It's not even midday, and I've already demolished a bowl of porridge with blackberries & sultanas for breakfast, a brunch of poached eggs & feta cheese on rye crispbread and a white chocolate Bueno bar. Seriously thinking I might be overdoing it a morsel or two ... oh well, diet begins Monday. Isn't that how the saying goes? (Luckily, there are lots of Mondays throughout the year.)
Anyway, I've a couple of things to tell you about. One of 'em is this book, '365 Days of Creativity' by Lorna Scobie. I received it as a present last Christmas, and finally got around to starting it. The book has 365 prompts in the form of pages to paint or draw on, collage or write on, all aimed at kickstarting your arty crafty creativity. Like this starting page.
You're encouraged to fill each bowl with something. Fruit or pencil or random objects maybe.
I really enjoyed this, cutting up an old Sarah Raven catalogue for pictures to stick on. Two garden urns, a cardboard box, seed packets, a book, a handful of candles & two glass bottles. I also use a stamp to print the outline of green leaves, and I drew apples, bananas, a carrot, Nessie the Loch Ness monster and a sleeping cat. Plus random stamped letters in black ink. Oh, and I stuck on a couple of used postage stamps too. I was pleased with how these bowls turned out, and happily started on the next prompt. However - hmmm, not so much fun.
This page was blank, except for the text suggesting I use a variety of different materials to explore making marks, and I should embrace smudges or accidental marks. Well, there I was faced with a blank page and my mind went equally blank. I had various false starts, & never properly felt I got to grips with what was being asked of me. I ended up tearing up paper, gluing it down, painting over it, stamping & using stencils & adding a scrap of fabric, splatters of paint, lines made by Sharpies. It's all a bit of a dog's dinner, and I can't say I like it. The next page for me to start on is also blank. But there's more of a definate prompt about how to fill it. Draw the view through a doorway. It suggests the view could be into a garden or a room, or a view from a cafe door. That's much less vague than 'explore mark making', and I might tackle that this afternoon.
Okay, moving on, this blog post's entitled every day's a school day because I was today years old when I learnt how to upload a YouTube video! I'm not great with technology, so don't usually find things like this simple, but to be fair to YouTube they make it pretty easy. It's not the most accomplished filming in the world, but I wanted to try recording a flick-through of my fabric covered journal. The link's here, and I'd be ridiculously happy if you'd take a look at it. The more views a video gets on the site, the more it's recommended to others and gains a wider audience. Not that I expect there's a huge crowd desperately waiting to see my shaky camera work ... Actually, it's fascinating to look 'behind the scenes', as it were, about how YouTube works. If you upload a film, you can not only see how many people watch it, but whether they stick around to watch the entire film or only manage a few seconds before they're clicking on something else. I belatedly worked out how to add music to the video, but that might take a while to process. So maybe you'll see the film without a soundtrack and maybe you won't. But please, do me a favour and take a peek. Make an old gal happy! It'll be your good deed for the day.
It's Saturday afternoon, and I haven't done half the things I'd meant to. Partly because I spent most of this morning messing about with paints, stencils and the gell plate. Never mind, everything on today's 'To Do' list will join tomorrow's 'To Do' list ... it's hardly life or death if I don't haul the hoover around the room or pull up weeds in the front garden. I thought I'd show you what I made on Wednesday. I'd gone to my monthly StitchArt group, and this time we did something a little different. There's a project called 'Threads of Freedom' which is working with various community groups across the city. It's about creating little stitched pieces, some of which will be included in a textile panel to go on display at Leeds art gallery. There was lots of fabric we could choose from to sew with, and I picked this vintage tray cloth with the roses embroidery. My own embroidery's not a patch on those flo...
Saturday's rolled around again, and it's not been the most eventful of days. Cleaning and hoovering, a walk to the shops to buy groceries, an hour on the allotment, then home to do some odd tasks in the garden. The strawberry plants are sending out runners, so I've been dealing with those, plus deadheading the perennial sunflowers, and cutting back the gone-over flowers on the sage and marjoram. I'm sad to see those blooms gone as the bees loved them. This afternoon I spent a few hours finishing 'Dawnlands' by Philippa Gregory. It's a really good book, a page turner where you care about the characters and want to be reassured everything's going to work out well for them. Plus you become enraged about the corruption of the so-called justice system at the time of the Stuart kings and queens, about transportation of prisoners to the West Indies, and about the vile nature of the sugar trade in the 1600s and the vast profits made from it....
Hello again, and excuse me while I scratch my insect bites. I don't know what it is, but at this time of year I'm invariably itching like crazy because I've been bitten by bugs. It seems to coincide with blackberry-picking season, but whether that's purely coincidental I don't know. Whatever's biting me, I'm obviously a tasty morsel in their world! I might try using a highly scented oil like Tea Tree oil, see if that deters them. Anyway, let's get on to more pleasant matters - I'm having a go at making a zine style booklet. Because I didn't have any paper large enough, I joined together two A3 sheets of sketchpad paper, using torn pieces of book pages for the joining. I thought that'd look less noticeable than packing tape or similar. Having chosen my colour scheme I used acrylic paint and an unwanted plastic bank card to apply the paint. Plus a stencil, sponge and modelling paste. Applying paint with a ATM card wa...
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