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.
To add to my seemingly never ending list of works-in-progress, I've started making a fabric bowl. Or should I call it a fabric basket? I'm not sure. Anyway, I've made the odd bowl or two before, like this blue & white one that I keep cotton perle in. I decided to use upholstery material, which has both advantages & disadvantages. On the good side, it has a certain stiffness, which helps the bowl stay in shape. On the irritating side, the kind of material I'm using frays like mad, and I'm forever picking up threads off the carpet. The bowl's a simple construction, and I've used a circle of cardboard covered with brown felt for the base. It'll look much better when I've embroidered and stitched into it. I've made a start on that, and appliqued on a rectangle of plum coloured velvet for extra interest. When not stitching, I've been catching up on my reading. I finished C J Sansom's 'Dark Fire'. Real...
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...
Hello on what's been a beautiful autumn day. Bright blue clear sky, a chilly start but warming up in the afternoon. I've been on a long walk around a local nature reserve, not wanting to stay inside when it's so lovely outdoors. In the last week or so, I've been finishing this fabric bowl, and have started making another. But mainly I've been having a bit of a change-around in my house. I've hauled furniture from one room to another, clutter-cleared cupboards and bagged up things for the charity shop, and generally hoovered and cleaned all those dusty corners. I'd finally made a decision about turning the dumping ground of the front bedroom into a craft room. It's taking shape, though it really has taken some effort. Larger pieces of material are stacked on shelves, grouped into colours. Lower down is my Sissix machine and die cuts, and at the base of the shelving are beads and jewellery making supplies...
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