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Across the hall from my office a massive construction project is underway. It's so noisy and dusty and I pretty much wish I was anywhere but here. So today, I'm doing a little visual escape from the chaos. Portland Photographer Misha Aston is my WAW artist of the week. None of her work is touched up in photoshop. I love that!
For our second Encaustic class, we got to play with color. I'm really happy with this top piece. I think it could use a it more scrapping to get rid of the last bit of blue and green that are bleeding into the background, but all it all I think it turned out well.
This second piece is far from done. I need to do a lot more scrapping. The red is really hard to get off, but with more elbow grease it should look much better soon. This coming week we are going to learn how to incorporate collage materials into our work. It should be fun.
Cary Weigand is my artist of the week. I remember seeing her on Oregon Art Beat awhile ago. Her clay sculptures are so incredible. I love her blend of Asian and Native American themes. Her creations definitely stay with you long after you have seen them. The details are amazing. You can watch her on Oregon Art Beat tomorrow (July 24th) when her story repeats.
This project is finally done! I purchased this Queen Bee bag back in February 2006. I didn't realize then that this would be my favorite bag. It is a record bag and I had my Jolie Girl record in it forever. After awhile, I got tired of people commenting on my bag all the time. Being the shy girl that I am, I never got used to strange people on mass transit having whole conversations about my record. I've never been one to draw attention to myself, so I ended up taking out my record. My bag sat empty for months and then I got the brilliant idea to make a piece of embroidery to fit inside.
The embroidery was the easiest part of this project. The hard (panicky) part was figuring out how to put it in my bag. After taking the work out of the embroidery hoop, I measured the piece and realized it was larger (almost 8 inches square) than the space in the bag (7 inches square). After I stopped hyperventilating, I measured the original pattern I used and it is indeed 7 inches square. So I got out my squirt bottle and hosed my piece down to try and shrink it. I did this 3 times and at the end, my piece was back to 7 inches square. Cutting the piece out was also nerve wracking. As you can see I didn't leave myself much of a border around the piece.
I took a piece of felt and used a Back Stitch to sew the felt to my piece. It was very tedious, but I liked how it gave a nice border to the piece. I figured I was done, right? Nope, this back made it too bulky so when I put it in my bag, it didn't sit right. I had to put this down for a week or so because I was so flustered as to what to do. Luckily, my genius mom swooped in to save the day. She suggested using interfacing to make the piece stiff and without adding bulk. It worked like a charm! I picked up some double sided interfacing at Joann's. It was super easy to use. I cut a piece of interfacing slightly bigger than the embroidery and used the iron to fuse it to my embroidery. Then I fused it to a piece of fabric I had to give it a finished back. Then I trimmed everything down. The interfacing helps seal the ends, so (hopefully) my piece won't unravel. I was going to add ribbon as a border to finish this off more, but with such a tight space and almost no real room for a border, I've left it alone for now. It's definitely not perfect. If you look closely, you can see holes where I had attached the felt back. Also, some edges unraveled a tad when I had to take the felt back off. Still, in the end it looks really good. I'm just so happy that it worked and I didn't have to start over. This was definitely a labor of love.
Here is the back of the piece after fusing it to the interfacing. After fusing, I trimmed off the excess with a rotatory cutter.
I had my first Encaustic Painting class last night at Multnomah Art Center. I'm taking the class with my sister and a friend. The first class was very slow. We learned some history and saw some examples of the instructor's work. We were given a wood panel and a thin piece of cardboard to put the wood on.
These pictures were taken with my new iphone; they aren't the greatest. But it was so great to have a handy camera nearby to capture what we were doing.
Then we spent the rest of the class put clear beeswax (mixed with resin) on our wood panels. It got pretty boring fast.
Towards the end of class, we practiced carving into the wax. This is a second piece I started on Masonite. I wish this picture was better. I used a tin to make the circles, a tracing wheel to make dotted lines across the wax and finally I free handed a tree with leaves.
We ended leaving class about 45 minutes early which allowed me to make it home in time for my dance show (the best show on TV). Next class should be better. We were promised color!
As I get ready to begin a new Encaustic painting class tomorrow, I thought it was only fitting that I picked a artist who does encaustic painting. NewbyArt has wonderful mixed media paintings. She even sells a 18 page tutorial on how to do encaustic painting. Check out her blog too. She has lots of great paintings there as well.
I'm so excited that this is done! It feels like I've been working on it forever. I'm so happy with how it turned out. I just love it. The entire project is far from done. That will be another blog post...hopefully soon. But for now, I'm relishing in the joy of having completed the embroidery part of the project. The whole thing is almost 8 inches around.
This turned out to be a sampler. Half of the fun was going through this book (just given to me by my wonderful Sis) and this book looking for different stitches to try. I practiced on a spare piece of linen before diving into my piece. Only the split stitch is repeated. I used it for the pink scrolls and the green triangles. Initially I was going to fill in the triangles with a variation of the satin stitch. After filling in a few triangles, I didn't like how it looked, so I pulled it out and just left it alone. I didn't have anything really planned out. I changed my mind many times on what I was going to put where. That spontaneity made the piece fun.
Key of Stitches
PackRat Power: I used the left over number beads from an old project as a low tech method of labeling the different stitches. It worked like a charm!
Lately, I haven't been as crafty as I usually am. I've been spending my time on my Wii Fit. One might say that I'm obsessed with the soccer head butting game. It's very addicting. It's only a matter of time before I master every thing on Wii
For my friend's Birthday, I made her the famous Fresno delicacy known as Strawberry Pizza. I found the recipe here and it turned out really well. I didn't roll out the crust because frankly I don't own a rolling pin. I did figure out an easy trick to make the job go quickly. The dough needed to chill for an hour. After that, I put the dough in the bottom of the pan. I took the saran wrap (that I had covered the dough to chill in the frig) and put it over the dough. Then I spread the dough out in the pan using my fingers. Since there was a layer of saran wrap between my fingers and the dough, I didn't have any sticky dough on my fingers.
My friend was excited to see the strawberry pie. Here first question was 'are these Wife on the Farm berries". Why yes, they are.
At 3am last night, I awoke to the loudest most deafening noise I had hear in ages. The hour long thunder and lightning storm was crazy! My poor cat was so scared and kept pacing along the bed trying to get as close to me as possible. There was hail and pouring down rain. It was pretty darn scary. I managed to go back to sleep some time after 4am.
There are pictures I pulled off of my local news web-site.
The area was hit with over 600 lightning strikes. Below is the graphic of Oregon showing all the strikes. Pretty amazing!
F**K - A Documentary (****)
Control (****)
Under the Greenwood Tree (***)
Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (*****)
