Explore. Dream. Discover.

Explore. Dream. Discover. is one of the first travel blogs I ever followed. It was before I even know what a travel blog was. The blog not only introduced me to travel blogs, it also introduced me to this Mark Twain quote.

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

- Mark Twain

And it was this quote that provided inspiration for my next craft project! Armed with over half a bottle of mod podge and a mind full of ideas (kind of), I set out to make use of any old materials I could set my hands on.

Remember how I can't paint?



Well there was a time before I accepted that-- and here's proof of it. In my head I envisioned a swirling dancer, the light catching on the silk of her twirling skirt, her body caught in the midst of a turn. What came out on canvas was nothing like that. So I stopped trying and stuck the canvas in the back of my dresser drawer.

Which is where I re-discovered it yesterday! I had seen lots of craft ideas involving canvas and paper so I decided to use the same old book that I used with my shoes and paste the pages on the canvas.



I grabbed my trusty mod podge and got to pasting. It was as simple as the shoes-- just gluing paper to a canvas really. I experimented with both cutting and tearing the pages and found that I liked the harsh edges of cutting better than when I tore a passage out.



It didn't take long before the entire canvas was covered!



Trust me, it looks better, and less wrinkled in person.

Now was the hard part. I knew that I wanted the words explore, dream, and discover on them. The question was how? I didn't have any stencils. I contemplated free-handing it, but realized it would not look good.

While I like doing decorative writing...((shameless picture of my drawings...))

I wasn't sure how it would turn out using paint. After all, you can't just erase paint.

I had finally decided that I would just print out the words, cut out the individual letters, and paste them on, when my mom had a brilliant idea.



We took a page from the same old book (1958 Reader's Digest if anyone's curious) and taped it to a sheet of printer paper. Then, we ran it through the printer and the words printed onto the old page.

I simply cut out the words and arranged them on the canvas.



A little mod podge, and it was all done! I love the finished result. It has that old book feel that I was striving for and the quote I love. And, considering I had all the materials on hand, it cost me nothing. :) All the materials, if you're buying them, are relatively cheap. My library sells old Reader's Digests books for 25 cents apiece, the canvas would be three dollars, and I used roughly 75 cents worth of mod podge.

Pretty inexpensive for a unique work of art :)