Japanese Accordian Moleskin Round Robin

Moleskin makes these awesome journals called Japanese Accordion. They are approximately 3.5 x 5.5 and the pages are folded in such a way to look like an accordion. You can pull all the pages out into one long page. Which of course, makes them ideal for mail art.

I am involved in 2 round robins, one over at www.atcsforall.com and one at their sister site www.illustratedatcs.com. The theme of my moley on the AFA swap is 'art as a spiritual journey'. So each person in the swap will get a chance to do a 4 page spread on that theme. In return I will do a 4 page spread on each of their themes, which are: mermaids, home is where the heart is, houses cats or quotes, found poetry, and what makes your heart soar. This book is almost done--just 2 people to go!

On iATC's we are just getting started on our journey. Journals are to be mailed to their 1st destination on August 1. My theme for this book is 'dark goddess'. The other themes are: naughty burlesque, the space between you and me, open theme but with loud bright colors, mondo bizarro, fantasy steampunk airships in the sky, big beautiful rubenesque women & forbidden fruit, and empowered women writers. The challenge for this round robin is I can only create art in the division I was accepted onto iATC's for. Which means I have to keep hand drawn work to a minimum (no more than 30%) and rely solely on collage and mixed media techniques. As you can probably guess this may represent quite a challenge!

The 1st challenge was to get my own 3.5 page spread done to offer inspiration to the next artist. I present it here:



I have a few lasts tasks to make my moley ready to hit the world. I need to create an introduction spread which contains directions regarding my theme as well as a travelogue. The back of the moley contains a pocket in which i am going to enclose handmade envelopes for each artist. Each envie will contain a thank you gift and in return i as that each artist stick a little something back in there for me. Not art necessarily, but possibly a leaf or a pebble from a walk, or a bus ticket or a snippet from the newspaper. I'd also like each person to sign and date their envelope.

I'll keep you posted on how and where my little moley travels to!