Give Thanks

Thought I'd share a Thanksgiving themed banner I just finished making that says:

GIVE THANKS

It is made out of flower/stars made from folded book pages (from an old paperback), threaded on vintage lime green seam binding, and the letters printed out on cardstock from the instructions which are free and over at Bitter Betty's.

Easy to make, a great sentiment for the season and virtually free. I like how it looks against my green living room wall and reminds me everytime I see it, that being thankful is the order of the day. Maybe I'll just leave it up all year round!

Also, make sure and check out her awesome new book Show Off!,How to Do Absolutely Everything One Step At A Time great for holiday gift giving to pre-teens! My son got to help test out some of the projects which were super fun.

The True Value of Play

"Has anyone seen Cinderella lately?"
Teeny tiny pumpkins with teeny tiny Snow White.
This seventh chapter of The Joy Diet was about Play and it was a real surprise to me.
I had pictured something more like the last chapter on Treats, but this was completely different and very useful. Getting down to what's really important in your life, answering the question "how do you want the world to be different when you're gone?" Whatever your reply is, that is what author Martha Beck calls your "real career". So then you have to realize that everything you do every day has to support the answer you give to that question. What else is there right? Just procrastination, straight-out avoidance and spending too much time in maintenance activities. "Playing the martyr by doing maintenance work that keeps you eternally away from your eagle goals may be your way of dodging the scary, exhilarating work of your real career."
Pshew, that's a big one isn't it? Well it was for me. But, now that I've got this idea down of switching between mouse view and eagle view of what I'm doing in the moment: "In Sioux Indian culture, the eagle symbolizes the ability to see distant goals and vast scenarios with great acuity. The mouse is a metaphor for the state of mind that focuses completely on the thing right in front of it, putting all its attention on exploring whatever it is with eyes, nose, whiskers, and tiny little paws"
I think it will now be easier to keep on my right path by staying loose, playful and experimenting with what works and gets me closer to what I really truly want to be doing, instead of making sure my kitchen sink is the cleanest and sparkliest ever.

The Leaves Are Falling

The leaf blocks are getting made one by one. Here are the ones I've made so far based on freebie blocks I found online in various places.This one is a 3D maple leaf, the points are basically little pockets. Kind of a cool look, and there were instructions I didn't read at the end, that would make it even more 3D, little tucks to make as you sew the pockety points.

A paper-pieced leaf, lost the web address for this one, sorry that I can't link to it.

Left over squares made up into a good old 9 patch. I figure this will come in handy when I'm fitting together all these leaf blocks.

An applique chestnut leaf (with two chestnuts that look kinda like cocktail olives). I love this background fabric.

An in-process oak leaf ring. There are going to be acorns also. And I'll be satin stitching around all the shapes too.

So that's all the new leaves so far, they are looking good with the leaf blocks that I already had from the long ago block swap. Not sure that the quilt will be together in time for Thanksgiving this year, well truthfully I'm pretty sure it won't be! But it is still fun to work with the fall colored fabrics at this time of year.

The Queen's Return

My altered board book of Queens has returned from its year-long rounds through the hands of several Traveler's Hart artists and it really is great! This is the cover that I did that survived all the travelling much much better than I'd thought it would. Guess that foam padding helped, I thought for sure I'd lose at least one of the letter tiles. All that extra glue and glitter held it together though.
This is how the first spread by Kathy Martin looks, aren't these colors and transparencies fabulous? So much great complexity on these pages.

This is an almost graffitti looking urban design, how about all those great fonts together? I loved the little message pocket on the right, it has a very cool poem on it.
Turning the page we get to meet the Queen of The Rodeo by Terry Owenby. Doesn't that expression just make you smile?

and her neighbor The Button Queen by Shelley Boose, love all the embellishments on this page, so dimensional.



Next up is Queen For A Day! by Kim Wood. She's used some of my favorite vintage Anne Taintor imagery.She's co-ruling the Queenly Housewife page spread with Queen Of Her Kitchen by Vivan Montre. She looks like she would scare the potatoes right out of their jackets with her intensity.

Here's my page spread with the signature card pocket on the far right.


Here are the signature cards, actually queens of various suits from a couple decks of playing cards which each artist altered to suit her work.

And the reverse of those cards.
What a fun collaboration! I'm so glad that I played in this project because I learned a lot working on all these altered board books.

You can see the work I did in all the other altered board books for this project:

Jewels & Treasures,

Land Of Sky Blue Water,

Doorways & Passages,

Inspirational Quotes,

Favorite Quotes,

Eat Your Vegies.

Heavy vs. Light

Dichroic glass=very heavy. Especially for quilt embellishments. To support a piece such as the large triangle on the left without distorting the quilt surface would take some engineering. Which is probably why these are unused as of now. Maybe they should just be jewelry instead, several of them look like they'd be great pins. I think Margaret Ball gave me these ages ago and I'm sorry I haven't ever used them, just taken them out every now and then and enjoyed looking at them. They have so much depth and you always find something new to see within the glass. They've been in a little box which just got discovered (during my recent embossing heat gun search) with these completely opposite embellishments-to-be-used:

These are metallic painted and heat treated Tyvek "jewels". That's how I always think of these, because of the shiny metallic paint that I used, they really glow and have a nice shine. In a different way than the dichroic glass above of course, but still shiny. I think they have a lot of presence because of their unusual and organic shapes, you're not sure what exactly they are, so they require more up close investigation.

The way that the Tyvek folds in on itself and bubbles up is so unpredictable which is a big part of the fun of making these. They are easy to use as an embellishment on a quilt, you can pierce them pretty easily with a needle and they are super lightweight and easy to bead upon.

Another reason that I need to find my embossing heat gun, so I can make some more of these!

I've used Tyvek embellishments on two quilts Meteor Meltdown and Open Book, Blue and I think I need to definitely use these in some upcoming quilts.

Some of My Favorite Tools

Here is one of my favorite pieces of fabric from my recent painting extravaganza. It wasn't ironed very well when I started painting , so that ended up creating cool and unexpected lines toward the bottom where the wrinkles were. This is from the paint getting stopped in a line as I sponged it on. I used the following two tools with black, gold and mustard yellow paint.

This is the type of sponge that I like to use for painting, a hydrophilic (meaning loves and attracts water) foam. It acts very differently than the usual cellulose kitchen sponge (related to the sponge printing from yesterday's post). I cut up the big sponge into smaller, more usable pieces, wet it, squeeze out the excess water, and then dip it into some paint colors and pounce,dab and/or smear the paint onto the fabric.

The second tool used to create this piece is plastic furniture carpet protectors. You can get these at the hardware store, so far I've only found these two shapes, but I have seen them in smaller sizes. I just dip them into the paint that I'm using, or sponge some paint onto the prongs and then print right onto the fabric.
I really like the orderliness of the dots along with the chaotic sponged on color.

This piece was also made with just one tool.

A smallish (3x4") piece of a styrofoam food tray, deeply incised with a ballpoint pen. I sponge the paint right onto the foam surface and then print it onto the fabric.

Another one tool piece.A thick piece of design board (like posterboard with foam in the middle), cut on one of the edges to secure a heavy string wrapped around in a pattern. It is becoming a neat object all on its own after all the times that I've used it now.

This piece was made by spongeing paint onto the fabric which is on top of bubble wrap, that gives the background texture, then the round furniture protector was used to provide all those regular dots.

Simple Sponge Stamping

Another round of painting, actually stamping with paint this time, using compressed cellulose sponges.

The sponge itself is pretty thin, about the weight of a thick card stock, very easy to cut with regular scissors. I believe I bought a package of these sponges at Trader Joe's, but Dharma Trading also carries them.
Here's my painting set-up of an ironed piece of white broadcloth, several pieces of paper sandwich wrap (like delis use), with a piece of freezer paper underneath to keep my table top dry and paint-free. I re-use the freezer paper over and over again until it gets too much paint on it. The deli paper absorbs excess paint and moisture and ends up being pretty usable itself for collage and other uses.

Here is the shape I cut out of the compressed sponge. surprise surprise a spiral. Keep it a simple shape, you're not going to get a huge amount of detail with this method.

"Just add water" and pow, look how big it is all of a sudden. Make sure to squeeze out the excess water before you continue with the paint, otherwise you'll just get a lot of smeary mess without the texture of the sponge.

To apply paint I made a small unmixed puddle of the colors I wanted to use (just plain old craft acrylics, nothing fancy or specific textile paints) on a Styrofoam tray (cheap and easy palette!) and dipped the sponge spiral into it, checking to make sure that there was paint all over the shape before stamping.

The upper left is the first stamping, you can see how the extra water bleeds out into the fabric which gives it a watercolor type of look.

In the upper right I pulled the spiral apart a bit as I set it down on the fabric to give a slightly different shape.

The lower right is just the sponge plopped down tightly curled up. A lot of easy variation between stampings.

More and more layerings of the image being built up, with mostly gold/yellow paint on top of the gold/green mixture I started with. Since you're stamping with very little paint the fabric won't get too terribly stiff, it will still be easily sewable.

Here's how it looks when it is all dry.

If you want to re-use the sponge shape again, make sure to wash it out immediately otherwise it will become stiff and unusable when the paint inside the sponge dries and hardens.

Flowing Colors

I was looking for my embossing heat gun and ended up unpacking the last two big remaining studio "stuff" boxes and uncovered all the fun paint and dye and surface design goodies I haven't used in quite a long while. Guess since I packed them up way back when before the house remodel...Anyways never did find the heat gun, but ended up having fun painting and fooling around with some liquid pigment dyes (Dharma and Createx), as well Dr. Ph.Martin's Spectralite airbrush color and liquid acrylics. I'd bought these from Dharma Trading ages ago, and had never used them. I knew they were unused because they still had the black electrical tape that Dharma uses around the tops of containers that they ship out.

This one is all Dr. Ph. Martin's Spectralite, very free flowing, watercolor-ish, mixed easily on the fabric as I wetted it. I like the clarity and intensity of these colors.
This one has all of the different pigments plus some silver Deka fabric paint on top. Some of the pigments are very concentrated (the Dharma brand especially) and are made to be used diluted, some are made to be used as is straight out of the bottle. This piece turned a little muddy and indistinct as it dried, I think I got the fabric a bit too wet in this case. Looks like a good start on a background though.

A Lock Box

What's this?
Yes, another box. Why not, right? Turns out I have a whole lot of boxes in the queue just hanging out waiting to be decorated. This is an old vitamin box, I love these for keeping bead projects together, especially because it has a sliding lock.

I used the origami paper leftovers from the shoe box, along with some cancelled stamps from Japan and a lot of matte medium to hold it all down. I love the green/red complementary look with the black white checks.

Guess I need to put something on the inside of the lid since I didn't take off the label first.

Am I done with boxes yet? We'll see when I sit down to make something tomorrow...

A Box Filled With Affirmations

Yesterday I made a third box in a row. Not intentionally working in a series, I'm just on a box decorating jag for some reason. This box holds circular affirmation cards, (box and cards were free downloads) .
The box is folded from card stock which I painted in purples and greens, and covered the lid in a grey silver pinstripe.

The edges are painted silver, a smiling moon is stamped in silver with some silver embossing glitter over that. As well as some phrases that I felt went along with the idea of the affirmations.

The lid has a domino and a ball-bearing. The domino functions as a handle to open the box.

Inside the ball-bearing is a small silver charm that reads Thank-You. All held in place with lots of glue and why not some silver glitter.
Everything then has a coating of matte medium which made the box feel much more sturdy than just folded card stock once it dried.

Three Things To Keep Me Busy

Three things I'm participating in this month, all alphabet soup titles, but still all three seemed like a good fit:

Yes, I'm trying NaNoWriMo one more time. So far so good, I'm already up to more than 6,000 words out of the goal of 50,00 this month. And I have chosen a much more open ended story this time. Last time around I really wrote myself into a corner and just kinda gave up.A new one that I've heard a lot of good things about. It was inspired by NaNoWriMo, but Art Every Day Month sounded like something I could use this month to keep me going on the creative art making path. It will be interesting to see how it balances out with NaNoWriMo or if one turns out to be more compelling or useful or easy or hard.
And after two succesful months in a row of posting everyday on this blog, I feel like I'm in the habit so I signed up for the official NaBloPoMo- National Blog Posting Month (also inspired by NaNoWriMo). Hopefully the daily posting won't fall by the wayside, but since I'm supposed to be making and sharing Art Every Day (see above) hopefully-fingers-crossed it won't be a problem.
Hope your November is full of daily challenges and fun too.

If The Shoe Fits

Here's another box that I've just finished, this time a shoe shaped paper mache' that came just plain with the red twisted paper on the top.

I covered it inside and out with Japanese origami paper and painted the edges and shoe rim with red acrylic paper.
A coat of matte medium to seal the whole thing.

It is a late birthday gift for a friend, hope she likes it!