I Spy My Studio

I was lucky enough to meet the lovely Karen Valentine of My Desert Cottage at The Creative Connection Event last year. I'm pretty sure she was actually the very first person I met and was so lovely and friendly and gracious as I was a bit scared and intimidated being at the event all by myself. This year she's hosting the 3rd annual Where Bloggers Create event and I am so excited to participate! So here goes a little sneaky peek into my creative space.

The first thing you see as you enter my space is my name spelled out using my Bunting O' Greetings fabric. I jazzed 'em up with a little bit of bling, too! It's not a large space as my husband and I live in an old rowhouse, but I love the space and I have made the best use of the space that I could to suit all of my varied artistic pursuits and interests.

One of the most used elements of my studio is my sewing machine. I love my Bernina!!! I've been a sewer since I was about 10 and took up quilting when I was in grad school (which is a very strange time to take up a new hobby as you are so busy, but I did). A couple years ago, I discovered Spoonflower and finally started to turn all the the ideas and imaginings I've had for my own fabric designs into reality. Now there are piles of swatches of my over 100 designs in my space of which you can see a couple here. The color charts I spent many hours putting together are the first things I refer to when I'm designing my fabrics. You'll also notice some more of my Bunting O' Greetings and the Spoonflower swatches that come along with every order. I haven't quite decided what I'm going to do with them all!

I can't get enough ribbon and you'll find some nearly anywhere you turn you'll see some. There's the racks of ribbons on the display I created out of the old frame rescued from a vintage shop. There are my handmade ribbons - dyed strips of wide selvage from my fabric orders and then lettered in calligraphy (something else I've been doing since I was 10 years old). Piled in mason jars are my easter egg dyed seam binding ribbons wrapped around vintage wooden spools. And even more ribbon is draped over the wooden rack on the wall under my mini folded hexi and button quilt.

Some of the pieces that hold my plethora of supplies are also fashioned by me. I'd had these two plain wooden trunks that needed a bit of sprucing up so I padded and covered the lids with pieces of an old and tattered quilt that had seen its better days and then painted the harlequin pattern and inspirational words on the bases. Now they hold bunches of my fabrics. My beads and other teeny tiny ephemera are stored in the drawers I created out of foam core and then embellished to sit inside an old CD organizer that was no longer used for CDs. The little flower piece is my CalEndure project created for my boss at Artella as she prepares to publish a book.

There are lots of other little things I love to use and just gaze upon as I'm creating my art of all kinds. My soul journals from my wonderful and amazing Soul Restoration experience are always on my big table so I can go back and remind myself of the lessons learned and those I'm still learning. All sorts of vintage ephemera can be found here such as these paper bobbins filled with pink and yellow thread that I got for a steal at a local antique store. The jar filled with red buttons is another local antique shop find. The beautiful boxes from gifts received and cute little polka dotted egg cups hold more supplies and just make me happy to look at.

I hope you've enjoyed this little peek into my creative corner of the world up by Lake Superior. Now I'm off to enjoy summer while it lasts around here!

Valentine's beauty

I've been stalking the mailman all week (not really, but I have been looking out the window about every five minutes since Monday). You see, back at the beginning of January I committed to taking part in a Victorian Paper Heart Swap organized by the lovely Danielle Muller over at the Vintage Dragonfly. Of course, at the time I committed to this very fun creative opportunity I didn't realize that I would be having surgery a short time later! This just meant I would have to speed up my creativity a bit and move up my own personal deadline to get everything sent off to Danielle.

The dozen of us that participated were each charged with creating a large hanging heart constructed of papers and other lovely vintage-y elements. We were also to create a dozen little packets of vintage-y art supply goodness to be contained in a space about the size of a postcard. Now each artist is anxiously waiting to get our fun mail with a big heart created by another wonderful soul and twelve little packets of new artsy stuff to play with! As we speak I am looking out the window at our mailman to see if he's carrying a box for me!!!

While I'm waiting, I thought I would share a pic with you of what I created to share with the others. After a fun trip to one of our great antique stores to supplement the supplies I already had, this is what I came up with. Bits of tulle and tatting, vintage french music sheets and a cute little couple of french children along with a touch of my calligraphy. I think I was trying to put myself back in my high school french classes! I only hope they like it as much as I LOVED putting it together!

A picture is worth a thousand words...

... but sometimes the combination of the two is profoundly more beautiful and meaningful. Letters and words have been my obsession for so long which I mostly attribute to beginning my practice of the art of calligraphy at age 10. I've collected notebooks full of quotations and meaningful verse that inspires me. Those words find their way into my calligraphic creations and other design work.

I am also a collector of many things vintage and one of my favorite vintage collectibles are photos. I am lucky enough to have a wonderful collection of old photos of my ancestors which I love to pull out and also often find their way into my designs. I've also been compiling other written memorabilia from my family - grandma's recipes, poems that my great grandfather authored, letters and cards crafted by my mom and grandma. I have plans and sketches to combine these items on projects in the future; there are just not enough hours in the day for all the plans in my head.

In the meantime, I have combined some of these family photos with words of different languages meaning family in fabric form. You saw the preview of one color combination in my last post. Above you'll see a second color combo, which is my favorite! A lovely blogger named Gay took note of this design, which you can find at Spoonflower, in her most recent posting at www.idreamedisaw.com. It is a beautiful site and very inspirational and I feel so blessed and honored that she chose to highlight one of my designs among other stunning works that combine words and images!

Paper Collage Fabric Design

Each week, my very favorite site in all the world, Spoonflower hosts a different design challenge. I don't enter every week as I don't have time to create for all of them and some themes just don't interest me. However, a few weeks back, they introduced an upcoming theme which captured my fancy and I set to work. I began the preparations for this particular challenge over 3 weeks ago as I wanted to have lots of time to to plan and create.

The challenge issued was for a paper collage design with a bare minimum of digital manipulation used in the design process. I set to work creating completely original collage papers and watercolor papers that were then filled with my calligraphy. You can see the original papers and additional materials of corrugated cardboard and paint chips below.

I cut and combined flower petals and leaves from these papers with corrugated cardboard and old paint chips. Then they were laid out on one my collage sheets and scanned. I performed a little digital magic to make the pattern repeat seamlessly and the fruits of 3 weeks of my labor are below.

The voting for this very creative contest opened up on Thursday and it's been fantastically fun to see the creativity of others. Some clipped from magazines, some stamped designs and then formed a design - there are just all sorts of designs out there and it's just remarkable to view them all. If you're so inclined, you should head over to Spoonflower and participate in the voting!

From this to this...

I try to make my own cards for special occasions - actually who am I kidding, I always try to make everyone's present for special occasions! Not always quick or easy but it's a lot more meaningful for me and I hope for the recipient as well! The special occasion that's just around the corner is my dad's birthday. My dad is a wonderful and even though I won't be with him on his actual birthday, I wanted to make a card that would convey just how much he means to me. He's the epitome of the world's best dad - unconditional love and support!

The card began with these pages filled with my calligraphy and other lettering.

With a little bit of experimenting and searching through my stash of papers, it became this card for dear old dad!

At-Home Retreat

I've been feeling really down in the dumps this winter for many reasons which I won't get into here. At one of the very lowest of those depths, I was talking with my husband and we discussed some ways that might help to lift my spirits and help my self-confidence. In the midst of that coversation, I mentioned something about needing to go to a creative retreat where I could connect with other creative people, but money was obviously a concern. As we further investigated retreat possibilities and there were none that were close enough to our home and they were many months off as well. We then moved on to something more immediate and my husband offered to give me an at-home retreat - he would take care of all the cooking and just let me relax and create to my heart's content all weekend!

So a couple of weeks ago, my husband gave me my at-home retreat. He made lasagna and deep-dish pizza, brought breakfast home, ran out for coffee, even gave me a goody bag of Ghirardelli raspberry-filled dark chocolate squares! I got to just create art as much as I could and as long as I could stay awake. I cut and soldered, made earrings, painted canvases, and anything else that I could squeeze in. I also created the fabric ribbons in the picture above. Those began by painting the selvedge edges of some of my Spoonflower fabrics. Once they were dry, I lettered them and added some little accents. Now I've got about 6 yards of totally unique, calligraphed ribbon - what exactly I'm going to do with it I don't know!!!

Hopefully, I can come up with something fabulous by the time I go to The Creative Connection Event!!!! During my at-home retreat weekend, I finally got a chance to look through some of the magazines that I am so far behind in reading. As I was looking through the latest issue of Where Women Create, I came across an ad for the event and got so excited that it was going to be just down the road in Minneapolis (the closest locale to my home along the North Shore). I became a bit disheartened when I saw the cost as I haven't had regular, full-time employment in about four years, but talked about it with my husband. He was so supportive and we decided we were going to do everything we could to get me there!!! I told him that this was all I wanted for my birthday, anniversary, everything - so my deposit has been sent in and in September I'll get to connect with a whole bunch of other creative souls at The Creative Connection Event!!!!

Long story short - I have a honey of a husband!!!