New Year Projects

It takes a couple weeks to be back to normal after Christmas.  Things to put away, shuffling around of projects, deciding what to start on in the new year.  January usually ends up being about finishing up loose ends and doing small projects.

I haven't done much so far but I've made a couple new tarot card bags and worked on some artwork. 

These are the two sides of a lined and quilted 6" x 8" bag.

And these are the two sides of a lined and quilted 51/2" x 81/2" bag.

My main goal was to make a bag for new tarot cards I received for Christmas. 

The cards came with an instruction book but not a correctly sized box for the cards so naturally I had to make a bag for the cards. I tried to pick fabric from my collection with colors similar to the artwork on the cards. 

The cards have beautiful artwork with subdued colors from nature. All the fabric I picked out just happened to be batik. The colors and prints seemed to match the natural theme of the cards.

These two bags are the only projects I've completed this month but I've been playing with some art ideas and collage artwork.

I did some experimenting to find a pen or pencil I can use in an acrylic mixed media artwork that would not smear if painted over with clear acrylic medium.  This is the practice canvas and the two artworks I'm experimenting with. 

And I found some fabric in a color I adore (Moda Basic Grey Grunge Turquoise) and tried to recreate that magical color in artwork. Wouldn't it be fun to paint an entire wall this way? It could be a color therapy wall. Looking at this color just makes me feel good. 

It took a mix of several hues to come close to the same color turquoise.

Thanks for reading. 

Aileen 

Halloween Deadline

Talk about last minute projects. There's nothing like a looming deadline to motivate action. We'll see how much I actually get done in two days. I'm not trying to do too much, just a couple placemats. And I don't usually get into Halloween that much but I found some really cute grungy Halloween fabric (Eerie by BasicGrey) and had to have it (on sale of course), and the scraggly cat Sebastion from the Ghastlies fabric line was also a 'must have'. 

And I found some neat spooky cemetery fabric at JoAnn's fabric store (also on sale, there is a benefit to waiting until the last minute). I plan on using a solid piece of that for one side of a  reversible placemat and patchwork a tombstone design for the other side. I'll post the results, hopefully in two days!

With all this fabric I'll get ideas as I go along. Each placemat will be different, spiderwebs, skulls, cats, cemeteries, bats. Lots of creepy spooky stuff. Mwahahaha...