Recycling Junk mail

More Work on the Haunted House

September 23, 2025

Dear Liza,

When the exterior walls were dry, I realized there was too much space between the ‘stones’. I tried coloring the space black, but it looked terrible. I made more streaky-looking bits and glued them over the gaps.

It looks haphazard, and I’m okay with that.

The walls seemed strong enough, so I made some folded paper L- brackets and joined up all the walls. It’s certainly more house-like!

Then it was time to add the roof. I painted some postcards to match the house, and cut them a bit bigger than the house itself. Rather than use tabs, I turned the house upside down and laid down bits of glue-soaked yarn where the walls meet the roof, to give better adhesion. If you look closely, you can see the yarn right there.

I’m going to let it dry overnight and see how it’s holding together in the morning.

As Sister Corita Kent said, “everything is an experiment.”

Love,

Grandma Judy

Trying Some Three-D

September 22, 2025

Dear Liza,

Looking at all the Halloween decorations for sale in the markets, I got inspired to build an illuminated haunted house. I started with old postcards, junk mail, Mod Podge, and a UHU glue stick.

Using pieces of other projects for templates, I cut a door and windows with an Xacto blade.

When they were cut, I put mullions in the windows and joined four of the five sides together, I wanted to keep it flat to work on, so I didn’t close up the ‘house’. To make the walls stronger, I gave the interior walls a coat of white paper applied with Mod Podge.

I wanted the look of old stones for my exterior walls, so I gave some junk mail a streaky coat of acrylic, then cut them into irregular pieces. While you and I were on our ZOOM call, I used the UHU to apply the stones. They needed a brayer rolled over them to make them stick, because the postcard walls still had some flex.

There is still a lot to do. I will continue tomorrow and show you what I’ve got.

Love,

Grandma Judy

Garden Journal Challenges

Dear Liza,

I like keeping garden journals. They let me keep track of what happens in the garden and when it happens, so I can learn from each year and get better year by year.

But I also like to make them creative, so I’ve used a different format every year. This year I am re-using a movie list book. It has nice roomy format which I really like.

However, re-using a book means I need to do something in each page to cover, obscure, or otherwise change the illustration that is there, unless I find a page with movies about plants.

This page came close. It was a watercolor from the movie “Amelie”, where the garden gnome goes on some adventures. I wanted to keep the gnome.

I cut some junkmail paper to cover the non-gnome parts, gave it a blurry garden-y paint job, and glued it down. The inside of a security envelope got some darker paint, and I had the basis for a decent page. I gave the gnome himself a little more yellow, since his blue didn’t go with my yellow-ish green.

I found a few nice greens in a handout from our Portland Art Museum, and cut leaves and stems. Not bad, but flat and boring. Auntie Bridgett brought some darker greens from her collage box. Better.

And finally, I cut flowers from some pink and blue paper from the same museum handout. Now the gnome looks right at home in his garden, and in my garden journal.

Creating and solving these artistic challenges everyday makes my brain so happy!

Love,

Grandma Judy