Art Journal
Art Journaling – Inverse Silhouettes

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Those of you who happen to lead projects or workshops, or lessons, or sermons, may have the same reaction as me to the question ‘what are we doing next time?’. There’s the moment of panic – ‘I’ve not even thought about it’; then there’s the moment of ‘shall I make something up?’. Then there’s the next thought: ‘I really must get a lesson plan together’. All of which then gets summarised into the quintessential reply: ‘It’s a surprise.’

So it was at the end of my last art journaling session a month ago. Since then, a little planning has happened, and I’ve come up with the project for Monday’s session: inverse silhouettes. Here’s a couple of examples I’ve done this week:

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And it’s perhaps no surprise to learn that I’ll probably have the same answer at the end of that session…

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Original Designs
‘1704’ – Quilt No. 13

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Quilt No 013Notwithstanding a minor burn injury caused by not having my arm far enough away from the iron whilst folding the binding for this quilt, I’ve finished my sampler quilt for the workshop I am running at Quorn Country Crafts in Loughborough on 17th April. As you can see, it’s a nine 10×10″ panel quilt-as-you-go with contrast joining strips featuring continuous line free motion quilt patterns that I have adapted from my tangle patterns.

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3D Projects
Mixed Media Sketchbook Cover

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IMG_5784_wIn between various quilting tasks and undercoating MDF clock bases, I’ve also been working on this mixed media sketchbook cover makeover, in the Finnabair style. I haven’t been to any of Anna’s classes, but did get to see her demo’ing her new media range, courtesy of Prima, at the Notions stand at the trade show last week.

The sketchbook is hard cover, and I made the mistake of forgetting to put the texture paste down before sticking the ephemera in place (but I think I got away with it). A gesso layer melds everything together and stiffens paper flowers. There’s metal trinkets, moulded paper clay, buttons, beads and bingo tokens as well as chipboard inches. Colour initially started in pinks and purples, but as the piece developed, the pinks receded and blues came in. Products include Inka Gold, Cosmic Shimmer Matt Chalk Acrylics, Liquid Pearls, Viva Decor Pearl & Paper Pens, Dreamweaver Embossing Paste and various stencils.

Oh and I used my new Bosch Glue Pen as well to stick things down with (thank you Kathryn & David!).

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Original Designs
Autumn Lily Layer Cake Quilt

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IMG_5766_wI finished a mammoth quilt last week, the first I have designed using a Layer Cake – Blackbird Designs ‘Autumn Lily’ by Moda. For the uninitiated, layer cakes are usually forty two 10×10″ pre-cut squares of fabric from a coordinating collection. I augmented this with a lot of calico to make a relatively inexpensive throw for the bed – it reaches over the sides, but only goes 2/3rds of the way up the bed by design (and by the fact that I would have needed more patterned fabric!). Each block in the above photo is just under 10″ square for a sense of scale, and the finished quilt size is 110″x67″ (roughly 3m by 1.5m). Each square has been quilted, and the repeating motif is my own continuous line quilting design.

I spent yesterday afternoon having my first play with Electric Quilt 7 – a quilting software package that I purchased last week to aid in production of quilt patterns, as well as designing my own quilts. As all the reviews I looked at have said, there’s a steep learning curve, but the help screens and tutorial videos do help you get to grips with what is actually an unintuitive interface (at least at first). It does have the benefit of being able to import photos of the fabric swatches, and Moda are kind enough to provide these as a download via their website.

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Card Craft
Bespoke Wedding Invitations (Part 1)

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The hardest thing about keeping my blog up to date with my crafty exploits is that some of my work has to be kept under wraps until the special reveal. So there may be times when I seem to be quiet – but in fact working frantically to meet deadlines!

Today’s post is one of those. A good friend asked me to make her wedding invitations – and now they’ve been sent and received, I won’t be spoiling any surprises 🙂

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Both Jess and Stuart are real ale aficionados, and we’ve spent hours together working our way through the bar at the Peterborough Beer Festival. What more fitting then than a personal hand pull badge? I drew the hand pull from reference photographs, and then scanned it and coloured it in Illustrator. The badge was designed in a combination of Photoshop and Illustrator. After creating print proofs, cut lines were created in Illustrator and sent to Silhouette Cameo using their Connect plug-in. It was then a matter of assembling the parts using 1mm deep foam pads to add some dimension (and allow avoidance of large letter postage).

By my reckoning, one can measure how successful a job has gone by whether more work is commissioned as a result. Happily, the couple are so delighted, I’ve been asked to adapt the design for the reception table labels.

Congratulations to the happy couple, all the best for the day, and here’s to another reunion at Peterborough in August 🙂

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Art Journal
ZIA on other surfaces: monoprinting

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I’ve just taken delivery of my 3×5″ Gelli Arts Plate, which is the perfect size to have a go at a technique I wanted to test for my forthcoming Zentangle Inspired Art workshop. I mixed black acrylic with a slow medium in equal quantities and used a brayer to cover the plate evenly with the black paint. Working as quickly as I could, I scraped paint off with a rubber tipped tool to ‘etch’ the tangle design. Despite the speed at which I worked, the acrylic still dried, so by the end I was scraping into dried paint, and to transfer the monoprint to paper I needed to add a layer of matt multi medium over the dried paint. After everything had dried on the page, I added Distress Inks to colour. A fast and furious sample, but a technique I think I will try again, perhaps with Golden Open acrylics or even a waterbased printing ink.

Have a go at this technique, along with others, at my workshop on Easter Saturday.

On a separate note, it is worth having a look at my original image – which was taken with a camera – the gloss finished of the acrylic played havoc with the light… Whereas the scanned image above shows off the piece far better. There’s also some resist happening with the black and the multi-medium which adds to the texture.

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Tangle Patterns
70’s Cup A: a tangle pattern

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70s-Cup-AIt’s been a long while since I’ve found inspiration for some more tangle patterns… but this week, while doing a house clearance, I came across a small earthenware cup with geometric patterns reminiscent of those from the 1970’s. This is the first of two tangle patterns based on the cup.

 

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3D Projects
Eazi-Box: How to make shaped boxes with ease

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I’ve just finished and published my first commissioned tutorial video, for Diamond Card Crafts. It’s evidence to me that LinkedIn is worth keeping up to date as this is where contact first started.

Back to the video: I show how to use Diamond Card Craft‘s Eazi-Box Shape Board to make shaped boxes, starting with an introduction to the board, then the basic square shaped box (equally able to do rectangular boxes btw), and then moving on to triangular, pentagonal, octagonal and short lid boxes. The board itself is a deeply moulded score board, with templates for the shapes which are so versatile and can also be used to make shaped cards and mats as well. I share tips and tricks that aren’t in the instruction sheet for perfect boxes every time.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/75whxyt6DeQ]

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