April 13, 2018

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I pick up trash when I walk.  On April 13 I found some things I'd never found before.

Naked lady.  Rolled, folded, and with significant water damage.

Envelope which brought a letter from Spain to Ann Arbor.

Whatever that red thing is.  Cupcake decoration?

Feathers and receipts are common.  Clean receipts get recycled, filthy ones get thrown away.  I have a collection of feathers..............

This is my first trash collage pic. 

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January 20 -- collage workshop

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On to the actuall collage workshop with Laura Cater-Woods.  Laura is an enthusiastic, engaged, and interesting teacher.  She does a good job of connecting with her students, and has a knack for putting her finger on what they mean to say, and helping them say it clearly.

My buddy K. bought this excellent long length of sewn-together sari scraps when we were in Cincinnati last spring.

She shared!

The text is about going to a yoga retreat where they had great food.  I thought that was appropriate, as I have started a yoga class, and I love great food....

Don't you love this scrap of silk?  Nothing better than hot pink and orange, in the depths of January!

Laura brought all sorts of interesting materials for us to use, including some tea bags. The tea dried in the bags, and then Laura took them apart and ironed them.

I chose one I liked, and glued it (just across the top edge) to a 4x6 card, and it was done. Laura thought so, too. When she came around looking at what we'd been doing, she picked it up and said "This is perfect! Mat it, sign it, frame it!"

Her own work is very much more dense and layered. I think it is excellent that she has the capacity to appreciate work that is not in the vernacular she prefers. This is a rare and wonderful quality in anyone, and is especially to be hoped for in a teacher (but not always found, alas).

I'm not fond of working in an en-masse and public setting, but I diddled a bit.  I'd thought I would work just with black and white, with different densities of print for different values, but somehow the orange found its way in......

The text in the prev NOT significant.  :-)  I was looking for dense print, and this drug warning thing was what I found...........



You know how I love light and shadow. This sliver of paper, snipped from the side of a little collage, curled beguilingly.......

(as always, click on an image to see a larger version -- the shadows show up better in the bigger image)

Laura liked this, too, and after I'd talked to her just a little about how I like light and shadow, she told me that was my bliss, and that I could work with light and shadow for the rest of my life and never plumb them.  (You can see what I mean about her deftly putting her finger on a student's pulse point....)



This is tiny -- it fit handily on a 4x6 card. I am pondering how one would manage to get this sort of effect in a size big enough to be seen more easily...........  The multiple light sources really enhance the appeal of the shadows.............

It may be the case that I "just" photograph these.  Though then the potential added attraction of motion is lost................

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fabulous!

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I hope you will click through to this post by Mary Ann Moss.

Enjoy her flowers, scroll on by the dirty cat on the table, and find yourself looking at the red, white, and blue journal page of a 72-yr-old who is taking one of Mary Ann's on-line classes.

I love the page!!! Wouldn't this make a great poster? I would SO buy one, and hang it where I'd see it every day!

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learned at my mama's knee

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My mom has been embellishing things she sends through the post office since long before such work was called Mail Art. She often uses fancy lettering, and sometimes uses color, drawing, and/or embellishments.

Our holiday parcel was embellished.....

Hallmark made figurines of these cute little guys. They have been sink-top standards at my parents' for decades, and it makes me smile to see them as a sticker.









Following in her footsteps.....................

Two weeks ago I found these stickers at Peaceable Kingdom, and thought they would be perfect on thank-you notes.

Love the Alaska stamps (wish the stinking post office would have just jumped to 45 cents from 40 cents, rather than changing the amount every two weeks!), and wish I had several more sheets of these old 1-centers, as I do not like the current version!



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updates

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Whew.

Spent last week at work in a Java programming class. This necessitated being there at 9:00, which I essentially never do, left to my own devices (SO lucky that I can come and go more or less at my pleasure, at work......).

Generally I am dropped at work in the morning by my better half who is off on his way to work at the same time I usually go.

HE did not have to be at work at 9:00..............

So I walked to work every day last week. Which is fine, but takes about three times as long as walking (10 min vs 30+ min). Which means I was getting up at about 7:20.

I know 7:20 is a lot later than a lot of people get up.

I do not do mornings well. Never have. Especially now that I wake up many times in the night WAY TOO HOT and have to fling off all the covers and wait to cool off before I can try to go back to sleep.

Anyway. Survived the week, learned a lot about Java. Walked home three of the five days, in addition to walking down all five days.

I'd been hoping I would die before they made me learn object-oriented programming, but no.



Ordinarily I stare at a screen all day long and then come home and do some more, but last week............ Couldn't do it.

Partly because our older computer takes Forever to boot. And you have to be really careful to let it boot All The Way, because ever since I put the U's virus protection on it it has bluescreened if you have the temerity to rush it by asking it to let you play solitaire while you wait for it to finish. Say.

So the notion of waiting forever for the computer to boot so I could check email or whatever was Just Too Much, and I went to bed and cut up magazines, instead.

Even if you have been with me for a long time, you may not remember this:



I blogged it back then, if you want to see more pics. Its plastic cover has the cleverest closing..........

Here and here are some of the first things I put in it.

(I decided rather quickly that I wanted the full page filled up, rather than leaving the top exposed. This meant, of course, that I had to acquire a paper punch that was about the same size as the holes in the cardstock.....)

I hadn't done anything with this teeny "book" for a long time, but last week....... Last week I filled it and then some. I can force it to close, but I think I would regret that if I did it.

(In the mean time I've acquired another couple of nearly identical items [they come in a choice of colors, of course!], and I'll start filling one of them in preference to taking a chance on hurting the first one by closing it when it's too full!)

Here it is, full.





Here's one of the images I collected last week.




Way back when I started this little "book" (April '07), I also acquired a much bigger :-) and more traditional book, which I blogged here.

I didn't like the woven paper, and haven't done any more...... Instead, I've been slowly filling that book with the same sort of extreme editing I've been doing with the other tiny "book." Find a section of a larger image which pleases me, extract same, and glue it onto the whole page of the intended size.

Here's an image collected last week.






I work this way:
Trace the size of my page (lay one down on a bigger piece of paper and follow its outline with a pencil). Cut the page shape from the bigger piece of paper. Use the resulting window to decide what part of a large image I want to keep.

I have a set of windows -- ~4" square for the little book, 2.5"x3.5" for Artist Trading Cards, the size of my filled binder-ring book, an even smaller binder-ring book I have just begun..........

Different images lend themselves to being cut up into different size/shape bits.....

I sit happily with magazines (often acquired from the freebie rack at the library) -- National Geo, Sierra Club, Martha, whatever -- and my set of windows, putting the windows over likely parts of larger images, until I what I see in a small window pleases me. Then I run my fingernail against the edge of the window to score the larger image for cutting. Only two sides; that leaves me a little slop room for imprecise scoring and/or cutting.

I cut along my scored lines (with scissors, usually, it ain't rocket science), smear the front of my page with gluestick (Uhu, usually), flip the image face down, try to put the page on it right side up!, try to get the page basically even against my scored-then-cut lines, burnish the page to the image with my fingers, trim the excess image around the edges of my page.................


Here is my newest "book" -- I think it's the same height as the other binder-ring "book", but it's narrower.





I really like this way of working.

Essentially no expense. You can cut sheets of cardstock into whatever size you want, or use cereal-box cardboard as your base, which I have done for *many* artist trading cards. Then all you need is magazines, scissors, and glue. Gluestick doesn't make your paper buckle the way liquid glue does, but I've been quite happy with collages made with liquid glue if I am verrrrry sparing with the glue...................

Essentially no mess. Paper scraps. I use parts of the magazines I don't care about keeping as a working surface when I'm gluing...........

Essentially no space needed for working. My bare pages are on a tray beside the bed (and that's where the scissors, gluestick, reading glasses) also reside. I sit with a big hardcover book (work surface!) on my lap, and spread a magazine I have already "used up" (desirable image wise) over the book when gluing.......

Reading lamp. Magazines. "Page"-size windows. Reading glasses. GO!



Next update -- Wibbs feels just fine thankyouverymuch. Perfect. Happy, goofy, lively. I estimate he has at least a week to go before he finishes this course of baytril. I need to look at his distressing-to-view red toenail, and probably take him in so they can look at that................ I didn't think it was an emergency, as it has clearly been like that for some time, so I let myself collapse after work last week instead of hustling off to the vet.........



Yesterday we scraped the newer computer's drive clean, and then commenced to reload it. The biggest fly in that ointment was that while Dell gave us all the disks they used to load the machine in the first place, the did not have the courtesy or kindness to make us a disk with the smaller drivers we would need. LIKE THE ONE TO THE ETHERNET CARD. That one is critical. It is your gateway to Out. You cannot connect to the internet without it. With no internet connection, you can't get any of the other drivers you may need, nor any updates to XP, nor anything else!

Without a second computer which is connected to the net (and without helpful colleagues at work who will answer your weekend plea for help and tell you your inability to connect sounds like a missing ethernet card driver!), you are hosed.

Dead in the water. Totally afu.

Dell could easily have burnt that driver onto a cd and included it for us, but did they? Not.

Shame on them.

We'll be burning one, ourselves, as a charm against ever (EVER) having to do this again...............................................

Feh.

Ok.

Cleansing breath.......................................

At this point, I believe XP is all updated, and has all the drivers it needs to do the things we are wont to do.

We have reloaded our data (set it up to suck all my 45,000! pictures off the external drive while we slept).

Itunes has been reinstalled, as has Firefox.

I haven't put any software back on it. Photoshop Elements, for example.

The one thing I lost was Photoshop's database of the tags I had added to pics. Where I had told Elements to keep track of stuff like "this pic was taken in Alaska," it has now totally forgotten all of that. Alas.

I knew I was losing it, but had no idea where that info was kept. Elements does, periodically, ask me to back that stuff up, but it takes F O R E V E .... R so I got lax about it. Not *entirely* sure how long-term useful all that is, anyway, as I'm not sure how long it will persist, over time, given software switches, etc, but still. A significant amount of work. I believe I do have some backups, but they are rather elderly. I suppose better than nothing.......

In any case, we are well on the way to being back where we were before the fateful day when I installed the U's virus protection..................... Huzzah.



And FINALLY -- even though it wasn't that nice a day yesterday, we went to the farmers' market. (We also raked the front yard. Almost all the leaves are off the front-yard trees, and almost none of the leaves are off the back-yard trees. A story for another day, but ... odd.)

Anyway. Farmers' market......

We got winesap apples, and russet apples, and the makings for vegetable soup.

I enjoyed this soup for the first time when my daughter was in kindergarten. Her teacher arranged 5th-grade buddies for the kindergarteners, and made use of the older kids' greater level of on-the-ball-ness and responsibility to do things like take walking field trips to the farmers' market.

Each kid had 50 cents, which they could use to buy whatever they wanted in the way of vegetables. They could pool their resources with others, or talk the farmers into selling them something for 50 cents (this was over 15 years ago, so 50 cents went a bit farther than it does now).

When we all (parental chaperones in addition to the fifth graders!) got back to school, we chopped up all the veggies, put them in a big pot with water, a glug of oil, and a lash of salt, and cooked until done.

I was very surprised at how good it was, and have been making it ever since.

This particular soup has carrots, turnips, rutabaga, potatoes, cabbage, spinach, and a can of tomatoes. I added some red pepper in addition to salt and olive oil.

Update, 11-2: I forgot the onion and garlic (which we already had at home). Onion, chopped, and plenty of garlic, put through the garlic press.

Yum. With the possible exception of the salt, totally good for you. And beautiful.



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another quilt weekend in Chicago

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This last weekend was the big quilt show in Chicago. I'll have lots to show you, but haven't sucked any pictures off the camera card yet.

In the mean time, I'll start with the most exciting thing that happened to me (since the pics are already at Blogger from 2007).

You may recall that Quilting Arts published this book two years ago.





You may recall that one of my artist trading cards was published in the book.





In 2007, at the big Chicago show, Quilting Arts had a wall covered with ATCs to trade. You could take home as many as you brought to trade. I traded a bunch, and later discovered that several of the ones I'd chosen were in the book.

Clearly the Quilting Arts people were disbursing their collection.

These big quilt shows happen in Houston and California, in addition to Chicago, so I imagined that if they put my card out for trading it went somewhere else.

Last year they did not organize ATC trading.

This year, they did.

Can you tell where I am going?

My published card was on the wall. Just waiting for me to reclaim it.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I had brought a few ATCs for trading, just in case I saw something I wanted, and was thrilled to regain the one which appears in the book.

Yay!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Michelle Stitzlein

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Have a look at Michelle Stitzlein's excellent sculpture. These are big (in situ in top left thumbnail).

Be sure to click on the thumbnails on the right in the middle row. The detail is amazing.

I would love to own one of these. Or to go play in her studio........

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stamps

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I went to a stamp show. One vendor had bins of uncancelled US stamps, at face value.

I got lots.

Isn't this fun?

I was tempted to not put names on, as the intended recipient could be divined from the stamps, but I wanted their arrival to be a surprise..........







Aren't these old stamps cool? So much *tiny* detail........

There are so many cool new stamps, too. Love the new Eames ones..... The old ones are cool in a different way. Wondering how on earth anyone could see to work so small, and then, what tools they had to do the eensy engraving........



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a present for me!

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Look what I got! Mary Ann, at Dispatch from LA, pulled numbers out of a hat to give away some zines. The zines are cool enough, but look how they arrived!









Doesn't Mary Ann have a lot of cool stuff, and doesn't she turn it into even cooler stuff???

I feel very lucky to have a Mary Ann original. :-)


Also lucky to receive these! I spent several hours yesterday, immersed in zinery, and will spend several more.

Thanks, Mary Ann!



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hommage à Mary Ann Moss

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Mary Ann, over at Dispatch from LA has been photographing Chinese lanterns, then making collages using her images (and other ephemera). She uses the collages as journal pages. I love her work..... Read the words in her post, too........ I'll wait for you.

Nice, eh?



Not having a Chinatown here, I found one lantern.

Here's my original image:





Here is my inspired-by-Mary-Ann image:





I selected just the lantern, made it a new layer (by copying), and then slipped a color-only teal layer between the lantern and the background, and messed with the opacity till I was satisfied with the depth of color. I looked through my "texture" pics, and chose a scratchy-looking cement wall. I copied that on top of the other layers, and then adjusted the opacity to suit. I put the text on. I used the "impressionist brush" on the edges (trying things at random! and discovering that the faster I moved the "brush," and the smaller I made it, the more ragged the edge).

Then I saved it as a jpg, and opened the new jpg. After copying the background to a layer, I selected the white area around the edge, deleted that white, and added a drop shadow. Then I decided the contrast was a bit stark with the white background, so I slid a gray solid-color layer between the background and the ragged-edge copy. I messed with the opacity of the gray a bit, slid up the saturation, and declared done-ness.

Not nearly as nice as Mary Ann's. So much less rich (love the herbal suppliment bit in the corner. and the other ephemera she used.....) But ya gotta love teal and orange.......... And ya gotta start somewhere. I want to do more and more digital collage......................

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more mail

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Playing with the stamps I bought at the stamp show last fall.

Airmail, airmail, and more airmail.

It's fun when the denomination of the stamp is way less than the amount required -- you can use so many more of these nice stamps.



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mail

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I suppose it's a stretch to call this "mail art".........

Last fall I went to my first stamp show. There were all sorts of interesting stamps, and lots of them weren't all that expensive. (I am sure there were plenty that were expensive, but I didn't look at those.....)

My favorite vendor had big bins of uncancelled US stamps. At face value, so any I don't use in art projects can be used as ... postage!

I had fun picking out lots of "free" (since they could be used as postage and I'd be buying stamps for postange anyway!) stamps that were interesting to me for one reason or another.

This is the first time I used any of them.

I enjoy watching the Olympics, and it is possible that we will know someone who goes to swim for the USA. One of my daughter's high school swim team "sisters" was a member of the 2004 Olympic team, and several other members of that high school team will also swim in this year's Olympic trials.

It's even more fun to watch the Games when someone you know is on the team!

Good luck at the trials Kara Lynn, Melissa, Margaret, Lizzie, T.! Swim fast!



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mail art

Mail art is all the rage amongst people who do collage.

My first attempt:




This is the outside of a thank-you package to Mom, for taking us to Alaska.

This is the back. The glitter glue looks rather more like a snail trail here than in real life.....

The front is another map, of the continental US (including Alaska). I drew lines on it showing where we came from, where we went, where we ended up..... My arm/hand make a decent compass, I found, at least for shortish circle segments.


I love maps, and I love that I can buy an atlas at the library used-book sale for $1. At that price, they aren't too precious to cut up..... The pages were nice and heavy, too, and didn't buckle when smeared with glue.

printing class

I actually have done something besides edit photos and write blog posts, over the last week. I worked at my day job, stuffed pills down canine throats, ate delicious dinners prepared by my daughter,






and.........

The local quilt guild puts on an extravaganza of classes every other year. This was the year, and last weekend was the weekend.

On Friday I took a print-making class from Deb Gash. We made printing plates from very concentrated (unflavored, unsweetened) gelatin. We put fabric paint on the gelatin plates, and then......................

My first efforts were very dyerly. Not a surprise, I guess, since I haven't made any prints since junior high, but have dyed yards (and yards) of fabric and lots of garments.

The colors make me think of Alaska.....







Deb kept showing us different ways to make marks.

She had a copy of a very cool print by someone who makes a variety of marks in the black ink on his plate before pulling a print. Inspired by that, I launched into a series of prints that clearly show the marks of the brayer (rolling paint onto the gelatin) and scribbles made with two different altered "credit cards." You can't see the dog hair that pervades my work as it does my life (though you can in many of my other prints), but you can see the imperfections in my gelatin plate manifesting themselves in this print, along with my deliberately-made marks.........

I am pretty happy with this. My plate was 8"x12", so my prints are a bit less.






Here's another one I'm happy with.

I rolled paint onto the plate with a brayer, then arranged a piece of cheesecloth on the plate. I pulled a throw-away print (the first ones from this series are yawn-making, but necessary to stick the cheesecloth down well and to remove a bunch of paint where the cheesecloth isn't), then pulled up the cheesecloth and took the real print (without adding any more paint).

Be sure to click on it and see the larger version. Oooh, eh?






I learned that while print-making can be a very fussy and precise business, it can also be loose and easy and experimental. I could never get into the fussy and precise parts (worry about having brayer marks? ack! no thanks!), but the experimental "what happens if I do *this*??" parts -- fun!

I kept wondering how you could get the different effects in Photoshop..... Wouldn't it be cool if you could get the edges you see above where the ink/paint was scraped thinner/thicker by the credit cards?????? Oooooh!

digital patchwork, 2

Definitely time to start thinking outside the quilting box.

After yesterday's effort, I wanted to cut a square out of the iris petal and rotate it.

I started with the four 90-degree rotations, and made a bunch of copies.

I wanted to do a 4x4 arrangement, with no duplication in any row or column. I started by arranging one corner, but then couldn't get anything I liked for the rest of it. I tried systematically placing the squares (square A1 in column 1, row1; square A2 in column 2, row 2; etc), and didn't like any of the results.

Finally I arranged the center as I liked, and then surrounded that, and it worked. Purple needs orange, no? Poppy for an orange border on the center medallion. I went back to the iris and cut a rectangle to use for the bulk of the next border. Back to the iris again for the corner squares, and back to the poppy for a skinny "binding."

I believe I've accomplished what I meant to do with this.

But it's definitely time to break out and see what I want to do with *this* medium that I couldn't do with a hard-copy medium.................

digital patchwork

Digital images, cut up and arranged. A first attempt at this process. Interesting how it is like, and unlike, working with fabric, which I have done manymany times. As you can tell. This is very quilterly....................

Anything I work on this much -- not sure yet how much I like it.

(Considering "this much" in the context of quilting......... Amused. "I mean, it was, like, allllllllll afternoon!" Even with as few pieces of fabric as this, I could not have produced an entirely finished object in one afternoon. Unless it were all fused, with no "finished edges" or anything.............)

My favorite thing about it is the iris petal going up and down, above and below the green stuff in the middle.

I also like the little "wrapped" thingies in the turquoise border, even though they took me nearly as long as the whole rest of it.

rainy NY

Sisters Linda Woods and Karen Dinino wrote Visual Chronicles (gorgeous, inspiring work!), and have a blog.

They offered to snail postcards to anyone who wanted to play with one.

Here is my response. I tried for a taxi-cab yellow background, subdued by the rainy day. I put the checkerboard around Linda and Karen's postcard, added some iconic New York images, and more rain......

I have only done a very sparse handful of digital collages, and I want to do more..... (click on it to see a larger version)

Thanks, Linda and Karen, for the invitation to play!

ATC swap

Cloth, Paper, Scissors hosted an ATC swap at the Chicago quilt show.

I wondered how it would work -- what if you wanted to trade with someone who didn't really want one of your cards?

It was set up in an excellent way. There was a big section of wall, covered with carpet. The person helping us handed out stick-on velcro circles. We stuck the velcro on the back of our card(s), and then stuck the cards to the wall. We could take as many cards as we brought to exchange, up to 5.

I didn't have a set ready that were particularly collage-y.

These are my original photographs (except for the zebra, all taken in Chicago -- how apropos), and I did photoshop them all..... So even though not a lot was done with the physical media, I did work on them..........

I dithered about even taking them (not right for this trade?????), and then decided that the worst thing that could happen was that no one would want to trade (that was before I knew about the wall).

The bottom row were the ones I put on the wall, and the top row I took just in case I wanted extras for some reason. I was glad to have the extras -- I handed a couple of them out like business cards.

They did not go like hotcakes. The last time I looked at the wall, two (three?) were still there. My buddy K told me she thought they were commercial photos I had cut out and put on there. Maybe that's what other people thought, too. Ah well.



















Here's what I took in trade. (The stick-on velcro bits came right off, with the exception of hand-made paper, and, oddly enough, the "cellophane" envelope one of them came in -- the stick-on would NOT come off that........)



















Top left, Susan Gafford. Top right, Evalyn Gust.

Bottom left, Belinda Spiwak, Bottom center, Lori Hennig. Bottom right, Jill Booker.


Thank you, all, very much!

demos and mini-classes

Cloth, Paper, Scissors and Quilting Arts (sister publications) had a lot going on at the show. Not only did they have a large booth full of gorgeous books (including the 1000 ATC book which includes mine own effort), but they sponsored mini-classes, and had lots of artists around, working right in the middle of things so you could get right up close and personal to watch, ask questions, chat.

I was so excited to see Cheryl Prater that I didn't think to take one pic.

I have a project in mind that requires 1.5" squares of ... something flat and stiff. I had thought of matt board (but ick -- all that cutting!!!!!!!). I went to the art supply store to ask questions, but didn't think of hitting the scrapbooking supplies stores.....

In the few days before the big Chicago quilt show, I stumbled across Cheryl's blog. Cheryl has little kids, so doing anything every day is even harder for her than for those of us with college kids. She is making one 1.5" collage every day ... on boughten 1.5" cardboard squares!!!!

You can imagine how thrilled I was to learn that such things existed! I went looking for them in my area, found some, and when I went back to Cheryl's blog to write her a thank you note, I accidentally killed the browser window.

Horrors! I had no idea how I got there, and had been so excited to find the supplies I needed that I hadn't paid any attention to anything other than Cheryl's excellent tiles (as she calls her work on these little squares). I didn't know her name, I didn't know her blog's name......... Phooey!

When I saw Cheryl sitting at the Cloth, Paper, Scissors artist's table at the quilt show, I recognized her work instantly, and knew she was the person whose blog had directed me to the Bazzill Chips 1.5" squares. I told her about it in exhausting detail. She is an engaging and very funny person, and I'm so glad I could thank her for showcasing the Chips, and that I had a chance to chat with her a bit. She told me that the Chips were for sale in the Cloth, Paper, Scissors booth, and I was very pleased to make some of them mine!

I tried to take Cheryl's mini-class, but didn't get in -- there was a lottery to get into the classes. My friend K got in, so I sat on the sidelines and kibitzed, which was almost as much fun as getting to take the class.....


Another teacher-of-mini-classes we met was Jill Haglund, who writes and publishes gorgeous books on a wide variety of topics. I bought an ATC book from her, and my friend K bought a book of scrapbooking paper.

K got into Jill's class, but I didn't, so I sat on the sidelines again. Jill was so kind to me -- she gave me a batch of supplies and encouraged me to lean over the barriers and make something anyway. That class was tags, which were inked and collaged and then finally dipped in wax. For a mixed-media person, I'm pretty minimal.... Jill had coffee-stained the tags, and I liked that so much I didn't really want to cover it up..... Here is my effort, with inks and a little bit of collage on the front, and even less collage on the back. It was very interesting to see what the wax did. It made the inks even more vivid, but made the glued-on image fade out a bit. Interesting......... Jill has wonderful books on many topics (when does she sleep???). I bought her ATC book.




















I did get to take a fabric postcard class from Judy at ArtisticArtifacts, which was lots of fun. She gave us a bunch of fun stuff to play with, which we fused to something stiff enough to actuallysend through the mail.

My favorite part of this is the center section. I like the dyed piece of fabric, and I love the skinny ripped blue bit and the stitches. I've been thinking I want to do more stitching on my little fabric pieces, so I collected inspiring images of work with hand stitching on them while at the show.




















K and I tried to get into the Saturday mini-class taught by the ArtGirlz, but neither of us got in. They had excellent supplies for sale in their booth, and we both acquired some of those.

This is Kelli Perkins, demonstrating her paper beads. A long strip of paper (map, old children's book, etc), rolled up around a straw, then dipped in embossing powder, gell medium, wrapped in angelina fiber, etc. Don't you just want to jump in and play with all her toys?

published!

Published!

When you see this in your local bookstore:

























Check on page 309 for this:

























The fabric was handpainted by Clare Smith of New Zealand.

I am thrilled to have work in such a gorgeous book!