Happy New Year!

And so another new year is under way. I hope it's a good one for you!

I really enjoyed the holiday break. I spent time with friends, ate far too much chocolate, and did some more artsy things. I also went to a conference in Florida. The conference was pretty good, and yes, I skipped out a bit to walk on the beach and visit a couple of beautiful gardens in the area. Here are some pictures. Hope they warm those of you dealing with the cold of winter!

These first two show St. Pete Beach, right outside the hotel. I really enjoyed my long walks along the beach every day while I was there. The weather was great - high temperatures in the 70s. You know, I think I could get used to that kind of winter!




This next one was taken at Pass-a-Grille, just down the road from St. Pete Beach.



I went to a couple of Botanical Gardens in Tampa and the Sunken Gardens in St. Petersburg. They were all beautiful! And seeing flowers in bloom at this time of year was a lovely treat.





I got a kick out of these signs (made me kind of nervous, too!!). I did see some alligators - luckily, they were sleeping and didn't seem to see me!



I've also posted some black & white pictures to my other blog (JillBlogz) - click on the link at the right if you're interested!

And now, it's back to work. It's going to take a while to get back into the routine!!
Best wishes for the new year!

Yet more craftsy stuff!

Hi again. Hard to believe another year is nearly over! With classes over for the semester, I've been amusing myself with some more craftsy things. Last time I posted, I had laid out a couple of fabric pieces, one with sunflowers and one bright, colourful one. After a couple of weeks, I realized I didn't quite know what I was going to do with them if I ever finished them, so I cut them up into smaller pieces (postcards and ATCs). Here they are in their new form:




I also made some Christmas-y postcards and ATCs:




(I sure hope that Quilting Arts magazine does an ATC swap at the quilt show in Chicago this year!! If not, guess what my friends will be getting for their birthdays?!)

I've also been playing with fabric painting. I've seen some wonderful examples on Pokey Bolton's Quilting Arts blog, and got some ideas from various books (including Traci Bautista's Collage Unleashed). Mine don't exactly live up to their standards, but I'm pretty pleased with them.

Here's one piece I painted. It has kind of an outer-space feel to me (a red planet, yellow flames coming out from it). I'm going to try to figure out how to quilt it or paint it more to bring that out.



The next one is a piece of commercially-printed fabric (a black & white print) that I painted:



These pictures show my painted fabric, and then what it looked like after I finished stamping and stenciling it.







And finally, a few more pieces (I'm not sure I like the second one; maybe if I keep stamping it, it will get better!)




This last one is very different from the others. I "painted" it by laying the fabric down on the waxed paper I was using to protect my table while painting the other fabrics. So it sopped up some of the excess paint that seeped through and created a really subtle background.




By the way, if you're wondering what I'm going to do with this fabric ... well, so am I!! More ATCs probably!! If you have any ideas, let me know.

So that's what I've been doing!

Best wishes to you for the holiday season!

Post-Crafts Day

Hello again! After Crafts Day, I left out all the paints and papers and things to inspire me to keep being creative (okay, and to avoid having to tidy up, too!). I found some interesting ideas in the latest Cloth, Paper, Scissors magazine, and also in a book called Collage Unleashed by Traci Bautista and decided to to try them out. Here are pictures of some of my attempts. (And, if you're wondering what I'm going to do with all these pieces ... well, so am I!!)

First, here's another "mosaic" of inchies from Crafts Day:




Here are some piles of all the pieces I made! (By the way, they are all quite small - mostly postcard size.)






And a few of my favourites:




These feel a bit "Asian" to me. I think I might try to scan some of them, print them out on fabric and turn them into little quiltlets.



These two are a bit bigger (about 9"x12", I think):




After I got all that painting out of my system, I decided to do some quilting! Here are a couple of the pieces I've laid out (not sewn yet). It kind of surprised me to realize how brightly-coloured they are - that's not my usual style!!

The first piece is an attempt to use some of the sunflower fabric I've been accumulating for the past couple of years. The second one is based on an idea from Traci Bautista's book: it uses lots of randomly cut or torn strips. I like the way it came out! It might be fun to cut up into postcards or Artist Trading Cards.



So that's what I've been up to lately! I think my next project will be to get out and take some photographs. But it's going to have to warm up a bit first!!

Thanks for stopping by!

Crafts Day

Last weekend, several friends came over to my place to make art - what a great way to spend an afternoon! (Of course, it did mean that I had to clean my apartment first! Heck, I even cleaned the floors!!) We made "inchies"; well, actually "twosies" (2" squares). Basically, we painted and collaged on watercolour paper, then cut it up into squares. It's amazing how beautiful and how different they all were! We swapped squares with each other and then glued them into little books and onto plain pieces of paper to make a mosaic. (We were going to embellish them with yarns and charms and beads, but didn't have time.) And, of course, while working, we also ate and drank some wine and did lots of talking. I can't wait to do it again! Let's see, what project could we do next? Book-making? Bookmarks? Knitting and crocheting?? ... the possibilities are endless!

Here are three of our completed books, and you can see a bit of one of our "mosaics" in the background:



A work-in-progress:




Our books again:



And a mosaic and a collage (it was too nice to cut up into inchies!):

More photography

Hello again! I've just finished taking a 3-week photography class taught by John Perez at the Indianapolis Art Museum. It was fun; maybe a bit too much oriented towards cameras with manual controls, which I don't have, but I think I still learned a lot, including how to do some fun effects! Here are some of my colour shots. I've also posted some black and white shots on my other blog, Jill Blogz (see the link to the right).

One of the things we learned about was keeping some parts of the image sharp and blurring others (depth of field). Here are some examples.







And here are some fun effects created by moving the camera on purpose! The first one was taken while standing on an escalator.



And the next two I took at home. The first one was taken looking at my stash of fabric; the second one focused on one of my small quilts. Cool, eh??

More artsy stuff

School is underway and I feel like I'm never going to get caught up!! Aargh! But I did make time on the weekend to do some artsy things. I went on a paper-buying binge at a recent sale at JoAnn's with the intention of using it to make more little books. So on the weekend I decided I'd better get started.

I had some papers that reminded me of ... yeah, yeah ... a prairie landscape! So I made my little book. Then went into Photoshop to create some layouts of the pictures from my latest trip and glued them into my little book. I'm quite pleased with how it turned out! I was going to add some sewing, but was afraid I'd mess it up and accidentally stitch over a picture, so decided to quit while I was ahead.

Here are some pictures:








I'm looking forward to making more books! I cut out the pages for one with all the colours of the rainbow (each sheet of paper has pictures of flowers or leaves in the different colours). I also bought paper for a blue book, a pink one, a brightly-coloured one ... and probably a few more besides!

And finally .... my sunflowers are blooming! Each year I buy seeds at the dollar store (as you know, I'm not the world's greatest gardener; okay, I have a brown thumb!; so I don't see much point in spending a lot of money) and not much grows except for sunflowers. I was late planting them this year, so wasn't sure if they'd even flower, but here they are!