More Baraka

I'm sure I've seen this yardage at Ikea before now. The white is opaque and the brown is sheer with a slight golden glow to it. This is the kind of thing I want to buy but don't because I'm never sure what to do with it.

However two lengths of it materialized in the laundry room so now I'm thinking of various projects and ways to use it -- stay tuned!

We also found a treasure trove of scrapbooking supplies including some very nice rub-offs and chipboard and transparent letters. A family member finished embellishing a painted wooden tray and I've done a little journaling.

It really is so cool that people are sharing and repurposing more than before, especially since we live on an island! Whoever left all those goodies must have been moving somewhere far. I wonder who's enjoying the goodies I left at Goodwill before my move?

Gleeful Celebration

This is a rendition of a collage I made in January. The original is actually a lot more gleeful because it's on orange construction paper with gold chocolate truffle wrappers. Suffice it to say that the celebration involved unwrapping the truffles ...

The sketch effect is from processing the scan through dumpr sketch, a free program with many possibilities, both creative and educational. It can create sketches from photos, so you could create personalized family colouring books, for example.

Go to www.dumpr.net and click on the links!

Journal Quilt

This is my first journal quilt that approximates the smaller size for these pieces. It was made as the first exercise in Lily Kerns' Quilt University class on Journal Quilts.

I was trying to express the idea of inner space and outer space by using some of the same elements inside and outside the head.

Space IS the final frontier, and that includes the space inside of us!

The white dots are cut from a home-made brocade skirt I found at a thrift store. Both front and back of the fabric are showing as I fused the right side of some and the wrong side of others.

Other materials/techniques are broderie anglaise, metallic fabric and yarn couched using Super Solvy.




IN OTHER NEWS >>>>

Perhaps because of the helpful telephone coaching I received from Quinn McDonald last week, perhaps because I was out and about interacting more with people than I had for a while, perhaps because the class started and I was looking forward to it, but last week I clocked in an impressive 43 hours and 15 minutes of work, both the bread and butter kind and the fun and creative kind!

Mandala Musings

This is "Enuff on my plate," created for the Mavericks Mandala challenge that we did after Nancy Green presented a workshop on mandalas and how to interpret them. It was one of the first pieces I exhibited, in 2007.

Although it's 25" square, it's really a journal quilt because my whole family is in it. Perhaps the class I'm about to take at www.quiltuniversity.com will enable me to make works on a smaller scale.

Yesterday I was reading Katie Pasquini's 1983 book Mandala for contemporary quilt designs and other mediums. What struck me was how she created beautiful vibrant pieces, yet individually many of those fabrics would be the ones left over after a quilt guild garage sale! Not "uglies" per se, just boring calicoes.

Today we have so many amazing fabrics in glorious colours that were unthought of even 25 years ago. Yet the curious thing is that many art quilters make very little use of commercial fabrics. Curious, isn't it?


PROGRESS REPORT: Did 27 hours of work last week.

Inspired by Hundertwasser

This is stiffened fabric that was used as a stencil for monoprinting with Lumiere paints. Behind the cut outs is a small fabric collage with Lumiere paint brayered onto commercial fabric with a sheer fabric appliqueed on with metallic thread. To the right is the same sheer fabric with journaling text on it in Fabrico marker, with no backing fabric.

The irregular rows of squares and funky colors makes me think of Hundertwasser. Here is an image of the Hundertwasser House in Vienna.

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/H/hundertwasser/hundertwasser_house.jpg.html




This is a scanned close up view which better shows that there is text on the sheer fabric behind the window.

The journaling is the transformative aspect of this piece. I still need to trim around the edges and somehow make them more finished.

1 + 1 + 1

Read about Kal Barteski's 1 + 1 + 1 challenge in her own words here:


http://lovelife.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/05/one_and_one_and.html

I have actually got on and done this. Of course, looking back at her blog I started second guessing myself -- I'm actually quite pleased with the art part, but I don't think I've done a terribly good job of visualizing my future. But then OTOH I realized today that if I keep revising and revisiting a year, a month, and a day could go by and I'd still be tinkering!

So my letter is sealed up inside the artwork. It's wearable art, which means it's NOT wearable, or at least not washable until July 3, 2008, because of the letter. And it's almost like one of my morning pages, I started jotting thoughts yesterday, was interrupted, and from yesterday to today various things happened which could possibly affect my future. Life as a recycled teenager can be exhausting!

Open virtues -- not always easy!

I've been using the Virtues project cards to pick a virtue for each day and week. Out of 100 virtues, the 11 in the lower drawing appealed to me as being open and expansive -- others are self-discipline, perseverance, orderliness, which are more of a struggle for me. But even the "open" or right-brain virtues don't equate to a free pass to goof off. I found it remarkably hard, even depressing, the first time I pulled the joyfulness card. I felt guilty that I'm not more appreciative of the truly great things I have in my life, and guilty that I'm not more on top of things so that I could afford to relax and be joyful.

This may all sound very New Age-ish, but really it isn't. The author of A Pace of Grace, who started the Virtues Project with her husband and brother, takes care to relate her thinking to various faith traditions. I pick a virtue each day for that day, and it is remarkable how they relate to what is going on in my life. And they are all virtues, so practising any one of them couldn't be harmful.

Good advice

. . . but can be hard to take!

I used a petal brush in Twisted Brush and printed a hard copy, then stamped the words on, using a bright purple letter N, which I then softened using EZ Tintz in whitewash. I also softened the bottom edge and around the dark purple line where the petal crossed over itself.

Was just bursting for the EZ Tintz to arrive -- of course now I want the whole set.

Visual Chronicles

Have been reading "Visual Chronicles" and working through some of the exercises, not very systematically.

This collage expresses how I feel today.

For a variety of reasons.

Now I'm thinking about the expression "Huis Clos" which is a legal term in French and was also the title of a Sartre play and I can't remember what it was called in English.

Considering energy and frustration levels it's amazing I can do anything remotely creative!

Better backgrounds are in the future...

I'm proud of the illuminated capital and the floaty moth like infinity symbol on the table created by playing around with twisted brush.

Visual Chronicles -- Life changing book!

I discovered this book by Linda Woods and Karen Dinino.

It's published byNorthlight Books in 2006

The full title is

Visual Chronicles: the no-fear guide to creating art journals, creative manifestos and altered books

They have a non-intimidating approach to art journals and show you how to break it down into little steps and that a journal doesn't have to be like a soap opera narrative. Nor does it necessarily have to be in a bound book. It could be in a box, or tied together with an elastic band or a ribbon.

The website is sistersonsojourn.com
and full of neat stuff from the book and teasers about the next one, due out September 2007.

There is an area with a Yahoo group, which of course I joined.

Find I am seeing things differently and perhaps this will give me an outlet for all the ephemera (aka JUNK according to some!) I accumulate so easily and can't bear to discard.

I now have a large sketchbook which is filling up with collage (mostly) artworks, and a box of index cards with prompts, colors, and notes about supplies.


The index cards aren't mentioned much in the book but I am the index card queen.

I have one old box full of housekeeping prompts from when we had a B&B, with chores detailed room by room, creative ideas (hmm I will have to revisit them, some of them must still be good), quotes from the Qu'ran, etc.

Then from my recent years in school there are thousands of cards with notes about medical terminology, spelling, trivia, steno outlines, etc. It's fun to pull out a random card and discover that the original topic bears some relevance to what I'm writing on it this time.

E.g. I found an ice blue card with

ANWR = Arctic National Wildlife Reserve

written on it, and the prompt I was jotting before it escaped was about the heat.

BTW we finally caved this aft and put the a/c on!