Leaves done, mini collage

Well, Christmas is over, the cookies have all been baked (and mostly eaten), the cards have been sent and the wrapping paper explosion has been cleaned up.

So now its time to get back to our regularly scheduled works already in progress. And there are a bunch of them! I'll just blog about a couple of them today.

At the top of my "must get done" list is the underwater/mermaid piece. I've been sewing all of those pesky seaweed leaflets down and they are finally done, outlined and the backs trimmed out. Whew!
That actually took quite a while (last week or so) but I haven't posted cuz, honestly, how many pictures of gold leaflets on a royal blue background does a body want to see?

OK, well, here are a couple, anyway. But I'm only including them because I'm done with the little buggers.

First is the whole piece (more or less), laying (as usual) on my bed. Its a long, vertical piece so I think I will have to start taping it to a wall to give a more accurate rendition. This shot probably looks pretty much like the last picture I showed so here's a detail picture.

Hopefully you can see some of the stitching. I'm happy with them and happy to move on to the mermaid and other elements.






One of my New Year's resolutions is to to be more active creatively on several fronts: start more art, finish more art and sell more art. That includes getting organized and entering more shows. I slacked off in 2011 and I feel like I need to get back in the groove. Pulling entries together and getting them submitted is always a chore and inevitably takes 5 times longer than you think it will and this past year I just didn't have the energy. But I feel like I can handle it again so I got an entry submitted (all online) today (deadline is tomorrow). Its a collage based show, so its kinda a new sort of venue for me. I had 3 pieces already completed that I thought were appropriate and I reworked/finished a 4th one yesterday for inclusion.

Check it out! Its a little piece (see the energy drink pop top?) with bright colors and lots of itsy bitsy details.

I sure hope it (and its brethren) get in to the show, but supposedly I won't find out until the end of March or so. Keep you fingers crossed for me!

Recycled Art, finished at last

     Sorry for my month-long absence, dear readers. Its been a busy time at work, but today I was finally able to get some work done in my studio. Nothing new, mind you, but I did some good solid work on 3 works in progress. Sewed some more strips onto the 8 Gerbera pieces and made a sleeve and pinned it onto the Blade Garden quilt. And then I decided that I absolutely had to finish the recycled materials piece. Its been sitting around for a month or so, unfinished and crying out for something. Wasn't quite sure what, but something.

       So its been sitting around and I have been trying out different doodads and this and that and just haven't been happy with any of it. So I decided that today it was do or die. And after trying out a bunch of different recycled items to keep with the theme (and because you know I save all sorts of interesting stuff, of course) and here is what I came up with. You can see I ended up adding a cool beer bottle cap, two energy drink tabs, a cut-out phrase from an Altoid tin and a couple of fortune cookie fortunes. And, if you check them out in the close-up shot, you can see that they are appropriate for a piece of art.

So here's the final list of all of the recycled materials that I used in this piece. All were found around the house or used my me or my family:
-vinyl from some bedding packaging
-a piece of fabric from a repurposed vintage t-shirt
-a used dryer sheet
-bread twist ties
-beer bottle cap
-energy drink tabs
-phrase cut from an Altoid tin
-fortune cookie fortunes

Yay! I'm so pleased with it. After all of the additional items I tried (and it took me about over an hour messing around with all sorts of bits), I really liked this combination of items for their color, texture and diversity.