Sewer Art

My eldest daughter is in Ecuador; my son is at an out-of-state baseball tournament; my husband is in a golfing tournament. That leaves my youngest and I at home to celebrate the Fourth. We're keeping it low-key and doing fun things that we girls like to do: jumping rope, baking muffins, eating popcorn while watching movies, and making ART!

I've been spying the sewer cover in the road by our driveway for quite a while and today I finally had a chance to play with it. My daughter and I took some fabric squares and oil paint sticks to rub over the surface. Even though we had the same colors at our disposal and the same sewer to work with, our art turned out very differently. My daughter used both the sewer cover and the road surface to create her texture. I think hers will make a great whole cloth little wall hanging. I love the bumpiness that the asphalt gave the rubbing. I think I'm going to borrow that on my next sewer piece.


Mine is just an abstract with the squares of the cover, along with random letters and numbers. I think I can use this as a piece of background fabric.


This is something we're going to do again sometime soon and we'll post the results when we do. In the meantime, HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY!

Monarch Paparazzi

I behaved like paparazzi today, relentlessly pursuing a monarch with my camera. No, not Prince William or anyone like that, but a monarch butterfly. It's the first one I've seen all year and it was beautiful. I couldn't resist taking both color and black and white photos.



Yesterday I added some cross stitch to my work in progress. The family's consensus: not the best thing I've ever done (I agree, but not everything can be a masterpiece -- on the other hand, I learned a lot from this and that's good); and, don't add any more stitching or it will look too busy. That was unexpected. So for now, I'm going to consider this one done (I'm not sure it's worth putting any more time or effort into it anyway) and get to work on some color / value exercises I'd like to try.


Oh, and has anyone ever seen a green bee before? I saw one today. Wow, huh? I never knew....

Are We Done Yet?

I had plans to lie in the hammock today while some gel medium dried on another piece. But alas, the two children who are at home beat me to it. But since they were so nicely occupied, I continued to play a bit play myself. First, I added some more chicken scratch stitching to my hand piece. Even though the stitching isn't that dark, I'm hoping the texture will be reminiscent of a shadow. I'm going to keep it pinned to my wall for a bit. I think it's done, but I'm not 100% sure.


Next I experimented with a tracing paper doodle I had sewn. I had torn off most of the tracing paper, keeping it only on the flower heads, and had put gel medium over it to keep it secure. After it dried, I came to realize that not all tracing paper is created equal. The one I used here isn't as opaque as others I've used and didn't make the flower heads "pop" as much as I'd hoped. I decided to paint the flowers white, but then they seemed to float in the middle of nowhere. They looked lost with just the stem outlines. I wanted the stems to be visible, but I didn't think I wanted them to look as saturated as the flowers. I liked the background and wanted it to show through as much as possible, so I filled in the stems and leaves with watered down paints. Since I couldn't decide what to do next, I figured I might as well just pillow case the thing. Now that I see it on a smaller scale -- without all the excess fabric -- I'm considering adding some magenta stitching. I'm wondering if the stems and leaves still look a bit too light. I don't really know what's next, so this is going to hang on my wall while I try to figure out what it wants to be: a more vibrant lone flower or just a hint of one. Perhaps it needs hints of other flowers in the background. Maybe it's just an experiment and there's nowhere left to go ...

A Lesson in Perspective

Early this morning I said goodbye to my daughter as she left for a five week service trip to Ecuador. I'm very proud of her-- I think she's very brave to go on this adventure, but I was teary-eyed nonetheless. My husband was driving her to the airport and I was left all weepy on the driveway. Yes, it was very pathetic.

I figured I had to pull myself together before I went back inside to the other two children, so I brought my camera out to take some early morning flower pictures. I confess I was having a hard time composing the shots. Nothing seemed right, so I just started holding my camera up at all sorts of angles, waited for the "bleep" of the focus mechanism, and shot frame after frame. Most of the time, I didn't even look through the view finder.

Now that I'm inside reviewing the pictures, I realize that I got some interesting ones. The photos all look so different, even though they're of the same set of flowers because I shot them from different angles.




This lesson in perspective is something I'm definitely going to have to remember in my art. Now if only I can keep it in perspective that my daughter's just gone for five weeks....

The Hand -- continued

I've been getting some work in, here and there. I've been helping my youngest with the baby quilt she's making for her pregnant teacher (yep, we have to finish it by Thursday!) and I've done a bit more experimenting with my paper fabric hand. I sampled some chicken scratch stitching. I tried a combo of burgundy and brown thread together for these stitches


and some deep barn red for these.


I really didn't care for the deep red so I pulled them out. I wasn't sure about the combo stitches, either. I didn't think they made the hand "pop" enough, but they were better than the red. Overall, it needed something else. I decided to write some of my thoughts illegibly onto tracing paper, cut it to follow the contours of the hand, then adhere it with some watered down gel medium to make the paper a little wrinkly. Here's what the piece looks like now:


I kind of wish the paper extended to the edges (not much I can do about that now) and I still want to add more chicken scratch stitching, but I think it's better. Do you?

Feeling stuck

The rain is keeping us indoors more than we'd like; I feel like I live in a temperate rain forest. I'm going to buy myself a good pair of rain boots so I can get out, splash in some puddles and jump with the peepers. I'm tired of feeling cooped up.



(Don't worry; he's fine. I just thought my neighbor's dog's expression was so priceless as he poked his head through the fence peep-hole that I needed to take a picture.)

Art in the Rain

Natalya and I tried to go into the city today to see an exhibit, but the threat of flooding on the roads made us turn around. So, we tried -- TWICE -- to see local art. Unfortunately, every time we arrived at an exhibit, we had arrived an hour before we could get in! How's that for luck? It was such a Murphy's Law kind of day that we got a little silly, but I was still able to get a few fun pictures:

The graphic light ceiling at the entrance of the Neuberger Museum of Art:


Patterns of the raindrops:


Life imitating


Art :