So Much Glue

Hello, Pocketeers!  I'm back!  Last weekend, with two days of Seth Apter classes, was awesome.  And I know some of you wanted to see what I did in the workshops, so here we go!

Day 1 was Collage Camp.  Seth went over several collage principles and techniques, and we did an exemplar of each one, thus building up a sort of handbook for future reference.  Then, we did some background painting and were let loose to practice what we had learned. 

This is the color combo I started with.  Meh.  I don't like the two-tone.

That's better.

Are you shocked by my choice of stamps?  I bet you are.  Not.

Auditioning the layout.  Employed here are Overlapping (duh), Repetition, and Highlighting.  For further explanation of what those are, take Seth's Collage Camp class wherever he offers it near you ;)

Just put the finishing touches (the gold and the word "sanctuary") on tonight.  Except for how much the washi tape wrinkled, I'm really pleased with how this turned out.

And btw, how gorgeous is that Gothic window stamp?  Mom got it for me (in a set with an awesome door design too) when she was out in Washington state taking another Seth class.  I swear we're not stalking him.  We're just groupies.

Day 2 was actually a class we were supposed to take back in February, but it got snowed out.  It's called Brick by Brick, and this class was a little more project-oriented, though we learned a lot of cool painting techniques and did a lot of, er, sharing.

Pardon the shadow of the window here, this is my painted paper.

Detail of the painted paper after a few more layers of fun.

All that beautiful paper........

And this is what it became!  Sorry, I can't tell you how we did it, you'll have to take the class.

Even the sides of the canvas are covered.

 

Doing all of this collaging and such, I went through an entire little jar of matte gel medium.  I'm not quite sure exactly how much of it ended up on my hands, but it seemed like a lot -- I wasn't sure I would EVER get it all off.  And if there's one thing I hate, it's having sticky hands.  But you know what?  For all of the fun we had, all the stuff I learned, and the two complete works of art I ended up with, I think it was totally worth it.

Weekend Art Frenzy

Hi all!  It was a seriously long Winter.  I've only recently gotten my creative energy back, and soon I'll show off what I've done on my own.  But I just spent a fantastic weekend with my mom taking Seth Apter's workshops, and I just have to get out a quick lunchtime blog post about them.

Mom and I took classes from Seth before when he was at our local shop, and this year when we heard he was coming down again, I was afraid I'd have to miss it because I just don't have the money for all the classes I want to take.  But Mom paid my way as my birthday present, so I was able to go with her after all!  Seth is fantastic, and if you ever have the chance to take a class with him, do it.  He's very fun, very chill, and very encouraging.  And, like Michelle Ward, his classes use a project as a vehicle for learning techniques, so you do have something concrete to take home, but it's not going to look like anybody else's in the class except in form.

Friday night was all about working with the Spellbinders' medallion sets and dies.  We layered them with all kinds of found objects, and made backgrounds that we could mount them on if we wanted to (which I did).  I'll have to come back and add pictures of my projects from that class, because I was having so much fun I didn't think to take many pictures!

Saturday's class was on painting techniques, which we used on vintage book covers that we then made a book out of themselves.  Super cool.  I learned how awesome fiber paste is, and he introduced us to some new sprays that I really really like.  They don't flatten out to the surface as they dry, but stay dimensional in the shapes of the drips and spatters that they land in.  So cool.  Anyway, those pictures are on my phone and I can't post them at my desk because of terrible reception in here, so I will add them later, too.

What I do have pictures of that I can access on my work computer is yesterday's class.  It was called 52 Card Pick-Up, and once again taught painting techniques but also collage principles, this time to create a weekly journal or art book out of a deck of playing cards.  Now, me, I used Magic: The Gathering cards that my friends were going to discard from their new boxes, but they're the same size.  But of course, with that being the origin of my cards, I kept thinking of the stages of the process in terms of phases of the game.  Most of the day was spent in what I thought of as the deck-building phase. 

So much texture and color...

This was kind of like a drafting phase.  What do I want to do with which cards?

I call this the summoning phase, because I actually picked cards and made them work with me.

It was a blast.  I really want to keep working on my deck, because I rarely finish projects from classes but this one is really cool and easy to work on a little at a time.  Plus, I plan for it to be a fantasy inspiration deck, where instead of journaling on the blank sides, I'm going to write quotations about or from fairy tales on them.  Then, when I'm running low on imaginative energy, I can just draw a card and think about what's on it.  That's the plan, anyway.  In any case, this weekend was so fun!  It's a little hard going back to work after spending days in art utopia. 

Wonderful Weekend!

Sorry I missed Thursday Themes last week. I was so busy prepping for the weekend that I didn't make anything new! What I was prepping for was an awesome two-day workshop with Seth Apter, which was my birthday present from my mom. We had a blast! Seth is a great teacher, and I would definitely take another of his classes. What we worked on was an altered book, using a vintage book that we gutted and made new pages for. Mine's not finished, and it's very different from my usual style. I used a lot of the new Prima papers from the Fairy Rhymes series and based the rest of the work on that style, so it's a lot more girly than usual for me. But I wanted to do something a bit fantasy based so that fit perfectly and gave me a direction. Anyway, I'll just show you what I've gotten done so far and let that speak for itself.

At Long Last

Sorry again for my even longer than usual absence.  I was going to post about Create NJ within a week or two of the event but there was a lot going on.  In the intervening 2 months, there's been a lot of scrambling to tie up loose ends at my old job, adjusting to a very different new job, battling severe depression, trying to focus on art, losing focus on art, trying to keep ties to friends, juggling new schedules, and general mayhem.  Even in times when I had the time to sit and blog, I just didn't want to do it when I was in a bad mood, which I generally was if I wasn't keeping myself busy (and sometimes even when I was).  But now I'm feeling okay and I have time and I really want to catch up on all kinds of blogging I haven't done.  And since I like to do things in order, here we go, the saga of the second-best and third-best days of my life. 

So, when Mom and I headed to New Jersey for Create East 2012, I had been feeling pretty low.  But I was psyched, because I was FINALLY going to bow at the altar of take classes with Michelle Ward!  I had my little totebag all organized and full of paints, scraps, brushes, glue, all kinds of stuff, and I was psyched.  Nothing could have prepared me for the rockstar experience, though.

The first day-long workshop was the Debris Journal.  This is where Michelle takes corrugated cardboard, uses tyvek and contact cement to make a journal out of it, and then goes wild with paint and all kinds of scraps and leftovers from other projects.  Let me just mention that contact cement puts off some serious fumes and it will indeed eat through plastic.  But that's okay, we were having a blast getting all sticky and painty and stuff.  I don't think I can really fully describe the environment or the progress of the workshop, but I can tell you that Michelle is every bit as awesome in person as she is on her blog.  She creates such an enriching environment, and really encourages everybody to take the techniques she's teaching and do your own thing with them.  That is something that I feel is lacking from most of the crafting classes I've taken.  Generally, while there is some room for improvisation, in most classes everybody takes home something that looks pretty much the sameish.  In this class, everybody's journal looked completely different, except for them all being the same size and all made of cardboard.  We all used different color palettes, different types of ephemera, and had different composition styles.  Mine looked something like this:

Well, that's how it looked when we broke for lunch, anyway.  Here's a little tour of what I did with it...

First page.  Had fun with cutting out arrows from the top layer of the cardboard to expose the corrugations.  There's a little bit of German text that says "I want to go back."

This spread freaked Michelle out.  Apparently she can't stand blue.  It just drains her.  But I really like blue, and it looks pretty cool with grey, so...

I added a paste-paper tag I had done a couple years ago, and some bookcloth left over from a book I made while interning at the Smithsonian.  And a piece of anaglypta wallpaper that Michelle gave us, which I had also used as a stamp (that's a Michelle trick).

The transparency with the architectural detail and the quatrefoil trim were also freebies for us from Michelle.  The trim doubled as a stencil as well as a decorative element!  Hence the paint on it.  It was black when it started out.  Michelle would not have given us something blue.

MUSHROOMS!  I used Michelle's new gothic stencils with my hand-carved mushroom stamps here.  But it was very bottom-heavy so I asked Michelle for advice, and she gave me some old book paper to tear and sort of "hang" in strips from the top.

And the book paper she gave me was in German, and clearly pre-WWII, which means it was in blackletter which just made it fit in even better with the theme, and then it also makes this...

...a Deutschroom!  (Yes, I know I'm a dork.)

Now, we were supposed to get something down on every page, just to "commit" to it.  I did not, because I got so wrapped up in the pages I was working on, and it got me in trouble with teacher.  So that night, after the Artists' Faire shopping expo (HOLY CRAP the shopping! Carrie has some Michelle stencils now :)) I sat in our hotel room and made sure I got something on every page, even if it was just "There's a thingie here" in pencil.  That got a chuckle from her the next day :)

The second day of awesomeness was the Frond Chronicles workshop.  This was all about stencil cutting and painting techniques.  We cut fantasy and realistic plant shapes out of tyvek (folded down the middle to cut symmetrical shapes) and acetate (for irregular shapes cut with a stencil burner).  Mine were all sort of woodlandy.  And then we used them on backgrounds we had painted on watercolor paper, which is now a preferred substrate of mine.  Don't know why I never really thought about using it for this mixed media typey stuff before.  Anyway, Michelle showed us brush techniques and some of her stencilling methods and tricks, and then let us play with it all.  So here is the Pocket Size Magical Forest of Frondy Wonders...

I forgot to take a picture of this background before I went at it with the stencils.  But it was pretty nice, as backgrounds go.  I was glad I had chosen the colors I did for this project, because they were really different from what anybody else was working with and they were pretty new for me too.

Another background.  You'll see this spread again.

You can just barely see my acetate stencil in this one.  It's up there in the upper right corner, where you can still see the sharpie marks on some of the edges where I drew it.  By the time I was done, this page was covered with ivy.  I haven't taken a picture of the finished page yet.  Sorry, I'm slacking with the pics.  But if it's not too vain of me to say, I'd like to note that someone else in the class actually asked if she could copy this stencil.

I really liked this predominantly red background.  Don't know why I didn't take a picture of the finished page.  This one got the willow treatment pretty heavily, with the willow stencils that dominate the top of the page at the beginning of this tour.

I was going for a lichen look here.  Ok honestly I was just dripping paint on the page and then I smushed the book shut and when I peeled it open again it looked lichen-y.  But I haven't done anything with this spread yet because I don't want to cover up the background too much.

This is what it looks like closed.  It pretty much still looks like this, because I haven't done the covers yet.  They'll come last.

I did this at home afterwards, on that page I said to keep in mind that was all tan and green.  Now it's not just tan and green anymore, is it?

I had so much fun getting all painty and playing with naturey shapes and seeing what other people were doing.  I made some new artist friends, like Nathalie who came all the way from Hamburg, Germany!  Her work is great, check her out.  Overall, like I said earlier in this post, these were the runners-up to best day of my life - the #1 best day being Mr. Pocket's and my wedding day.  I know that sounds dramatic, but it's really true.  While I was in these workshops, I was learning new things, I was being creative, I was experimenting, I was focused, I was engaged, and I was happy.  I hadn't felt like that for a while before the workshops and I haven't felt like that much since.  If "the Pocket" is a metaphor for where I fit, this was the Pocket.  I've been looking for that kind of experience again, thinking that art alone will bring it, but it was just a special environment, surrounded by fellow artists, immersed in new techniques, and accepting Michelle's gracious invitation to creativity.  I'm not sure it can be repeated, but I'm sure as hell going to keep chasing that feeling.

Coming soon... some new and different features for the blog.  One in particular that I'm rather psyched about.  See you sooner than usual!

Back to School

Well, my two month break is over, but I've been keeping busy with the craftiness. And I've already got an entry for Michelle's latest Crusade! A couple of things for it, actually.

Took a class with Tim Holtz this summer... Oh. My. GAWD. He's a total rockstar. I had so much fun! The class was on bookbinding and creating covers with embossed metal and of course Tim's own findings. In one afternoon, we learned a simple bookbinding stitch, metal embossing, the use of alcohol inks, and what the faun to do with all his little findings and details. This is what I took home, along with a head full of ideas:





Since coming home, I've been doing a lot more stamping and paper art. Don't have much to show yet, but I'll give you a glimpse soon... :)

I've finished Ishbel, too, finally. I had to put it down for a little while sometimes, but I got it done!



Extreme closeup!


And I've had the chance to start the much-awaited Raven Shawl!


That's just the first three colors, accomplished while I watched the Ravens vs. Jets pre-season game. Oooooh I'm so excited for football season!

And, it being Monday, it seems like a good time to show off my most recently spun yarn. Yep, I've been getting back to spinning! This is what I've done with Mountain Colors targhee in Copper Mountain:


Spun on my Traveller, chain-plied for a good stripe effect.



I've decided that targhee goes on my list of favorite fibers to spin. It might actually spin easier than merino. Definitely a good fiber to learn :)

So, more on the learning front, I'm finally taking a rare books librarianship class. It promises to be super hard, but I'm really looking forward to what I'm going to be learning this semester. It's going to cut down on my crafting time, that's for sure, but given certain financial restrictions I'll have to make a lot more Christmas presents this year, so I'll definitely be finding or making time to get some crafting in. Nevertheless, crafting must needs take a backseat to academia sometimes. We'll see how the trip goes...

Yay?

Last night was a night fraught with emotions. Most of them negative. I will explain.

First off, Mom and I went to the fabric mecca yesterday. I got some of the stuff I was looking for (rayon velvet so I can try embossing it), but the main thing I wanted just wasn't there. I'm more than a little frustrated.

Then there was the evening. My computer was just not responding to anything I tried to do to fix it. Even advice from Roxy's hubby was in vain. But finally, last night as I reached the breaking point and gave up in a fit of rage, my dad stepped in again. Seems he had turned on a security feature that was blocking my laptop. So he turned that off, and now I'm connected! Woohoo!!!

That, however, could not help my Ravens. As a Ravens fan, I am depressed and more than a little embarrassed over last night's sorry excuse for a game. I don't even know what that was. I had to turn it off after the Colts' third touchdown. Did turn it back on in time to see the last two minutes of the game, though, and saw Troy Smith play with some guts. Granted, it was against the Colts' second-string defense, but still. He didn't dither. He didn't cower in the pocket. He played. OMG! I hope we get to see more of what he can do. In the meantime, I am not making any Ravens gear. I had plans. Those plans will be on hold until the Ravens come back and play in Baltimore. I'm a loyal fan, and I still love them, but if they're not gonna put in the effort to play the game, I'm not gonna spend my crafting time making Ravens gear.

And now, since it is still Handspun Monday for another few hours, a spinning update! I don't have pics (bad Carrie! no cookie!) but fear not! I have spun in the past two weeks! Last Sunday, I tried spinning some of the silk/merino I got from Lisa Souza. It was such a frustrating exercise that I had to walk away from it. I'm not one to give up on things, but at some point I do have to acknowledge that I'm not having fun and shouldn't waste my time. On the other hand, yesterday I pulled out some of the alpaca I got at MDS&W and started spinning it on my square spindle. Yum. I'm in love with that alpaca fleece. Being alpaca, it's a little tricky to spin. A little bit slippery. But if I'm paying attention it works just fine. Woohoo!!! Pics will come soon, I promise!

I've also started a Christmas present. Remember Charmed? I'm developing a crocheted version, this time using the cashmere I got from Habu Textiles. Having never worked with cashmere before, let me say: YUM.

This present may or may not be aided by a class I took on Saturday with mom. The class we took was on soldering small glass pieces together to make jewelry, ornaments, multimedia art, etc. My pieces ended up a little wonky, but for a first attempt they aren't bad. I'll have to post pics of those too. Mom and I now have a little soldering kit and plenty of little glass bits to encase pictures or fabric or whatever we want. Whee! I really wanna play with it right now. But I can't. Have to make an hors d'ouvre for the office Holiday Party tomorrow. Ah well. Soon. I will be making charms, and pendants, and such things. After all, the only way my soldering is going to get better is by practicing!