Posted on by

Other Creative Paths

Creative stitching has not been happening in my world lately.  I’m trying not to get too worked up over this, as the days have gone by and I cannot get them back.  However, I have been creative in other ways – food.  Last week at my nearby produce auction, I purchased two gigantic heads of Chinese cabbage.  So far, I have made wonton soup (heavy on the cabbage), started a batch of kimchi (something I have always wanted to try making) and homemade egg rolls.  I still have one head of cabbage.  The soup and egg rolls were delicious, the kimchi has to ferment some days longer.  I don’t know what I will do with the second head, I must get to it quickly.  So my creative energy has gone in a different direction, much to the delight of my taste buds.  There is no reason why creativity shouldn’t affect all aspects of our lives.

Looking forward, I still have not picked up my goal of finishing the index-card-a-day challenges from 2018 and 2017.  I’m not going to go into great depths into this project here, other than to report my progress.  Here are the first two weeks from 2018, I managed to keep with the challenge at the time.

Prompts: roller coaster, fireworks, tilt-a-whirl, Ferris wheel, line/queue, carousel, haunted house.

Prompts: zebra, chevron, trap door, coffee or tea, magic wand, cobblestone, flamingo.

I managed to complete four of the cards for week three when I was supposed to (summer 2018).  Will I get the remaining three cards done by next Tuesday?

 

Posted on by

Travel Journal – Granville, Ohio

Last week, my excuse for not posting was getting ready for a quilt show, this week, I’ve been recovering from it, mostly trying to put all of my inventory out of the way for the winter.

My trip to Granville started out with a journey an hour in the opposite direction to the Kreinik Threads factory and outlet store.  I am pleased to announce that I will have a selection of their unusual metallic threads, silk threads and scissors at future shows.  I always like to stitch out samples of the things that I sell, and at the outlet store, I found a sampler set of some of each of their threads.  Over next couple of months, I will be “testing” and reporting on each thread here.  I bought some things to take to Granville, and some other things for myself.

Then it was on to the last quilt show of 2019 for me, the biennial Heart of Ohio guild show, held on the grounds of the Bryn Du Mansion.  The house and grounds has an interesting history, more may be read here.   I was most pleased to see that one of the buildings is being used for a community arts center.  I will be looking into getting involved there in the future.

While the quilt show was good, I had some great food over the weekend.  In Heath, Ohio, I recommend Bombay Garden (delicious Indian cuisine) and in Granville, Mai Chau for equally delicious Vietnamese food.  I do not want to wait two years for the next quilt show there to go back to those two restaurants.  I’ll have to find some other excuses to head that way sooner.

The show was a successful one for me, thank you to everyone who bought fabric and thread from me.  Welcome to my blog, too!  I had a few ideas presented to me over the weekend, and I am working on developing them more.  One of these ideas was coming to a guild meeting with some of my wares to sell.  If you belong to a guild that might be interested, please contact me to schedule for 2020.

Next week, more on metallic threads and those index cards – they just won’t go away!

 

Posted on by

Stencils and an Escape

Today, a few words about some more of my index-card-a-day experiments.  I won’t be going on much more about these, I promise (at least until next year’s ICAD edition).  The annual challenge is all about making something within the daily theme, with what you have on hand, and sometimes producing even when you are not at all interested in the subject.

The two above cards illustrate perfectly the concept of “use what you already have.”  Of course, taking on a daily mixed media art project, I already had a good stock of various art supplies.  The card on the left happened very quickly.  The prompt was “stencil.”  I simply reached up above my painting table and whisked my small collection of TSC Designs stencils off of their nail on the wall, and traced some of them onto the card with markers.  I’m interested in creating complex layers in my art, and this was an easy way to accomplish a few layers.

The prompt for the card on the right was “escape.”  On the day I was to create this card, I read the prompt while sitting at my painting table, thinking, “what a ridiculous prompt for a 3 X 5” card… what am I going to do?”  I was NOT inspired.  I stared at my table for too long.  No ideas were coming to my mind.  I stared some more, noticing how messy the newspaper that I used for a paint blotter had become.  I could still see bits of the newspaper text and images through the multi color paint splotches.  Eureka!  I could use the newspaper “drop cloth” as a base for a card – the escape card!  Quickly, I cut a 3 X 5” piece of the paper, glued it to an index card and used circle stencils to doodle on top of the paint.  I had successfully escaped artist’s block for another day.

 

Posted on by

Daily Little Things

What’s this? I’m actually getting a post out on a Thursday, shocking!  Today I want to feature a few cards from my efforts in the 2019 ICAD challenge, and introduce a possible new daily project that I am trying.  I really have enough to do in my life, but as I always say, I will NEVER be bored.

From this summer’s index-card-a-day event, here is a group that all share the same concept in carrying out the prompt:

The prompts for these four cards were pendulum, tinker toys, guitar and skee ball.  I was not at all interested in these four prompts, and with a limit of time to produce a card each day, I had to get innovative with my interpretation.  For each of these, I looked at images of the subject, then extracted shapes, lines and patterns that I noticed in the images.  I then made paper cutouts of the shapes and arranged them in compositions that still had the elements of the object, but mixed them up in a new way.  These cards ended up being a lot of fun to work on once I tricked my brain into not seeing a guitar as a guitar, but a series of shapes to play with.  By the way, the guitar card is the only one that I drew the shapes with markers; I did not use my usual paper cut out collage technique on that one.

Earlier in the week, I received the current issue of Quilting Arts magazine.  One of the articles is a short introduction by Liz Kettle to daily meditative hand stitching.  It is another affirmation that if you want to be more creative, you have to make things every day, and build your skills.  One of the tips that Kettle gives in the article is to never remove a stitch in you daily stitch pieces – just keep going.  I absolutely agree with this!  If I keep redoing all the stitches that don’t turn out like I want, I’ll never finish anything, and I have enough trouble finishing things.  I have finished three 4×4″ squares, here they are:

I don’t know if I will keep this up daily, with so many other creative things I have in progress, but I have a goal of five of these little stitchies each week.  They are a great way to warm-up before working on a bigger project, and to play with design and composition.

Next week, more about the ICAD cards (I really love them!) and whatever I have stitched over the weekend.

 

Posted on by

ICAD 2019, Card #47 – Turnpike

Just a quick post today.  I want to feature a few individual cards that I made from the 2019 ICAD challenge and the technique or inspiration behind them.  Up first is the card from day 47, the prompt “turnpike.”  I have an unexplained fascination with outrageous 1950s cars.  I’m not a gearhead at all, my interest is in the exterior design – the bigger the fins on the taillights, the better!  One of my favorite 1950s cars is the 1958 Mercury Turnpike Cruiser, so I naturally thought of this car when deciding what to do with the prompt.

 

My process for the card used a photo that I took of the taillight of a ’58 Turnpike Cruiser (above left).  I made a black and white copy of my image, using the photo setting on the copier and lightening the copy (center image).  Then, I simply tinted the copy with colored pencils (right image).  I think that the tinted copy looks better than the original photo.  Many antique postcards were colored with a similar technique, and hand tinting black and white photos continues to be at technique  occasionally used by photographers today.  I’d like to try the technique on an image printed on fabric.  Colored pencils apply nicely to fabric, I recommend brushing a textile medium over any areas drawn on with pencils.

Next time, another ICAD card feature, and some stitching.