Fun with Ribbon!

Click here to see the flyer for my Ribbons class in March!

Here are photos of 3 small purses I made out of ribbon recently.  I love the little brown one for its size: perfect for an ID and your iPod. I'm thinking of combining that with the bike bands (see next post down) to make an iPod holder for when you are working out. Wouldn't that be so much nicer than the boring ones they sell at the Apple store?

Taking (and Giving) Lessons

I've recently had to pay some visits to a chiropractor (unfortunately), but something more than just relieved back pain has come of it: a new art relationship!  Barbara McCulloch is a local painter, and four of her acrylic paintings hang in the waiting room of the chiropractor's office!  These paintings are so beautiful and lovely, with one or two white aspen tree trunks in the foreground and bright sky-like backgrounds, with colors like purple and orange. They really spoke to me.  Her contact info was noted, so I emailed her, which led to our first encounter this afternoon.  We talked for an hour or so about the business of art (she's got some excellent life experience) and then delved into making art!  Below is what resulted from her lesson to me:

As you know if you've been reading this blog for awhile, I value professional development and I have always felt a desire to get back to basic foundations.  Well, today we started very much at square one (right where I needed to be) with oil pastels and watercolors, two mediums I've never loved.  Barbara said that she could see my artistic skills lie in design and precision, so she challenged me in this oil pastel exercise to be inspired by certain phrases and create each piece in just two minutes.  We did four pieces, and it loosened me up a little, forced me to use my intuition and emotion rather than my brain.  I found it to be pretty fun, actually!  The final product looks very elementary to me, but I really appreciated the exercise.  At first, 2 minutes fled by and I felt like I'd done almost nothing.  By the 4th one, my brain engaged a little more and the 2 minutes felt a lot longer.  I could think a little, and that led to the one I like the most (bottom right: "Dancing alone at home").

Meanwhile, I am thinking lots about teaching my own classes, and I finally have a date for a Ribbons Class(!) at Mama Said Sew: March 26.  Tell your friends!  To market the class, I just had to make samples of the projects we'll make (poor me) out of some of their ribbon.  Aren't these leg bands (for riding your bike) SO GREAT?????

Valentines For Sale & Card Swap Time

One of my fave holidays is next week: Valentine's Day!  Why do I love it so? 

• How can you not love a holiday that celebrates the people you love in your life?  Yes, V-day has baggage, especially for people who are uncontentedly single, and the day has been over-hyped to become materialistic and too sappy.  But I try to look past all that and think of it as a way to tell the people I love in my life just that.
• It is a big card-giving holiday, which for me is excellent considering my love of making cards!

You can find 4 different designs of my beautiful handmade Valentines for sale in Fort Collins at The Eyes Have It in Old Town, just north of College and Mountain on the west side.  One of the designs is above.

Speaking of LOVING making cards, this year's annual 6 degrees of HLM International Card Swap is officially announced!  It consists of this:

• RSVPing to me that you want to participate by next Wednesday, February 16.
• Using the following 8 weeks to create 10 cards (usually identical, but not required) that you'll enter in the swap.
• Sending me your cards by the postmark date of April 15.
• Receiving 10 cards made by other participants around the end of April.

If you'd like to participate, please send me an email (noted to the right), and I will send you the details.  Fu-un!

Another Scrap Project

This week I wanted to sew some more scraps, so here's what I came up with, as a lightweight, flat, just-because gift for one of my quilt loving friends in Germany (I had some other, not-so-exciting stuff to send her and wanted to spruce up the package!).  I took the pictures of these coasters at night so the flash or available light doesn't represent the actual colors very well, but just know that in person they are delightfully bright!

They each have a letter embroidered on them, a 'B' on one and a 'D' on the other.  I made the 'B' one first and noticed that the second one had a more polished look, after I'd initially designed and practiced on the first one.  You can see that I also used variegated thread around the edges.

The final look, with a cup of cocoa!  (This awesome mug was made by my friend Micah.)

In the crafting world, I've noticed that crafted coasters have come to be called 'mug rugs.'  I think that is a little cheesy myself.  

Regrouping

Hi everyone, and happy 2011! I know it has been over 4 weeks since I last posted, but I have been working hard behind the scenes to regroup after the experience that was November 2010 and the craft fair. I am slowly, slowly, slowly making my way through piles of paper scraps and fabric scraps and cardstock and buttons and pens and receipts and books and magazines and ephemera and on and on to RE-ORGANIZE my art space. So I haven't been creating a lot lately. My mission has been to figure out how my space can work even better for me, especially considering my un-tidy nature. Along the way, I've made a box of "half-started projects" that I aspire to work on every once in awhile over the next few months. Shorts and socks to mend, a snap to put on a shirt, a few card fronts to be sewn to cardstock, my very first paper-piecing that I never did anything with...

Sometime in the next month, I hope to show you a progression of what I've done to my art room. But for now, I'll show you the one project I have done: an art pillow for my mom, made completely of scraps. This is how it started:

This is what happened!

Here is the view of three sides of the pillow. That was actually one of my favorite parts, the surprise of the way the sides came together.

Please stick with me for the rest of this post to hear about two things I can't wait to share: I Am, a most amazing documentary I saw last week, and the latest development in The Beckoning of Lovely project.

The film I Am was created by a guy who is famous in Hollywood for directing lots of comedies, especially with Jim Carey in them. He had a bike accident, and his injuries afterward got him to take action to share his thoughts about the world before he died (something he thought was soon to happen). He spoke with researchers, scholars, religious leaders, business leaders, and scientists to ask, "What is wrong with the world?" and "What can we do about it?" I got to see it with three of my close Fort Collins friends, and we were overwhelmed by how much it affected and inspired us. It gave us all hope. While watching it, I cried, laughed, cringed, smiled, nodded, and cried some more. I wanted to see it immediately again, and I can't wait till I get to. Please at least go to the website to watch the preview, and I implore you to find a way to see the movie, whether it is at a screening in your city or, if we're lucky, it comes out in mainstream theaters. Because of this movie, I want to strive to be a better person, love more, be kind and compassionate, cooperate and build even more community, and love my enemy. Incidentally, the director recovered from his injuries while he was in production. Here is the website:

www.iamthedoc.com

You've heard me talk about The Beckoning of Lovely project before. There's a link to their site on the right side of this blog. I recently saw the video of their 10/10/10 event in Chicago, and it is right in line with what I Am is about. There are people out there making a lot of right in the world, and I hope you'll take the 10 minutes it takes to watch this video on YouTube. It is so so worth it. You will be so glad you did.

The Beckoning of Lovely, 10/10/10 (10 min)

If you want to see the original video, or the one that happened in '09, here they are too, for easy clicking/viewing:

The Beckoning of Lovely, 08/08/08 (7:15 minutes)

The Beckoning of Lovely, 09/09/09 (2:35 minutes)

I am definitely considering being in Chicago on 11/11/11. Wanna come with?