Handmade Books

A few years ago I decided to learn how to coptic stitch bind my own blank books.  I had recently purchased a beautiful coptic bound journal with stiff leather covers and it was a rare find. I like the look of the exposed binding. I love how coptic bound books lay completely flat when open. I wanted more but choices were few and far between or too expensive for my budget. so of course I thought, "I can do this myself".  And that is basically true but achieving the high standard I appreciated when I see these books takes practice and quality materials.  Well, I have lots to practice on but quality materials will come later when I've practiced enough. 

I recently finished a number of coptic bound 'practice' books and a couple other books.
This is what I have been doing:  

Other Non-coptic books I finally finished.
Denim fabric covered booklets with colorful painted pages:

In the process for cutting paper to size for the coptic books I ended up with a large stack of accurately cut mini sheets of paper. Something most people might throw away. But what I see is paper for tiny books. I have plans for this paper.

Plans for Mini Books:

2" x 4" sheets and 1 1/2" x 3" sheets

2" x 2" book in progress

Check back later to see the Mini Books completed! They are so cute.

Buried under Purple Choices

I have over 100 different purple fabrics in my collection. I had a plan, many many years ago, to make a purple quilt for my Mom. I decided on a design, bought light purple/lavender fabric as the background and began collecting purple prints for the main design elements. 

The Overlapping Purple Print Design Plan

That was so long ago. I never got that quilt made. My Mom died years ago. But I still have all this fabric and just recently it has been on my mind. With all the other projects I have on my plate right now I don't know why this has come to mind. I don't know why I feel compelled to look at this again after all these years. It's beyond my comprehension. But I'm going along with it and to see where this goes. 

I decided I wasn't going to make the quilt I designed for my Mom but I've gone through every single piece of purple fabric I have and cut one 4 1/2" square from each print. It's been an interesting journey, looking at each one of these pieces of fabric and trying to remember why I have it and where I got it. I know I've had some of this fabric for over 20 years. Some if it seems ugly to me now and I can't imagine ever having bought it. Some if it I can't renumber at all and probably got it when I was subscribed to a monthly fat quarter club. But that was a choice also. I choose to blindly get fabric sent to me every month even when I didn't like a lot of it. But some of the fabric I love and clearly remember where and when I got it. 

At this point I'm playing with design ideas. I think I will at least sew a quilt top. It may never be finished beyond that. I have several unfinished tops because that's the part I like to do. But I haven't decided if I am just going to make it with only one square of each fabric or go ahead and cut more squares. 

Quilt size calculations and new design ideas.

One square of each print could easily be fashioned into a lap quilt or a larger wall hanging. I have enough fabric, if I repeat prints, to go to any size larger I want. But I don't need another bed size quilt and there is a better chance I will actually finish it if I keep it small. 

And now I have this huge pile of trim scraps! Normally it would all just go in the trash but since I've started doing collage art and mixed media, a pile of what used to be trash now looks like a pile of opportunity to me. There are a number of things I can think of to do with this "trash" including collage elements or fabric beads.

 

The purple trims trash piles.

You see here some of the trimmings already stiffened with a mat acrylic medium wash laid out on freezer paper to dry. It's a very easy way to make fabric usable like a paper, stiff enough to cut small shapes with no fraying but still pliable. I do this first when I plan to use fabric as a collage element.

So besides one or more purple quilts to add to my project To Do list, I'll also probably do 'something' with the scraps. I may end up doing that first. Art and collage is so much easier than sitting and sewing for hours and I have a whole lot more wall space for art than beds to put yet another quilt on.

Butterfly Outlines and Indigo Fabric Design

I have all these outlines of butterfly wing patterns I have been sketching on and off for the last couple years.  

I use them as a reference when doing butterfly artwork. I thought one day it might look interesting to create a simple black and white fabric pattern using the butterfly outlines. I just needed to do a few things like create digital and neater complete versions of some of the outlines, import them into Photoshop, clean it up, arrange it and slice and dice that to make it into a seamless repeat pattern.  That's all...  I let that stew in my brain awhile and played with different art apps on my iPad until I found one that had a line I liked and the controls I needed to make the reflected drawing. Once I solved that problem I made a few butterfly outlines.

The next step is to import them into Photoshop (I use PSE8), extract the line objects so I can move them around and change their size or clean up edges. Fairly simple things easily done in PSE. Somewhere along the line though I decided that instead of doing black on white I would do white outlines on a dark background.  I choose a dark indigo blue as the background color. So the next step was to make my butterfly objects white.

Add some more butterflies and throw in a little crosshatching texture with a Photoshop brush tool.

Add some little flowers.

Now I'm getting somewhere.

Now do it all again in a perfect square. Try to make a balanced arrangement, slice it, rearrange the pieces, fill the center, finish the crosshatching and tadah...  

an indigo butterfly seamless repeat pattern.

And I will probably do this all again, make more flowers, add vines and dots, draw new butterflies. This was a first draft exercise. I want to refine it and eventually have it printed on fabric to see how it looks for real.

You can find instructions on the web for creating a seamless repeat pattern.

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.