Tag: creativity

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Very Small Pieces

Another very quick post for today.  I have been playing with little shreds of fabric.  Now, I am not one who feels compelled to make use of every little scrap, but I have been setting aside the trimmings that result from my box making process.  Once I trim each side, I end up with a substantial pile of fabric bits, a prime example of which you can see on the left side, below.

A few days ago, I embarked on a quest to use some of these little scraps.  I’m starting by making some artist trading cards by fusing the scraps to fusible interfacing (center and right, above).  Next, I will machine quilt the cards to secure the pieces.  I have not yet thought about embellishing, other than that hand stitching is out of the question.  Amazingly, the overlap of the little pieces has made the cards too thick to easily hand stitch.  That actually doesn’t bother me, as these cards are supposed to be finished quickly.  Over the weekend, I will work on ways to machine embellish.  My sewing machines need more exercise anyway.  Check back on Tuesday to see the finished cards.

 

 

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The Last of ICAD 2018

I finished it!  Almost a year and a half late, but my quest of the index-card-a-day challenge from 2018 is at an end.  Week 8 (prompts: radio, mint, postage, cassette tape, tide pool, circuit or network, typewriter):

Week 9 (prompts: twister, favorite color, staple, wish, telescope):

These little daily challenges are great exercises in many ways.  They also prove the theory that you have to make a lot of stuff to get decent at art, and a fair amount of what you make isn’t good.  So, is bad art still art?  It exists, but should it?  Many of my cards are terrible.  There are a few gems, and some that I could have done better, but I won’t re-do those.  I am keeping all of my ICAD efforts, and over the winter I will make fabric boxes to hold each year’s cards.

I am going to forge ahead and finish the cards for the first year I tried the challenge, 2017, but I won’t post my efforts as frequently.  I don’t think that I will stick to the one-a-day pace that I set for finishing 2018 (not to mention that I should have done one card a day when the challenge was current).   On Thursday, some thoughts on my fabric collage boxes.

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Catching Up and Getting Distracted, Over and Over

The title just says it all,  I am in a constant state of trying to get caught up on so much unfinished and behind schedule things, and I still am wandering off on other tangents.  I’m not stressed too much about it though, as I have hinted before, I feel fortunate to have so many enriching things in my life, and I enjoy having so many creative options to fill my time.

This week’s creative catch-up: index card challenge, 2018, week seven, done!  Here they are:

The prompts were window, fringe, candyland, tie-dye, love, camera and landscape.  I was not interested in most of this week’s prompts, with that in mind, they turned out decently in the end.  Next week’s posts should be more insightful than I have been able to manage lately.  With the upcoming holiday, I am looking forward to doing some substantial creative work in stitches, collage and words.  Check back to see what I accomplish.

 

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Debating Daily Projects

I have been having a discussion with myself lately about all of these daily or weekly projects that I am working on now, or that I have attempted in the past.  Daily creative projects are great ways to discipline oneself into a creative habit, try new things, work out design problems and generate new ideas.  However, I have been taking much longer than I should to complete my daily efforts.  I get so wrapped up in the little daily things that I am not putting time into bigger projects that will be for sale or get entered into art shows.

The little daily stuff is just for me, which is still important, but not the only thing in my creative world.  I don’t want to give them up, as the index card challenge has been a great learning experience, and I want to complete the past years that I started – that was a goal I set for myself, and there are so many goals that I have not met.  I wonder how much more I would have grown creatively by now had I known about these little daily art doses in college or even high school.

Since I have not been stitching at all lately, I picked up the 4×4″ daily project again to get back into the needle and thread.  Here are all the squares that I have done since attempting the challenge back in September:

Some winners, some not, I have learned from them all.  Now I am behind again on the index card goal, and I managed to bring home five more books from the library to read.  I am very glad I have all of these things to do.

 

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ICAD 2018, Week 6

A very quick post, I wanted to get this out yesterday, trying to keep up with getting caught up!  The prompts for this batch of index card creations are: pretzel, poetry, palette, pixelated, pinball, portrait and plate.

The card for pretzel was an experiment, I simply made layers of three colors by putting real mini pretzels on the card and spraying them with Marabu acrylic spray paint.  I like the effect, and I’ll be paying with those paints more in the future.  For the poetry card, I cut out a few lines of text from magazine articles and filled in with my own words.  Palette was simply blots of acrylic paint in one of my signature color combinations of purple, green and yellow.  Finally, the pinball card was a pleasant surprise.  After looking at images of pinball machines online, and studying the photorealism paintings of Charles Bell, I cut shapes out of colored paper, layering them to imitate the pinball graphics, and added details with gel pen.

More tomorrow, some sort of stitching.