Searching for a creative voice part 2

I mentioned that there has been a lot of inspiration coming out of this year's CHA (the American Craft and Hobby Association) trade show and I've bought some more of the lighter, brighter distress markers and some new stencils. I want to mush them all together, inking, stencilling, staping and doodling to see what happens. And all of this is in an attempt to see if I can find my unique creative style!

My first simple experiment. Some spring coloured stencilling, a word to frame and doodles to frame it.

For my second experiment I gethered together the things below which were a mix of colours I wanted to see work together and a new stamp I wanted to use.

Between us we made this...

The quote from Jean Anoiulh has a personal connection which I never feel from the sentiments and words you can buy as rubber stamps. I scroll through online stores looking for the right words but never find the ones which really speak to me. I've learned my first lesson then about what my style is - and it doesn't include off the peg word stamps. This is great and I'll save money on stamps!

The following day I decided to use the same "recipe" ie make a background, add a stamp but instead of adding writing, I wanted to add doodling.

I splatted the colour burst on a piece of smooth hot pressed watercolour paper and spritzed it. Then I used a permanent ink to stamp on a piece of tissue paper. I added a layer of gesso to create a whiteness under where I wanted to place the image. Once I'd smoothed the stamped image on the sheet, I sealed it with matte Mod Podge. There needed to be more blue so I sprayed some salty ocean one the page and spritzed with water before drying with a heat gun. The doodles were added and where I'd drawn onto very dark colours, I tried to get the flowers to pop by making a small with dot with a white sharpie.

Both of these experiments are a good starting place and I look forward to playing further! After all this hard work I was shouted downstairs by Himself and the mutt for our first cuppa in the later morning sunshine. It's Valentine's Day today and is early in the year for outside drinks. We had to wear thick coats and wrap our cold hands round the mugs but the promise of spring to come and life outside again is exciting :)

And this spring we have a puppy to share it with.

Posted with Blogsy

Searching for a creative voice part 1

I have so many interests I sometimes feel like a fibberty gibbet butterfly brain. Constantly fluttering between paper arts, quilting, needle felting, zentangling and baking. But the truth is I've discovered each has its season and they feed into each other so instead of being widely varying activities, they compliment each other. Take quilting, this is generally an autumn and winter thing for me, appreciated best when the frost outside bites.

Fabrics and quilts are cosy things which speak of dark nights spent with a needle by a glowing fireside.

Baking fits in with this season too. One of my favourite things is to curl up in a well cushioned chair with a pile of recipe books researching new recipes to freeze or store away ready for when visitors drop by. The boys sometimes help out too but I removed the biscuits with their rude words before taking the photo!

It's lovely to spend time in the warmth of a kitchen on a cold day, filling the house with the festive scents of cinnamon, apples, cloves and oranges.

A row of jars and tins filled with welcoming nibbles or Christmas specials feels like a practical way to hibernate when the days are short.
As we leave the short days behind us and climb into spring my interests change. The new year is when I feel curiosity building up, time to learn a new technique or develop an existing skill. Usually it's paper crafts and zentangling. After tidying away after the latest quilt or growing weary of washing up baking trays, I like the simplicity of pens and paper and instead of needing to follow precise measurements or weighing ingredients, I can freewheel. My mind is off the hook and floating free.
In all these things I'm searching for the unique spark of creativity. I can copy a pattern and follow a recipe but creating something new, original and unique doesn't come so easily. How do you find your unique style? That thing that makes your artwork instantly recognisable as yours? I'm beginning to think it will only be found in the art for arts sake, things you do when your mind is not hindered by instructions or under pressure to produce a finished piece of work. And it's very relaxing to just doodle...

Something I rarely mention is music but it plays a huge part in my crafting life. There are some quilts I've made which in my mind will always be associated with a particular piece of music which I listened to over and over while setting my stitches. I listen to a lot of radio drama and comedy and those have special associations with things I've made. The quilt I've just completed for my nephews first birthday is linked in my memory with Bleak Expectations, a very silly radio comedy based (very loosely!) in Victorian England.

Another quilt given as a Christmas present last year was made while listening to series 4 of John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme and another remains associated with the radio dramatisations of Cadfael. Kate Bush is fairly prominent and her lyrics are prime source material for some art journaling I'm planning. Equally Eminem has loads of words which spark off cretive thoughts and may feature somewhere soon. So as I continue to search for that creative voice, I'll pay more attention to the music.
My experiments with paper, inks and pens will continue in part 2 of this post....

Posted with Blogsy

Stuff my dog does

We got our Parson Russell puppy, Buster, late last summer. He's now 7 months old and as the weeks pass, his personality is developing. He laughs a lot and is very enthusiastic about everything and everyone. His hobbies include jumping up to say hello to visitors, barking at cars, hugging other dogs and licking horses. His crate is in our kitchen and he has always been very good about going to his cosy bed at night with his favourite squeaky chicken. He loves this so much we're on chicken number 3.

I think it helps that his bed is right by the warm radiator.

Most mornings he is quite happy to stay settled in his bed, listening to the sounds of the shower or hairdryer upstairs as we get ready for work. Hearing our footsteps on the creaky stairs is his cue to bounce up and down and welcome us. His sheer joy at the start of each day is brilliant and now we have a routine, he knows all his favourite things are coming his way. Outside for a sniff and a wee, round the corner to visit the ponies, home for a massive game of fetch followed by breakfast and surveillance duties from his window seat. If he's lucky and there's a bundle of washing going into the machine, he might score a sneaky sock.

The only cloud in his endless blue sky is when the servants take away newly acquired toys (toilet rolls) and put him in doggy jail (behind the baby gate in the kitchen).

These are his favourite things in the whole world, especially the red ball. If the servants let him, he would play fetch with these until he fell over.

But sometime the servants adapt his toys, for example cutting the chewed and frayed fronds off his squid. Meanies.

I currently work from home and have a small office set up in our back bedroom. Buster visits me there because he thinks my office is his Fartorium. He also thinks he's very funny.

Despite his sometimes unsavoury presence, we are very appreciative of our good natured, scruffy little dog. There are no cushions left on our sofas, the floors have a permapaw covering, we have to hide the toilet roll, be on call when he rings his bell to go outside for "dog time" and groan with frustration when he forgets his manners, refuses to sit for anything less than sausage and behaves like a devil dog on the lead. For all that we find him irrisistible.

Posted with Blogsy

Playtime -distress markers and stencils - part 2

I wanted to show you how to put together the flowers used in part 1

Cut out ever decreasing circle sizes from card or tissue paper and spritz ink over them or just spray neat water on them. Scrunch them and leave to dry. Once dry, unwrap them, they should have nice deep folds. I've laid out the top row in the order I'm going to layer them and don't worry about putting the circles directly on top of each other, make them slightly off centre as in the bottom row.

In the flowers below, I've spritzed them with complementary colours to match the backgrounds I've created...

If you want a little extra sparkle, use a glitter pen on the edges of each layer. I used a clear Wink of Stella brush pen because I love it. It's one of the best glitter pens I've found.

Poke a hole through the background card and fix the flower in place. Add a sentiment and - ta dah!

I had a lot of fun with these and got slighty obsessed. But only slightly.

Well, you get the idea!

Posted with Blogsy

Playtime - distress markers and stencils - part 1

This January I had some random annual leave to use up so I had 4 self indulgent days of play with distress markers, stencils and texture paste while listening to loud music and funny stuff on the radio. Bliss. Usually the tightness of time means I need to get on with whatever the project is, maybe a quilt or an urgent birthday card so there's rarely time just to play and experiment. As I wasn't spending money on an actual holiday I treated myself to some new bits and bobs. See the pretty!

I've used distress markers since they were introduced but I've never really used them to the max. I'd always known they could do more than just ink up stamps in different colours but I hadn't explored further. I watched some of the you tube videos coming out of this year's Craft and Hobby Association trade show in California and got really enthused to try out some of the techniques, especially those by Tim Holtz. I've never been a fan of his dark, grungy style but he's broadened his colour range considerably and shifted slightly into what he calls "vintage" and I call "better". Like everything, crafting supplies go through fashion phases. His products have always been imaginative and well thought out. You can tell they are designed by someone who is himself a crafter.

I used to be a bit irritated by the names on the marker pens like "spiced marmalade" rather than "orange" or "faded denim" instead of "blue". I have to admit though, that after using them some more and making myself a chart of the colours in my collection, the names are spot on and describe the quality of each colour beautifully. I take it all back Tim!

The ink spritzer is one of my fav gadgets. It's a great way to explore colour mixes without all that tedious mucking about with water and buckled paper. What I discovered about the colour palette of the distress markers is that no matter how hard I tried to make a bad colour combo I couldn't make anything truly hideous because the colours all share the same tonal value, basically you can't get it wrong. I think this was the moment at which I had my epiphany. The clouds parted, the sun shone a ray of light on my slightly inky face, a celestial choir sang, the scales fell from my eyes and I got it. You can't get it wrong. Crafting can be good, bad or indifferent but it can't be wrong and there doesn't need to be an end product. For me crafting is a form of meditation which I just happen to do with my hands. If I have a busy patch where I don't do something creative for a few days I feel disconnected from myself. So I wacked the music up loud (Yes - McAlmont & Butler, Do You Realise - the Flaming Lips, Just A Gigolo - Louis Prima, River Man - Nick Drake) did some chair dancing and played.

I started with the textured paste and stencils, having spritzed an inky background using broken china and stormy sky. I spread the paste through the stencil and it picked up the colours from the background which was unexpected but nice.

Then I tried mixing a small amount of colour into a blob of textured paste and spread through another stencil.

Once dried the paste is hard but can still absorb paint if you want to paint over it. I didn't but I was impressed with the result.

I kept trying different combinations and added a narrow strip across the front of this sunnier coloured background to allow room to add a sentiment later.

The real fun thing I found was stencilling over a background. Im not sure if it was this particular stencil (one I've had for a while and forgotten the name of but the code on the bottom is THS032) or the colours but this really grabbed me.

And yes, this is a different background but for some reason I can't load up the proper photo but you get the idea. The flourishes were added by picking up colour on a felt ink dabber and were a mix of mini ink pads and distress markers. I scribbled some colour from the markers onto my silicon worksheet and picked it up with the foam pad. This increases the colour range available without having to buy a whole load of ink pads. I started light in the centre and switched to a darker colour moving out to the edge of the card, all the while keeping the stencil firmly in place.

But what would this look like in pink or red or orange...?

I particularly liked the brown and blue. The brown was dark enough to let me add some white highlights and created a worn, leathery look. Then I stuck a paper flower on it.

Flowers? Yup.....part two of this post coming up...

Posted with Blogsy