylic paint on heavy bristol paper. I scraped, splattered, mono printed, stenciled, spray painted, etc. Happy painting abandon! Then I tore up a newspaper and reassembled it as a collage, photocopied the result and started playing with the silhouettes. As a nod to my predilection for using fabric, I included a wee bit of hand dyed cheesecloth. The collages were glued to the hardboard with gloss gel medium. Good thing too! They buckled. Even though I let them dry while weighted with heavy books. It was kind of a mess. There is an artist named Johnathan Talbot who does amazing collage. He uses a technique where he pre coats his collage materials with gloss medium and lets them dry. He then arranges his collage items into place and IRONS them down. I used this technique to place the collage silhouettes. When my pieces ended up buckled I put parchment paper of the top and ironed the heck outta them. It worked! The gel medium I used as glue fused down quite nicely! Phew!

Woman's Depth - 2012

Cat Hair Studio

I wanted to call my blog Cat Hair Studio but the name was already taken.  There's a good reason for wanting to call it that.  Everything I make ends up covered in cat hair!  Short of closing the door while I work there is no possible way to keep the cats out of the studio, and frankly, I enjoy their company.  Once I ended up with a cat with blue paint on his paws!  OMG, the chaos!  LOL.  I had to scramble to catch him before he tracked blue paint all over the house or tried to lick it off.  There is a rule that applies to cats as well as people....DON'T EAT YOUR PAINT!  This lovely glimpse of a newly finished piece is posted merely to amuse the cat lovers out there.  Don't worry, the  hair will be removed and better photo's will be taken.  I'm thinking of submitting this piece and a couple of others that are part of a series to some magazine or other.  I just have to finish everything first!

Collage painting

I recently completed this 9"x12" collage painting.  Can you tell who inspired me?  I'm utterly fascinated by

Lynne Perrella's

work.  Could stare at it for hours.  Her work makes me shake.  That shaking feeling is what made me realize that I wanted to be an artist.  Nothing but art makes me feel that way.  It's like being seduced by a new lover.  Back to the painting....  This actually began as an experiment inspired by one of

Jane Davies

techniques where you dip a pipe cleaner in ink and feather it across the page and then scrape various colors of paint over the top with a credit card.  Great idea!  All my attempts looked like crap.  Sigh.  I put the papers away for a while and recently dug them out to see if I had any ideas.  The I took another look at Lynne Perrella's series based on Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and some ideas took off.  Stencil's and tar gel and t-shirt transfer paper, oh my!  It was great fun and I'm really happy with it.

A new mixed media book

I signed up to be part of the C&T Publishing Creative Troupe and one of the great benefits is that I get to read PDF versions of their books for free as long as I post book reviews. Check it out! What a great opportunity! I've been considering writing book reviews for a long time now, seeing as I have a huge library of art books! Here is my first review for C&T Publishing:

More Fabric Art Collage by Rebekah Meier is a treasure trove of techniques that will appeal to any mixed media artist. Many of the techniques presented in this book have been around for a while but the author does an excellent job of explaining the techniques in simple terms that will make it easy for any artist to get started. She does not address the problems that can arise from some of the techniques, such as getting fusible adhesive on your rubber stamps when embossing Fast2Fuse, or completely disintegrating your tyvek when ironing it! The techniques are presented in such a way to help you get started and to inspire ideas, but they are not in depth examinations of the process. The author suggests several ways to upcycle items found in your home or art studio, such as paper towels, aluminum foil, dryer sheets, soda cans, waxed paper and scraps left over from other art projects. With these ideas nothing goes to waste although you risk finding yourself wanting to save every last scrap that you might otherwise throw out! The author covers a really nice array of substrates/foundations, texturing mediums, and other art supplies such as transfer paper, and Rigid Wrap, and Mul-tex. There are numerous ideas in this book for using lots of techniques together in one cohesive piece of art which will appeal to all the technique junkies in the mixed media art world! All in all this is a very inspiring book and would be an excellent resource for an art group looking to work on a book study. The artwork shown in this book is a bit more sophisticated than that show in her previous book and is very inspiring. Rebekah Meier uses these techniques to create artwork that is layered, interesting and feminine. This is a book to return to again and again for ideas and inspiration.

Quandary

I completed these three mixed media paintings several months ago.  They are large....19 x 23 inches.  The base is heavy bristol paper and I've painted and collaged the surface.  There are some slightly dimensional elements too.  Here is the quandary..... how do I mount them for display?  I can't afford to frame them because they are so big.  They need a deep frame because of the dimensional elements.  I've been reading about mounting works on paper and the experts seem to think that gluing them down to a support devalues the work.  I don't even know if these are good enough to worry about devaluing them!  There is new art district developing in my neighborhood and they are putting out invitations for artists to display their work.  These three pieces are among my few finished works of art and I'd like to see if they would be accepted for display at one of the venues in our new art district but before I can do that I have to get them ready for display.  I'm considering gluing them to masonite but then I wonder if I should use some kind of varnish to protect them?  They have a few layers of gloss medium already but some of the collage elements are just plain printer paper which is not archival and I'd like to protect it as much as possible.  What is an affordable and reasonably professional way to finish these pieces?

Artist Trading Cards

Last December I got together with a few friends to work on Artist Trading Cards (ATCs).  This is my first set!  A year or more ago I was playing with collaging in my art journal with colored tissue paper, some of which I had stamped with black acrylic paint.  I no longer recall why exactly, but I ended up tearing the pages out of my journal and cutting them into ATC sized pieces.  I also cut up the smaller bits into inchies that I have yet to use.  Sometimes it seems so insane to cut or tear up papers I've spent a long time working on but I so often find that the resulting bits are much more interesting than the whole.  Months after all that I came across these 18th C. images of women with these amazing (and frankly, really ugly!) hair styles.  Did you know that women actually wore things like live birds in their hair during this period?!!  Ping!  I had to use these images on those backgrounds.  The women are printed on cheap watercolor paper because I thought the texture was nice.  They took me forever to cut out and the whole project languished until my friend put together the ATC party.  The lovely damsel's are edged with gold pen and glued to the background with Collage Pauge.  There are three sparkly pink and gold stickers on each card.  After gluing some pretty scrapbook paper to the back I ran each edge through a puddle of gold acrylic paint to color and seal the edges.  Finally I coated the fronts with gloss medium to seal the ink jet ink and make sure it all stayed glued together.

Here's a picture of my work table covered with the tissue paper I stamped with acrylic paint.  It looks so cool when used in collage.

So here is a sticky, and probably tacky, question.  What to do with my ATCs?  Trade them, right?  I got to peruse my friends collections of trading cards and frankly most of them stunk.  Cheap color printouts and bad kitch that I don't want.  What do you do if you go to a ATC swap and someone wants to trade for one of your cards but they have nothing you want?  I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings by saying their work isn't good enough, but I do want to collect art that appeals to me.  Also, while my cards may not be the worlds greatest, they took me a lot of time and work and I want to trade for equal value.  From the collections of cards I've seen it seems like a lot of people get into it more for the social aspect than the art aspect.  After thinking about this for a long time I've more or less decided that the actual trading part of making ATCs is probably not for me.  I really enjoyed making them though!

Journal Pages

Another couple of pages.  Naturally I have only photographed the pages I like.  Maybe someday I'll get brave enough to post the uglies too.  First I have to accept that they exist!  Some of the collage elements on the Crazy Love page came from Kelly Kilmer.  I took one of her on-line journaling classes and she gave the class collage pages.  The other page was a result of testing various pens and inks I have in my stash to see how they felt to write with and how waterproof the ink was.  I also played with an edge punch on this page.  It's kind of a messy page but I like it for some reason.  I have a terrible time finding pens I like for journaling.  Half of the ones I try won't write over paint and glue.  Most of them aren't waterproof and I always end up regretting that fact.  The best pen I've found so far is my Copic marker but I don't like the chisel tip or the brush tip for most things.  I bought a fine point Copic pen but it doesn't seem to work as well.  Other artists swear by this pen or that but I have not had such good results.  Maybe it's because I live in such a dry climate.  There's nothing like an early morning blog ramble about pens huh? 

Journal Pages

Here is another page from my smaller art journal.  One of these days I'll get organized to take pictures as I complete pages, or at least I'll make some effort to post pages in order of completion.  Right now it's just an accomplishment if I get something posted!  I actually completely filled my larger art journal recently - the first one!  I'm not sure if it's complete or not since there are pages I'd still like to do more with, but it will take time to tell.  I do art journaling sporadically as I'm still trying to make up my mind why I'm doing it in the first place.  At the moment I'm trying to use this smaller journal for working ideas for new artwork which makes for rather ugly journal pages but I'm trying to get over that.  Do you ever want to get past the stage of figuring **it out and finally understand your own process?  I do!  But then again, learning is fun too.  Waffle anyone?

Color Studies

These are pages from my art journal.  I decided to collect images in color schemes that I don't normally work with and make a collage with them.  All these images and scraps came from magazines or catalogs, with a few bits of scrap paper thrown in.  I am so often disappointed with my journal pages but I ended up really loving these collages.  It was a great way to change my perception of these colors.  Now I find myself using orange and yellow green in more of my work.  These could also make fun concepts for a art quilt.  Hmmmm.

Leda's Flowers

Here is a new piece that I finished a little while ago.  Getting the pictures taken and edited for posting takes me forever!  The down side of bloggin! LOL.  This began with a piece of fabric-paper in shades of red and purple, which is a favorite color combination.  So many of my pieces begin after experimenting with a technique I want to try and this is no exception.  This is a remnant of my first piece of fabric-paper, made a couple of years ago.  I also wanted to to try printing images on silk.  I chose one of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings and was really pleased with the way it came out.  This piece includes embossed velvet (so much fun!), embroidery, beading, and stamping (with acrylic paint).

Black Flowers

Here is a new mixed media piece that I recently completed.  In the March/April 2011 issue of Cloth Paper Scissors magazine there was an article by Susan Pickering Rothamel and Frankie Fioretti about making restructured paper using Perfect Paper Adhesive.  As a collage artist and art journaler I had about a ton of scraps so I thought this project would be just right for me.  I was totally thrilled with the outcome but could not decide for quite a while what I wanted to do with it.  It was so pretty just the way it was that I considered calling it finished but in the end I decided to try adding some flowers.  I did all this work creating and stitching down some paper flowers and hated the way the looked.  LOL!  So I carefully cut the shapes out, leaving square flower shaped holes.  I like the way the collage paper looked on a background of black brocade so I added some batting to the back, secured the whole shebang with fusible webbing and stitched it down with gold thread.  The flower centers are pieces of black card stock that I cut, folded, and edged with gold Smooch ink.  I mounted the whole thing on a small canvas that I painted with various antique-y colors, and stenciled with punchinella.

In this detail picture you can see some of the black on black brocade and the little gold spiral I stitched in various places.  The Perfect Paper adhesive is really great to work with and I find myself using it in my journals as well.  My pages don't stick together like they do when I use matte medium.  Yea!