Great thrift store find!

Look what I found at Goodwill for only $1.99! Now all my nice threads can be together and untangled from a drawer!

It's finished!!!

I have now finished my artwork from the weekend class with DJ and Deryn so here she is! I'm pleased with the piece. Now, to work out all the muscle problems from my shoulder so I can get back to doing more art again! The stress of the weekend on my neck and shoulder are in full flare now. I went to the chiropractor yesterday but it's clearly muscular. I"m trying to work it out, use my hot packs, etc... but it's pretty painful. But what a great class! I have several errands to run today and Max has swim lessons so I'd better get movin'...

still a work in progress

Well, I'm beat and will be heading to bed really early tonight. Today, we worked with the wire stuff in Deryn's class and I really enjoyed it. I still have to put text with Diamond glaze behind all the leaves but you can see how far I have gotten.

Workshop day 1

Yesterday I had day 1 of my workshop. DJ Pettitt taught her face painting technique and wow, amazing how much time it takes to paint a 6x6 canvas! I painted most of the day and then another 2 hours after I got home and finished up this morning! I'm dead tired. Painting, especially sorta' realistic, really exhausts me. And DJ's style of painting faces sends me straight into my perfectionist thinking. It's so hard to fight it! Anyway, this is my canvas. Everyone else painted using an image of DJ's just to learn the technique but me... nope. I always have to do things the hard way. I really wanted it to be my own, 100% and I've wanted to paint this young girl for a long time. She is taken from a photograph that my friend, Noleen, took in Senegal. Noleen is the most amazing photographer and the photo of this girl is one of my favorites.

Today, Deryn Mentock will teach us how to embellish the canvas with wire and metal work so I'll post the finished product either tonight... if my eyes are still open when I get home, or tomorrow after I"ve had some solid sleep! The class is great and I love both DJ and Deryn. My friend, Maija is also in the class as is Tonya Peacock,whom I got to meet for the first time. Also, I'm really enjoying getting to sit next to Rena from Utah... gotta' get her blog addy....

Gotta' run... babysitter will here here shortly!

Book is finished!

I wish I had kept up with the number of hours it literally took to create this book. I have been working on it daily 8 days and several of those were all day. Here is the finished book. The photos are the greatest but you get the idea.

Things I learned... suede is a bear to sew. It's not as easy as I'd thought it would be so I spend hours sewing with a pair of pliers. When making my cover this time, I allowed for fabric overhangs from the pages when deciding on a size. I wouldn't do that next time... I'd let all the stuff hang out past the cover. And, the number one thing I'd do next time is make sure the book is in the right position when attaching the cover... I realized after it was too late, that I'd added the cover on (which was done last) with the book pages upside down and backwards. I can't begin to tell you how sick I felt. I had to sit down and take a cry before calling Fran, my best friend, to calm me down. There was no way to re-do the book once I'd added the cover because I'd glued the covers to the suede before stitching it. It's permanent. At this moment, I'm glad my strength in my art is creating balance. I spent so much time on each page making sure it was not only balanced in composition but color elements as well. So, unless someone is REALLY looking, no one would know the pages are upside down. But it makes me sick to look at them. I planned the composition so carefully the "right" way. Oh well, this was my first fabric book, the first made like this, so it was a learning process... but oh, the time it took to make. It was a costly lesson that I'll never let happen again!

Anyway, if you were wondering about the front cover, the cut out rectangle contains a glass vial suspended which contains cactus needles. On the inside of the cover, I added a loose "flap" of sheer black fabric so it would show as a back drop for the cut out window making the needles show up better.

This book looks completely different than my original vision for it all except the construction of the book. That turned out to be exact.

Tomorrow, I have a weekend workshop with DJ Pettitt and Deryn Mentock at The Paper Studio in Tempe and I'm very excited. I have my things ready to go. Because of the drive, I have an early morning so I'm going to eat something and go to bed!

pages finished!

Today I finished my fabric pages! I now have to create a cover and bind all the pages into the book. I have, however, made a decision about the exhibit submission. It was brought to my attention by a fellow artist that the gallery with the call for these books happens to be located with an alley entrance only AND, it's only open for a few hours on Friday and Saturdays! Not much time for people to see what's there! So, I have decided against the submission and am considering a class with my binding method using this book as one of my samples. I have uploaded the remaining pages to my flickr site here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/artvisionz/2578779707/in/set-72157605619455811/

I think I mentioned previously that I made little charts for my boys for chores, behavior, and a little tag book for Max for getting ready in the morning and for bed. I have been asked to post all the stuff I made for this so, here goes:
This is the magnetic chart on the refrigerator. It is made from a manilla folder and sewn pockets. Each boy starts each day with his 10 sticks. Disobeying, fighting, arguing, etc... causes them to lose a stick. Each of the 10 sticks is worth a point. The gold sticks can be earned by my finding them acting in a kind way, encouraging, helping, being polite, volunteering to help do something, etc... The gold sticks are worth 10 points each. I tally the points at the end of every day. The points are accumulating right now until Chuck gets home from Ohio to help me made decisions on things they can earn. You can also see chore sticks on this chart. They each have 3 chores to do each week besides cleaning up their normal stuff. Since Max can't read well yet, I drew pictures in code that he can understand and know what his responsibilities are.

Next, we have the June calendar:
It consists of list of things to do this summer, movies to see, playdates, daily things to do, and the weekly point tally chart. I also color coded days Sam's best friend was not going to be in town so we can plan around that for them to see each other since they will be gone a total of 5 weeks this summer. Those are the orange dots! I keep up with things they have going on, swim lessons, etc... on the daily blocks as well as daily points earned. I got the idea for the poster from Joanne ( http://www.thesimplewife.typepad.com/). Thanks Joanne!!!

To help organize the boys toys and make it easier for them to know where things go, I made photo tags for their baskets showing what toys should be put in each basket:

To help Max, especially, with getting ready for the day or bed, I made him this little tag book. His mind wanders so fast that he can't remember what I told him to do from one minute to the next. With this in hand, he can flip through to see what he's suppose to be doing. It hands on a hook in the bathroom.

I also made a chart that is on their bedroom wall that shows pictures of things that should NOT be on the floor in order for their room to be clean:

I have to say that so far, all these things have really been helpful and made a difference in the conflict happening in the house. Of course, for the past week, I've only had one child here so it's been peaceful regardless since he doesn't have anyone to pick fights with! It's been a great break taking off my referee hat... a job that I despise! Also, seeing the difference in points Max has earned this week with Sam gone and how many he tallied with Sam here, really shows me that we need to come up with some strategies for them to be able to work their own issues out together without me being in the middle of everything. If anyone has advice, I'm all ears!

Well, it's time to get Max to bed....

Workin' hard

I am creating my first ever fabric book for an art call put out by a gallery in CO. The submission deadline is Friday, the 20th and I'm crankin'. Why don't these ideas come to me just after I find out about an exhibit so I have time to work instead of right at the deadline?!

Since this is my first fabric book, I am learning a lot, documenting what I'm doing, what I'd do different, etc... Yesterday I worked from 5:00 a.m. until 8:00 p.m. with little break. My body is lashing out at me for it too. I will take the day off to spend Father's day with my step-dad but will be back in the studio tomorrow. With other things I have going on this week, I'll be lucky to get this finished. It's MUCH more detailed and time consuming than I'd anticipated. The thing that frustrates me about my work is that often, it looks so simple yet I spent hours and hours on it. I've easily had some layouts for these pages that have taken me an hour just to design the composition and layout of fabric bits for a single page... and they aren't big! But I'm trying to achieve the right balance in composition with elements as well as color and value. Then, all the little pieces have to be adhered to the fabric page, sewn, and then the image added.
The images are transparency transfers onto watercolor paper of my cactus blossom photographs. They are then ages with walnut ink. Here's a preview:
I completed 10 page faces yesterday with 6 left to go... then binding the book which will be done using my original binding idea so the pages will be added individually. By the way, I did submit a proposal to write an article about this binding method but was turned down. I'm thinking of creating a class to teach it and also creating a pdf file to sell the instructions. I dunno...

Here's a tip for those of you wanting to try transfers from a transparency printed on an inkjet printer to watercolor paper. I experimented and found that the images turned out better on cold press paper instead of hot press, which wasn't what I'd expected. I used fluid matte medium to transfer the images and on the hot press, because it is smooth, the images showed streaks. This didn't happen on the cold press paper. See what I mean?
These transfers are on hot press paper. You can see all the lines where I was burnishing the images down.
These were on cold press paper. This was the look I was going for.

Well, gotta' go get ready for church! The shower is calling...