Disclaimer: I have never made a quilt, nor am I ever likely to.  (Unless you count the blanket I made a few years ago out of denim squares cut from old jeans.)  But thanks to the wonderful folks at Quilting Arts/Cloth Paper Scissors, Quilt Fest is so much more than just quilts!  They feature an ATC trade, lots of fun mixed-media classes (that you can only get into via lottery) and various artists working right there on the show floor so you can watch them do their artful magic. 

As this was the festival’s 35th year, we were encouraged to make 35 ATCs.  I went back to the “ATC wall” several times throughout my four-day stay, often running into the same people over and over again.  I ”explained” ATCs to at least 30 curious people in the process, and many of them expressed interest in trying them and excitement at the idea of trading.  Maybe we’ll see some of those “converts” at next year’s show. 

This is a view of downtown Houston from inside the convention center.  The weather was beautiful, and a nice breeze made the city, state and country flags look their best.

The first class I took was making an embellished tote bag with elinor peace bailey.  You’ve probably seen some of her work in various magazines; she is a wonderfully gifted and prolific artist.   The first thing I saw when I arrived in her classroom was an array of colorful dolls and bags.  This particular one I think conveys all the excitement of being at Quilt Fest!

And these could represent the happy students in her class:

elinor herself is as colorful and interesting as her dolls.  She is also one of the kindest and most patient teachers you will ever meet.  She started the class with an inspiring speech about taking risks in our art and not worrying about what others think.  I adored her!

The length of embellished fabric she’s holding will soon be turned into a bag.  She described the bag construction as a simple no-brainer, what we were to concentrate on was creating a beautiful piece by drawing, painting, embellishing and combining fabrics.  She demonstrated drawing a face and many people did faces, but she said it didn’t matter what we drew.  I decided to draw a bird.  I thought it looked too much like a chicken, so I wasn’t that pleased with it, but I knew a face wouldn’t turn out that much better, so I went with it.  I got to try watercolor pastels for the first time and just loved them.  (Guess what my next Michael’s coupon will be used for!)  I used the pastels to color my bird and outlined his features with a Sharpie.  I had a little trouble constructing the bag, as the sewing machine didn’t like the many layers I was trying to force through it, but I plowed on and was able to finish in the class.

front

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In another class, we made “no ordinary journal” with Madeline Arendt.  We covered a comp book with fabric and used various embellishments to decorate it.  My favorite bit is the vintage spool of thread acting as a closure.

The two other  formal classes I took were “Mixed Media Miscellany” 1 and 2, in which approximately 15-20 teachers sat in a large room demonstrating different techniques and/or projects, and you walked around at will, sitting in on whichever you found interesting.  Each participant got a thick hand-out with each technique being explained on a page or two for future reference. 

And then there were the “lottery” classes in the “Make It University” area sponsored by Quilting Arts/Cloth Paper Scissors.  Up to 15 minutes before each class started, you could put your name in a jar and if your name was drawn, you got into the class.  I got into all six of the classes I tried for, which was fabulous!  The very best one was the last, “Surviving the Runway.”  I won’t go into too many details, but it involved making an “outlandish couture item” representing either the 70s, 80s, 90s or 2000s, using the materials provided.  (Unfortunately the materials provided were really awful, tacky things like Fun Foam, pom-poms, chenille stems, feathers and colored duct tape.)  You could “earn” extra materials by doing embarrassing things such as singing the Brady Bunch theme song or moonwalking.  I made a pair of gi-normous earrings representing the 80s; one says “radical” and the other says “just say no.”  (I made liberal use of pom-poms and the ric-rac I earned by singing the theme song to the Flintstones.) The event culminated with approximately 20 women dressed in Fun Foam gyrating to Van Halen’s Dancing in the Street in front of approximately seven thousand complete strangers.  Yes, I was one of them, and yes, it was super fun.  Even more fun than shopping!

Did I mention they had shopping?  Only over 1,000 vendors!  Here’s a look at a tiny portion of them from an upper floor:

I did quite well when it came to the shopping; I had budgeted $300, but ended up only spending $110, and $40 of that was for a lovely tapestry purse.  (I can’t resist buying purses!)  I think I just became overwhelmed by all the possibilities and worried that I’d overspend.  And while I was excited by a lot of the new techniques I’d learned in classes, I kept thinking I could buy most of the materials at Michael’s, Jo-Ann or Hobby Lobby when I got home and save $$ with a coupon!

There were many beautiful and unique quilts at the show, of course, and I’ll share my favorites in a future post.  In the meantime, here’s a photo (borrowed from another site) of the Best in Show winner, Caryl Bryer Fallert.  Her quilt is called On the Wings of a Dream.  If you look closely, you can see the faint outline of a flying bird (possibly a heron?).  It was an honor to see this quilt in person; it’s so beautiful it actually brought a tear to my eye!  One can only imagine the hours of work that go into creating something so special.  As I said, I’ll never be a quilter, but I can certainly appreciate those who are and who do such amazing work.

So I’ve been an ATC-makin’ fool lately!  This first batch is for an Artchix Studio swap called “Royal Birds.”  We had to use at least one image from a selection of their collage sheets; I chose “Bird on a Wire” because the images are the most versatile.  I also used one image on each ATC from their “Mystical” collage sheet.  Love those moons and clocks and zodiac charts and such!  The backgrounds are made with paper from a very old ledger book I found at the thrift store.

I also made 35 (count ‘em!) ATCs to trade at the Quilt Festival in Houston this week.  I’ve spent most of the day packing and am ready to go first thing tomorrow morning.  Yee-haw!  (As I imagine they say in Texas.) Houston is pretty much an all-day drive straight west from here; the weather is very similar to ours, except much drier.  So I packed some lotion and am good to go!

The Quilting Arts/Cloth Paper Scissors people will be there, sponsoring awesome classes (fingers crossed I make it into all the lottery ones!), mixed-media demos, a raffle drawing and an ATC swap.  Participants were encouraged to make 35 ATCs because this is the festival’s 35th year.  I met the challenge head-on, and while it took a few days, I got all 35 done!  I didn’t have time to photograph them all, so here’s a small sampling:

Hopefully I’ll find time to post from the show.  I went for the first time back in 2007 and it was rather overwhelming!  My camera is going to get quite a workout. 

I’ve been a fan of Gail’s wonderful Mind Wide Open blog since it began, and haven’t missed a single monthly challenge.  Sure, some of the images have been a little more challenging than others, but I always managed to come up with at least one workable idea in the seven days we’re allotted.

Then came this one – the hardest yet.  I suspect my brain was less than fully engaged when I first saw this image, because for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what it was.

My first thought was, okay, so Gail has finally gone off the deep end and given us a fuzzy duck with a striped neck.  (Why is he looking at me like that?  What does he want from me?!)

Eventually I did realize what this is supposed to be (I’d make a great Rorschach test subject, apparently), but it didn’t help matters any.  Inspiration was slow in coming, and as the deadline loomed, I began to panic a little.  What few ideas I mustered were complete duds.  I like working with, as Gail herself put it, “pretty” images, like vintage women and children and flowers and birds.

So, in the end, I kinda cheated.  On the last day of the challenge, I came across this hinged wooden box at the thrift store  and inspiration struck.  I did use the image, so technically I followed the rules of the challenge. Rendering it unrecognizable, however, is probably stretching the rules…maybe just a teeny, tiny bit?  But, by golly, I refuse to miss a challenge, no matter what it takes!

 (Sorry, Mr. Stripey-Necked Duck.)

The preview has started over at Art Now for Autism, and I hope you’ll take a few minutes to check out the wonderful variety of artwork that can be purchased beginning October 5th.  

My friend and colleague Leslie Pace made some amazing hematite necklaces and bracelets to donate to the cause.  She has only been making jewelry for a couple of years, but it has turned out to be her calling!

Leslie was overwhelmed to discover that one of her beautiful necklaces was chosen to be featured on the Art Now for Autism flyer this year.  I’m so proud of her!

So one of my favorite blogs is the inimitable Cake Wrecks, which features ”professional cakes gone horribly wrong.”  The cakes alone are enough to inspire mild amusement, disgust and/or just plain bafflement, but blog owner Jen’s commentary takes it to a whole new level.  If you need a good daily dose of hilarity, I highly recommend it.  I laughed so hard I actually stopped breathing the first time I read Cake Wrecks.  (It was the Thanksgiving turkey cake that resembled “a weird smiley face with its hair on fire” that did me in.)

So I was ridiculously excited when Jen announced that a) she had written a Cake Wrecks book and b) she was going on a book-signing tour, commencing in Orlando.  MapQuest informed me that Borders was a mere 137 miles away by car.  And I just happen to have a car.  It was like fate!

When I arrived (quite early), the bakers commissioned to provide a cake for the occasion were just getting set up.  They did an amazing job, combining several “wrecks” into one glorious cake.

Shortly after I took this photo, one of the decorators added some roses and leaves to the bottom of the carrot, at which point I informed her that the cake was getting “too pretty” and that she may want to reconsider.  (This was supposed to be a “wreck,” after all.)

Jen and her husband presented a slideshow of their favorite cakes and took questions from the audience.  How cute is she, anyway?  And just as funny in person.  (Thankfully I did not stop breathing.)

Afterwards, they judged the cupcake contest.  Alas, mine did not win (I knew I should have gone with the mildly obscene design I first thought of).  When it was time for the actual book signing (and cake serving), the considerably large crowd started mobbing the podium – it was literally “crunch time.”  Before long, I became overheated and claustrophobic, so I just grabbed a piece of cake for my husband* and left.  Yes, before I got my book signed!  But it’s cool – I had a great time and I’m really enjoying the book.  So it doesn’t have a Sharpie scribble in it – meh!  I’m really okay with that. 

(* Because, ironically, I don’t eat sugar.  Read this book and you’ll likely give it up, too.)

So what road trip would be complete without at least one visit to a thrift store?  None that I know of.  I stopped at an awesome Goodwill in Wildwood on my way to Orlando and found several items that made my heart go pitter-pat!  First, this box of vintage get-well cards.

The pinkness!  The lace!  Roses!  Birds!  Kittens!  ::sigh::  “Seven large cards, seven small cards, seven personal notes” with an original price of $2.50.  The box was thoroughly taped shut (with packing tape, alas), but I was thrilled to discover later that most of the cards are still in there.

99 cents!  Also found a wedding guest book for the same price.  The cover is a little beat-up, but it’s filled with beautiful, high-quality paper.

I’m going to alter the cover and use it for something special.  (No, I haven’t decided for what yet – that will come at some point down the road.)  Also snagged a package of awesome luncheon napkins for 59 cents.  There was only one missing!

There are so many cool things you can do with napkins.  I like to glue them down as backgrounds in collage.  You can decoupage them onto eggs for Easter (a la Martha Stewart) or onto large wooden beads.

Finally, there was this small photo album for 59 cents.  It looked to me like a Papaya Art design, though it may not be.  I very much love their style, so even if it’s a knock-off, I still consider it a great find!

Halloween is fast approaching, and I recently joined two swaps on Swap-Bot in which we’re to make an appropriate hanging to display on our door during the Season of Fright.  My favorite thrift store put out the Halloween stuff last week and I was thrilled to find two words rendered in elegant script and covered in black glass glitter: “Beware” and “Spooky.”  Immediately I was inspired to use one of each in my wall hangings.

As the words look rather classy, I threw out all notions of making something like a cutesy scarecrow on a straw wreath (not that I would have seriously considered that in the first place!) and began to plan something more refined.  The first thing that came to mind was that I needed roses…roses the deep, rich color of blood.  (Bwa-ha-ha-haaaaa!)   Alas, all I could find were roses the deep, rich color of cheap wine.  But it’s cool – they were on clearance!  I also bought sheer black ribbon with a subtle sparkle and raided my stash for tiny beads (technically, “Beedz”), jewelry components and colorful gems.  I cut and painted ceiling tile for the substrate.  Love that stuff!  Not only inexpensive, but a great texture.

You may recognize these images; one previously graced the cover of a comp book for a swap in which my partner wanted a “sexy witch,” and the other is the lovely image from last October’s Mind Wide Open challenge.  Back then I used lots of molding paste, paint and a giant spider to create my challenge project.  I like this one much better.

What else is spooky? On September 11, the odometer in my 2000 Toyota Corolla reached another milestone in its long, jaded career.

 The spooky part?  I’ve washed my car a total of maybe ten times in its entire life.  (I’d rather spend the $$ on art supplies!  Besides, it rains a lot, and that’s sort of like a car wash.  Right?)  My husband is convinced that dirt is the only thing holding my car together at this point, but I know better.  I’ll still be driving it when it reaches its next big milestone. 

I don’t have any kids of my own, but I do love using pictures of them in my artwork.  This week the challenge over at Mind Wide Open provides this gorgeous image and the word prompt “daughter.”

Isn’t she lovely?  This is one of my top-three favorites so far. 

I decided to play around with the image in my photo editing program, tweaking the hue and saturation to brighten it up a little.  Once I did so, I realized the colors were a perfect match to some fat quarters I bought a few months ago to decorate my laptop bag.  I’d had a vague idea of making an artsy patchwork of some kind and wanted bright colors to play off the black bag.  Then I was struck with feline inspiration for the bag, and no longer had a use for those fabrics.  Until now!

I’m not a seamstress by any means, and most “traditional” fabric projects I attempt turn out really awful less than stellar.  But once I got myself into the mindset of treating the fabric as if it were paper, with stitching as the adhesive instead of glue, I was able to whip out this wall hanging in a couple of hours.  (Don’t look too closely at the amateurish stitching!  And if you do, tell yourself I meant for it to look like that.  It’s artistic, dang it!)  I made it like a quilt, adding batting and a backing and stitching all the layers together around the edge, which gives it a nice “weight” and sturdiness.

Check out the Mind Wide Open blog starting on the 9th, where you can see all the entries for this month’s challenge. It’s always intriguing to see how different artists create with the same image.  And don’t forget to vote for your favorite!

I have mixed feelings about birds.  Who doesn’t love their beautiful colors,  melodious song, and enviable gift of flight? Yet, if you ever get close to one, examine its scaly feet and peer into its disturbingly inhuman eye (you can only peer into one at a time, as they’re located on opposite sides of its head), you can’t help but notice these signs of its lizard ancestry, and maybe you shudder…just a little. 

So yes, mixed feelings.  When viewed from a reasonable distance or heard singing in a tree (and not, say, flying at me with the intent of pecking out my eyes, a la Alfred Hitchcock), I love me a bird.  Which is why I started a little paper quilt project a couple months ago with a bird theme.  

I worked on this one square at a time over the course of several weeks, keeping certain elements consistent so that the project would work as a whole despite that the parts were made separately.  Each bird is stamped with Memories chestnut brown ink and each square contains either one or three buttons.  The edges were finished with ribbon and pom-pom trim.  (I won’t tell you what my husband calls pom-pom trim.)

And for those of you who read the post title and thought this was going to be about Peter Sellers, I apologize. 

So who else remembers that scene in National Lampoon’s Vacation where Clark Griswold (aka Chevy Chase) is standing in front of a mirror pretending to be a diet ad?

“Look at this, honey.  Before…” (pooches out belly) …”after” (sucks it in) …”before (pooches out) …after” (sucks it in).  A rather silly, non-relevant scene, but hilarious nonetheless.

Ahhh, good old Clark Griswold.

The latest swap I joined on Swap-Bot directs us to find a framed picture at a thrift store, remove the picture and alter it, put it back in the frame and then alter the frame.  Fun?  You bet.  I found this rather pretty 8×10 floral in beautiful condition priced at $5.

BEFORE:

I left the central image intact and added various papers, paints and stencils to the outside edges, then glued a flower to the glass.  (Because I put at least one flower on everything – I am helplessly compelled to do so!)  I didn’t want to alter the frame too intensely as it was already fairly attractive, so I merely rubbed some gold paint on the inside edges and on the scrollwork in order to tone down the red highlights.

AFTER:

I had to take about seven gazillion photos before I got one that didn’t show too much glare on the glass.  This was so much fun I may have to do it again. 

Not long ago it was handbags – couldn’t get enough.  For the past few months, for whatever reason, I find blank journals irresistible.  The library in the city I work in has an annual book sale in the spring and fall that attracts thousands of visitors.  I normally head straight for the art books, foreign language books and mysteries, but this past spring, I discovered  a section of calendars, blank journals and photo albums.  It was exciting to find beautifully bound, high-quality journals (one filled with watercolor paper!) for two or three dollars each.  Since then, I look for them when thrift-store shopping and in the bargain bin at the book store and have amassed quite a collection.

But is it enough?  Hmmm…not yet!  I still get a thrill when I find a great journal at a great price.

So I joined a couple of altered journal swaps recently – it’s time to start getting these things out of my studio…and making room for more! 

My first swap partner loves “retro housewife” images, so it was easy to design for her.  (Can you guess what her name is?)

And my second partner loves roosters.

Two down…a couple dozen to go!