"Creative people are curious, flexible, persistent, and independent; with a tremendous spirit of adventure and a love of play."~~Henri Matisse
Saturday afternoon Jan. 25th was the second class of Postcard Panache. These ladies couldn’t make the first class, so I scheduled another one. There were supposed to be a couple more gals but something came up and got in their way! Here are Mary Ann and Bonnie learning some things about Angelina fibers.
Next class: Saturday, March 8, I will be teaching a fiber photo collage class. Students will learn a bit about collage-making with fibers, photo transfer, and hand stitching. Class sample…
Here’s a couple more pieces of my exhibit that have not been seen on my blog before.
Sticks and Stones #3
Rust dyed cotton sateen, silk screening, stenciling, applique, hand writing, paint, ink, dyes, stitching with polyester thread.
Sticks and Stones #4
Rust dyed feed sack, discharge dyed cotton sateen, silk screened, stenciled and stamped, paint, dyes and automatic dish washing liquid and other discharging products, hand writing, inks, stitching with polyester thread.
Last week I was working on getting some things ready to sell. I often do events in New Harmony, IN and have a lot of photographs from that historic tourist town. I decided to start a series of collages from photographs that might be appealing to visitors to the area.
Stories of New Harmony: Brick, log cabins mixed with modernity.
Stories of New Harmony #1
Stories of New Harmony #2
Stories of New Harmony #3
Stories of New Harmony #4
Stories of New Harmony #5
Stories of New Harmony #6
Stories of New Harmony #7
Here are some more bags I have stitched up. However, according to comments on the previous post, the boxed bottoms have won….so these will be getting pleats momentarily.
Ok, I need some help. I was thinking about making the bags a little different than I usually do….but then I couldn’t resist making some with a boxed bottom. You tell me which you like best.
Is it this way?
Or this way?
They are pretty cute sitting up….
I love what I do. I love my work. Looking at inventory after the past weekend, I decided I needed to dye a few more scarves and make a few more small bags. I am almost out of the ArtFul cloth zippered bags. And so this a.m. finds me printing cloth. I have 11 ready to stitch!
Killing time waiting for them to dry (actually, I’m taking a break), I was looking at my favorite pages on Facebook and came across something everyone might be interested in. Linda Matthews has gathered 250 free handbag and tote pattern links from across the web all on one page. There are so many cute bags on there! Now I want to make some just for fun. I have added the link permanently to my sidebar under her name, but here it is too. Free patterns for purses and bags.
Working out in the patio yesterday, I dyed 10 of these…Sweet little onesies for sweet little babies.
Between Monday and Tuesday, I finished 8 new silk scarves and have 3 more waiting to finish. I need some time to decide how to finish them. I want to do more wax designs. There is only one in this group using my new “BIG sponge” stamp. I love the BIG sponge.
This weekend at the market was a good one…weather not tooooo terribly hot and customers coming and buying. I sold 4 pairs of my hand made bead earrings…3 pair with fabric beads and one pair with felt beads. Hmmm…these could do well, so last night I made more beads before going to bed so they would have all night to dry. I had a piece of cloth with a design stamped on it in ink that I thought would make pretty beads…BUT..the ink ran when I applied the glue/water mix, so that idea didn’t work very well.
Bright idea…make beads FIRST, THEN stamp with inks! Ta da! They roll quite easily over a stamp image. Can’t wait to get these made up into earrings.
I have been packaging some photography that I have for sale. I thought it would be a good idea to trace over some interesting shapes and lines in these photos before I sealed them in their sleeves. With these pencil tracings on tracing paper, I can flip them over and RUB the tracing onto the very inexpensive product called Foamies. Now Foamies makes their own shapes and sells them complete with adhesive on the back so you can make stamps, but I prefer to be more original and adventurous so I made mine from the plain sheets of foam and cut out my own shapes from a drawing or the shapes from my photographs. The exciting thing about this type of stamp is that you can press into it with a pencil and create wonderful details…or not, as the case may be. Your image can be as basic and primitive as you like it or more detailed.
Who doesn’t from time to time need the image of part of an old building that looks like it is on a slope?
I take photographs of old barns and sheds with all of the lines of slats they have. For instance…
…from this photo, I made a tracing of the doorway in the lower right hand corner, pressed it onto the foam, cut it out, and made pencil marks on the lines of the slats…
…to make this stamp
Results?
More stamps from drawings.
Distress ink is too wet and doesn’t stamp really well unless you want that kind of look.
You can create positive or negative images. Foamies sheets are very useful tools.
