I’ve never spent much time with paper-based arts but obviously have had a hankering to do so – I’ve got the supplies on hand!  I’ve decided to allocate a bit of time this year to exploring journals and book-making and have spent the last couple of days ‘playing’.  If I hadn’t, I’d still be procrastinating and who knows when I would get started! Over the past two days I’ve introduced my mini...

In the past I’ve been unsuccessful in remaining faithful to my journaling efforts.  I did manage one NaNo challenge!  Part of the problem arises when I ‘get lost’ in the journal pages and spent too much time doing them and part arises from frustration with bound journal pages.  So I’m trying a new approach. I also want to explore ‘tangles’ this year and have prepared to do so by making my own tangle...

Happy New Year everyone! I was going to wait until tomorrow to do a post but thought better of it.  I need to put down a marker – a marker for a new beginning, a new direction, a new focus. It’s been a pleasant start to the New Year.  A leisurely breakfast, some work on a major fiber art piece neglected for a couple of years because it is too large for my work area in the RV, preparation for some journal work this year, topped off...

I’m still limited in my mobility while trying to avoid the coughing that results with physical exertion so, with sweatshirt #1 completed, I moved on to sweatshirt #2.  This time I was inspired by a posting on Pinterest.  The first posting I found was by Rachel Hatch and appears to have been woven with cotton broadcloth strips.  However, when I followed her links to my inspiration it led, via Danielle Schulz, to the original posting at The...

Thanks to a particularly nasty encounter with a flu  bug I’ve been under the weather and very limited in creative energy.  In fact, for a number of days, I existed on fluids and slept.  Now hubby is dealing with it. However, a bit of hand work did manage to get completed and here is the first of my up-cycled sweatshirts finished.  Complete with pockets, it is sure to become a favorite! As the instructions I worked from didn’t have...

As I’m feeling a little under the weather with a flu bug, I’m not feeling particularly creative today so I thought I would chat a bit about a project I’m just starting.  I’m always on the lookout for quick and easy projects that I can share with friends who are not as comfortable with a needle and thread as I am. While RVing, the wardrobe basics are jeans t-shirts and sweatshirts.  I’ve resisted wearing plain...

I’m always on the lookout to find new materials or techniques that I might use in mixed-media art.  While at the Calgary Creative Stitches & Crafting Alive Show I came across a booth with a representative offering courses in the use of Paverpol to create garden-safe sculptures.  My sister has created a couple of sculptures and they combine fibre empregnated with a material that hardens it to a waterproof structure.  I have never...

Years ago I took a workshop that introduced me to encaustic. While intrigued  I wasn’t particularly pleased with the pieces that I produced in the workshop and the teacher, who spent a lot of time talking about the creation of her encaustic medium, made it sound as though it was a very time intensive project.  I must have had some lingering interest though because a year ago I bought Encaustic Workshop by Patricia Baldwin Seggebruch....

Last fall I started to work on what I am calling my ‘Re’ series.  You may ask, what is my ‘Re’ series.  I’ve always been fascinated with trying to use things that might other wise be discarded and of course that opens the door to using processes that ‘Recycle, Reuse, Repurpose, Reclaim, Reprocess, Restore, Rescue, Relove, Recondition, Remodel, Regenerate’.  Of course if you are not a purist you could...

For a change of pace I’m going to share some of the photos that I looked at when starting this project.  The finished piece will be 18″x45″ so the shape of the piece will be a challenge in itself. This piece will be an entry into a FAN (Fibre Art Network) exhibition in 2013  entitled Abstracted.  This show requires artists to work with a partner, one artist develops a representative art piece and the other develops an...