Where is my Round TUIT?

This is simply a list of all the blog entries I intended to write but never got around to doing. Why? I don't know. I either didn't have a good enough photo, or I couldn't think of what I wanted to write, or I was busy making something else that I would eventually not get around to writing a blog entry about, or I was busy reading a book, doing housework, or surfing Pinterest.  It doesn't really matter. Most of the time I just forget to do it and get sidetracked doing something else. Which makes me ask myself, "Why am I writing this blog anyway?" and if I cared about it "Why do I procrastinate on writing these entries?".  When I'm motivated and care about something I get it done. So this is something I should think about.  In the meantime, this is a list of things I have been doing over the past several months. I'll include a short description for each item and a photo if I have one. Here goes.

January thru June 2014

* Embroidered quilt pieces, red heart quilt pieces and a Quilted Eyeglass case

These are simple scrap quilt pieces that I have been working on, on and off now for awhile, building up a pile of 'things' to make other 'things' with. The eyeglass case is one 'thing' I made from the other 'things', the embroidered quilt pieces. I think I posted a photo of this to Facebook.

* Sky Photo Book, digital collages, and digital art

This is the result of my 2013 365 day project. I took a photo of the skyline out my front kitchen window everyday for one year. I put all those photos in a photo book I made on Shutterfly for myself and I created digital collages of all the photos and then used those photo collages to create digital art in apps on my iPad. 

* Icicle ornaments with red and blue colored copper wire

This is a continuation of the icicle ornaments I was making for Christmas 2013. Even after making several and giving them as gifts in 2013, I still had several vintage glass beads to use on more projects. I found some beautiful red and turquoise colored copper wire to use instead of simple silver and copper colored copper wire and wire forms for snowflake shape beaded ornaments. 

* Wire wrapped tree of life with pyrite beads

I really like the wire wrapped tree-of-life pendants and ornaments I've seen and I keep making them trying to get better at it. I've seen so many beautiful ones on Pinterest, they are all very inspirational and I have a few design ideas I want to try. I choose pyrite for this one because it was a gift for my son's birthday and I put 20 beads for his age and made it into something that could be a key chain if he wanted to use it that way. 

* Collages with painted paper, Blue Butterfly, Orange Butterfly, Flowers and Butterfly

Last summer I posted photos of butterfly collages made with fabric, paint and some paper. I'm still drawn to the butterfly theme in artwork and explore different ways to represent it.  In the last year I have been doing some mixed media painting exercises I found in books and on line and I've compiled a large collected of painted papers to use in collages. I've completed three more butterfly collages done in paper and paint on canvas and each time I do one I learn a little more. 

* Collage with Big Leaf

One day, a couple summers ago, my husband came in from doing the yard work carrying a big leaf (9"x6") full of holes. It was cool looking and he thought I might want to use it in some project. He knows by now that almost everything I touch I can find some use for and the more mixed media work I do, everything becomes a 'potential' subject, tool, element, etc...  I wasn't sure what to do with it at first but I definitely wanted to use it. So to preserve it for future use I first painted it with acrylic paint and used it to stamp some prints on sheets of paper, then I basically glued the entire holy leaf onto another sheet of white paper with clear acrylic gloss medium and set it and the stamped papers aside, ... until this year. I was sorting through some papers and came across that leaf and stampings and had an idea for a collage. This was one of those instances when everything else I was doing was put on hold until I finished the collage with that Big Leaf. 

* Spoonflower fabric, hunt for the reddest red

I love the concept of what Spoonflower does, design your own fabric and have it printed out. How cool is that?! Awesome! I was so excited when I found their site a few years ago, I immediately joined and set about preparing some of my quilt designs in Photoshop Elements (PSE) to try out their service. I even researched how to correctly create a seamless repeat pattern and created a test print file of what I was working on to have printed. I ordered a print of that design on a quarter yard of fabric and anxiously waited to see my design printed on fabric. Sadly, I was disappointed. Not In the quality of the print or the fabric, but in the colors. I use a lot of primary colors, especially red and black in my designs, and all my reds printed orange and some of the other colors shifted. I knew they had a color code guide for their fabric printing but I was hoping I wouldn't have to get that technical in my PSE editing. No such luck. At that point it didn't look like even changing the color codes in my design would print a Red I would be happy with. I didn't want to go through multiple experimental prints (they all cost something) and more PSE edits. I decide to wait. Spoonflower was bound to improve in multiple ways over time and I would feel more like doing all the technical work to find the color code and print match I was looking for further down the line. 

And that's what I did this year. I purchased a print of their new, improved, color code chart and created a repeat print pattern in PSE8 using their codes of all the reds I wanted to test and all the primary colors I was likely to use in a design. I'm happy to say it turned out beautiful and there are multiple 'reds' that meet my design needs. I haven't done any more with this for now but I am working on some Christmas fabric designs that use bright colors, including red, and I am curious to see how they would come out. 

* Simple placemats

This is one of those boring, simple, but satisfying craft projects. I had one of those "Why am I making this so complicated?" moments one day when I was working on a patchwork placemat. I'd had this big idea of a patchwork design I was going to use when making a set of placemats. Well, halfway through the first of four I suddenly got bored, or tired or realized this was going to take longer than I was willing to commit to something as functional as a simple placemat. They get spilled on, stained, washed frequently, etc.  Duh, they are table protection, just placemats. This is not a wall hanging project or a decorative tabletop quilt piece, it's just a placemat. So why am I approaching it like something special? That's when I decided to KISS (keep it simple stupid) and use colorful pieces of fabric from my large collection of fat quarters and just layer, machine quilt, and bind uncut pieces of fabric. What a concept!? As a quilter, for years (decades!) I've been cutting to pieces countless yards of fabric and sewing them back together. You'd think I'd get tired of that.  Well, in this case I did. There are many beautiful fabrics that stand alone and don't deserve to be cut into little pieces and that's what I went searching for in my collection. Now I have multiple beautiful, colorful, interesting placemats and didn't overwork myself making them.

Well, that catches me up to July, I think, and seems like a good place to stop today. 

Background Wall Art

This is my third attempt at creating a mixed media canvas to be used just as the background for something else. I'm trying really hard not to like it too much otherwise I won't want to cover up any part of it with other collage elements. 

Let me backtrack.  This all started one day when I was straightening up my art work area and sorting through some scraps of collage papers and materials. I came across a bunch of heart shapes I'd made or cut out of various papers or collage scraps.  I decided a pretty simple quick project would be to paint and embellish these hearts with reds and collage them to an interesting canvas background to hang on the wall someplace.

I had an in-progress (for two years) canvas that I had already covered with fabric scraps but grown bored of, that I decided to grab and paint, stamp, splatter, etc. to use as a background. Easy, just do something quick without much thought because most of it won't show anyway after I put the hearts on it. Problem is after I did all that random stuff I liked the results. I liked it so much I didn't want to put the hearts on it and it didn't really look like the background I was thinking of originally. It wasn't the right colors and there wasn't enough contrast.

So that background morphed into an art project of it's own.  I changed my approach and added some more specific paint elements and eventually called it done. Now I enjoy seeing it on the wall without red hearts.

After I finished that I still had those red hearts to put on something so I started another collage canvas. I put a bunch  random scraps of fabric on to another canvas with clear acrylic medium. The fabric doesn't show through the eventual paint layers much, if at all, but the cut edges and overlap of the fabric adds texture to the canvas. I decided to go with a different color scheme, yellow, this time because I wanted more contrast. I tried to keep it simple, but interesting, but boring at the same time so I wouldn't mind putting hearts all over the top of everything. That still kind of became a problem but my real problem was now I had too much contrast and when I auditioned the hearts on the new canvas all I could think of was Pepperoni Pizza!

That wasn't going to work at all. I didn't like it with hearts so I again added some extra splashes of color and haven't really decided what I'm going to do with it next, if anything, so I just hung it on the wall as well.  I may take it down at some point in the future and add something else to it, but for now this is what it looks like.

They say three's a charm so this is the one I will use with the red heart, I think, maybe....
I started with a larger rectangular canvas (I had too many hearts for the smaller canvas) and covered it with paper collage elements of maps, text and patten paper. I thought a pale blue and white mix background would give enough contrast but not be too glaring like the yellow "pizza' version of background.

I like how this looks but I like the collage canvas without the hearts as well.  It has a lot of interesting texture, color and patterns in it. I plan on scanning it because I think in can use it as a background in digital collages. I'm working on a fourth canvas now that is mostly white textures and patterns. You know what they say, KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid). That will be the one I use, definitely...

Looking for the Perfect Egg Shape

How many different egg shapes are there? In the real world there are a few variations on the generic egg shape.  In the clip art world there are even more shapes, some not so egg shaped actually.  I was looking for a simple egg outline to use in cutting out collage shapes and got frustrated with what I found.  My solution, define my own egg outline. Simple really, photograph a REAL egg and copy the outline. 

All My Needles

I've had this project on my work table for a year. A big needle book for my entire collection of various needles. I got tired of looking through a pile of different packs of needles and different pincushions or sewing baskets for the needle I wanted for some task. My son thinks I have a lot of needles. Maybe yes, but not really. Needles come in packs of several, there are multiple sizes for each type of needle and there are multiple types of needles. Start doing the math and suddenly you have a bunch of needles. Thus the need for one large needle book to keep them all in one place. I have embroidery, sharpes, blunts(tapestry/needlepoint), quilting, bookbinding, beading, and a few upholstery needles.

I also have a few vintage golden eye needles my Mom gave me. I really don't know how old they are, several decades, but they are in perfect shape and some of my favorite needles.

Still Making Crochet Bags

It's so easy, relaxing, meditative. Just crocheting anything. A simple repetitive motion that results in something tangible, functional. That's what I do when watching TV, or more accurately, listening to TV and half watching. Who needs to see everything anyway and then there are all those annoying commercials. I hate the time wasted on commercials. If I'm making something while they go by I feel like I'm not wasting my time.

Winter Crafts - Crochet Bags

What do you do at the end of busy Holiday day when you finally get to relax? Well, sometimes for me it's some TV and a little random crochet. Fun little bags to hold treasures. Fast and easy to make. I like to exercise my crochet muscles once an awhile but it's like riding a bike, you never forget. The first thing my Mom taught me to crochet was something like this when I was maybe 9 years old.

World Collage

This is it. The finished World Collage. I added fabric icebergs, glitter dimensional paint in silver, blue and purple, alcohol inks in various colors, some more silver glitter paint, some more alcohol inks, some silver threads that I created a mesh with and cut into squares, and then I had to stop. It was done, or as done as I was going to make it. I don't really feel 100% that it is done but I do feel 100% as if I don't want to work on it anymore.  I was done. I kind of sort of mostly like it but it was an experiment from the beginning and I had no idea how it might come out. I learned some things about the materials I used and it was a fun project. But I'm personally still critiquing it. At this point I think I would have to start over to correct what doesn't feel right about it.