Next Step In One Small Project

Here is the next step in my snowflake coasters project. The paint is cured and I took the freezer paper off. My intention was to go a bit further with them this weekend by adding some machine and hand stitching, but my sister came for a couple of days and brought my youngest grandson, so it was off to the Sea Center to hold some sea cucumbers and pet a shark followed by beach-combing for shells and cool rocks. I can work on the snowflakes next week.


I will have to come up with something extra creative because I overshot some of the freezer paper in a couple of places on the copper pieces and got some paint in the wrong places around the outer edges.


These seem to be calling out for some glitter and beads, but I'm not sure beads are a very good idea on the surface of a coaster. Seems that might make the glass that was set on it tip over! Kind of destroys the whole point of using a coaster in the first place.

A Few Small Projects

A couple of weeks ago I decided to start working with the book Drawing Lab for Mixed-Media Artists by Carla Sonheim, hoping that some directed projects would get my creative juices jumping. The first exercise is drawing cats and this little feline is so cute that I made a screen out of it for printing. Today I printed a green background out of an older screen on some hand-dyed fabric and topped it with my cat. These will become fabric postcards.

There was so much of the purple/black paint left that I grabbed one of my clean up rags and printed a couple of my other screens on it. The clean up rags that result from my dyeing and painting days are usually some of the best fabrics I have. These are some cool turtles and one scary Halloween spider. They'll get cut apart and used separately. Don't know exactly how they'll get used, but something fun will come along.

Another thing I started today is a little project from the new Quilting Arts Gifts magazine. Cut out some snowflake stencils and used some Shiva Artist's Paintstiks in copper and white to fill them in. Now to wait a week for the paint to cure before the stitching starts

Visual Journal

Recently I began a class at Santa Barbara City College Continuing Education (commonly referred to around here as Adult Ed) called Creativity and the Imagination: Visual Journaling, with Deborah Wroblewski. We will be creating journals using more than words to capture our experiences. This is a photo of the first page of my journal. The assignment was to create our name page - something to describe ourselves as introduction to our journals. I chose to do a watercolor wash as a background, then used a Sharpie to write about who I am, what I feel, and what I aspire to. I then printed some photos of my quilt "Everyday Quan Yin" - which is about bringing compassion and mercy to daily life - glued them on to the page and then began playing with some materials I am familiar with from surface design on fabric. The silvery splotches are Shiva Artist's Paintstiks and the spirals are glue and foil. They certainly act differently on paper than they do on fabric. This is definitely going to be fun!