With Her Heart and Her Boots

With Her Heart and Her Boots - Mixed Media Collage

"Bats in the belfry" "A penny saved is a penny earned" "Her heart was in her boots" - all those wonderfully descriptive sayings and metaphors of the past! I grew up with them, having been raised by a mother who as a child was raised by her Victorian grandmother. Lately, I've been thinking of ways to give those old stock phrases a little bit of a twist, replace a word here and there to give the meaning a nudge.

"Her heart was in her boots" is a metaphor for feeling low. For this collage, I gave her a heart that had definitely escaped from her boots, and both her boots and herself wings to fly away.

The background is hand-colored and painted with a gear stencil. The butterflies, I hand-cut, using my own templates, out of art paper and then hand-embellished with pen. Flowers and heart are another art paper. Boots and cameo are vintage ephemera.