Where is my Round TUIT II

In my last post I summarized my projects up to around June. Now I'll finish that list to get to where I am today, maybe. But I am never doing just one thing at a time and most projects span days, weeks, months, sometimes years. They come in and out of rotation depending on my mood, interest, or outside events like holidays or gift giving moments. Some of what I do is just for the fun of doing it and learning something new. Sometimes I have new materials (paint, yarn, paper, pencils, etc.) I want to experiment with. Sometimes I actually want to make something to use in my home like a bed quilt, place mats, wall art or a photo collage of the family. And holidays, usually Christmas, always inspire me to make something, usually many things. 

June, July, August...

* Tray collage from an old cookie sheet

What do you do with an old cookie sheet that has seen its last cookie? It's still a piece of metal, it should be useful for something. It may be scratched, stained, dented, rusted or you just don't want to use it anymore because you got fancy new cookie sheets. I had one I was using as a shelf on a wire bakers rack. Not pretty but functional. I never really thought about painting it. I think I just automatically dismissed that idea because I didn't think the paint would stick, it probably would scratch too easily and maybe peel off.  But I've been doing a lot of collage with acrylic gels and paper lately and find that combination seems to stick to anything and creates a great surface to paint and do more collage on. So I took that old cookie sheet to my craft room and completely covered it front and back with a base paper collage layer, painted it some and collaged some colorful cutout papers on the top. It actually came out better than I ever expected. It's not something that can be washed anymore, but it can be cleaned with a damp cloth. Acrylic paint is really tough, it's basically plastic. I wouldn't submerge this tray in water but I would have no problem keeping it clean.

* Streets and blocks collage

This was the collage I started back when I was still trying to make something to put the red harts on mentioned in an earlier post. Like many of my mixed medial projects it became something other than I first imagined as I worked on it. I called it streets and blocks because the first layer of papers were squares of security envelope papers and strips of text pasted in a grid like configuration.  I was playing with an idea but didn't know where I would end up. I still had those hearts I want to put somewhere. After several go rounds with paint and auditioning the hearts I settled on color, placement and the addition of some painted string for accents. I don't love it but I'm moving on to other projects. 

* Inktense blocks, butterflies and Photoshop

I don't do watercolor. My self-taught art experiments are typically acrylic paint over a pencil sketch. As a kid I loved to color and I like making art and improving my skills. I dusted off my drawing pencils and colored pencils a couple years ago and started drawing butterflies. They aren't exactly realistic but I was focusing on the wing patterns and colors. That's really what I wanted to capture. To me, the body is just an oblong shape the wing is attached to. While working on these drawings I saw a blog post or something about colored pencils that were water soluble and that intrigued me. I've been experimenting with them ever since. I first got the Staedtler watercolor crayons and the Derwent Aquatone pencils.  Later on I got the Derwent Intense pencils which are, exactly as they advertise, intense color. Recently I finally got the Derwent Intense Blocks and you can use them in so many ways, they are very nice for making watercolor like artwork. 

This butterfly is one of my little experiments. Of course, one of my pictures is never done until I scan it and create a digital composition with it in photoshop. Then I can print it on a card or something else or post it online.  Then I'm happy with my amateur art. 

*Just painting and playing 

I've been reading a number of books on mixed media techniques and acrylic painting. They inspire me to try different things with color, texture, materials and composition. I never know when an idea will hit me. I absorb all the information and wait for inspiration.  I woke one day up with an idea for a collage and was squirting paint on a canvas in my PJ's before I even had my morning coffee. It wasn't suppose to just be a painting, I had planned other layers of papers and paint, but after adding some alcohol inks and acrylic gloss I liked the result and left it as simply a painting. 

I've also been experimenting with texture base layers for my artwork. This painting had a texture layer I created with wall texture compound. Last year I covered a wall in one of our bedrooms with this stuff and created a stucco texture to cover damage and other imperfections in the wall. It turned out really well but now I have a ton of this stuff leftover. I'll be doing more experimenting using this as a texture base layer for paintings and collage. 

*Star Trek fabric

I love fabric and I love Star Trek. How could I resist Star Trek fabric. Of course I couldn't. It didn't matter what I might end up making with it, if anything. If I had it I would make something, eventually. I first got the fat quarter bundle with a sample of all the prints because I wanted them all. Then I decided I needed more of some of the prints because I liked them the best. Finally I decided I was going to make a single bed size quilt with this fabric and bought extra fabric of some prints. At this point I have enough fabric to make the quilt top and a design planned. Making it is on my To Do list. 

*And a few othr things
To be continued...

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.