Under Construction

Fancy leaf prints

I have a longstanding and ongoing love of leaf printing. The other day I wanted to try something new. Inspired by all the word art on Pinterest I decided to carve into the leaf before stamping.

This is definitely an idea I'm still playing with.

Different types of leaves take ink/paint differently. And carving a leaf is not quite as easy as I'd hoped.

But as I went I was liking the result more and more. Then I realized, duh, I don't have to print with the leaf, I can use the leaf as the print. So I explored pressing the leaves.

In a frame for a fun little birthday present add on gift.

Pressed in a stack of paper/books for several days.

The phrase, "You are awesome, cool and nice" is what Biscuit asked for it to say. Very positive affirmation :)

I'm definitely still working on this concept. I want to frame at least one print for Oscar's wall'o'art which still isn't installed (but will be after the craft shack move).

In the meantime, I'm working on another project for Oscar. Here's the inspiration image

Image source. Mr. H and my father-in-law will be so proud I posted a photo of a car.

Journal wrecking

My dad gave me a boxed set of Keri Smith's books for my birthday. And ever since they've been waiting, still in plastic, for inspiration to strike.

Today was just the right day. Mr. H is out of town, I was tired and grumpy and Biscuit was full of enthusiasm.

Turns out journal wrecking is an activity just made for five year olds.

After the morning bath we went to two different parks and worked on journal destruction! (among other activities)

"Results"

Biscuit jumped up and down on the book on the lawn to fully smash in the found objects. "Lucky we're supposed to wreck this, huh?" she said as the cover got bent and crushed. Now the book smells nicely of lavender.

We just jumped around and completed activities as the mood struck. The entire process was very fun and liberating. And Keri's mentality of experimentation fed into another project we worked on this evening.

Where we started (very boring but inspired by this activity)

Our new "process" inspired by the fact that the damp paper towel I was using to clean up looked better than our deliberately painted cloth.

The "results"

Even more interestingly, the colors continued to run and bleed as the fabric dried so the final result (which is in the dryer now--hopefully not turning my dryer blue) is different than the image above.

Fun times!

Oh, and a super pretty flower on a tree. It's a dogwood, right? I had no idea these grew in California.

Good stuff

Recent sources of inspiration:

Two books

Crafting a Meaningful Home I'll admit, I had low expectations for this book based soley on the cover image being of Lisa Congdon's lovely (but overexposed) plate wall. Still, I decided to check it out at Borders and was pleasantly surprised. I found several innovative ideas I actually wanted to try. One was to take rubbings of embossed metal things around your city (ideally things that say the name of your city). Biscuit and I struck out on finding anything especially cool but had a nice walk around midtown and did rubbings of several standard issue sidewalk covers.

Print Workshop by the Yellow Owl Workshop folks. Their stamp kits are awesome and their book was even better. (again, took a look for free at Borders). An excellent mix of inspiration, useful techniques and guidance to do your own thing which is exactly what I like in a craft book. I find I don't use very prescriptive pattern books but prefer to see ideas and learn the techniques behind them so I can adapt to my own tastes. We bought some supplies for a project from the book during our sidewalk rubbing walk. I'll report back on our success.

Speaking of learning techniques, Abby of While She Naps is doing an amazing series on soft toy construction.

And speaking of great things on the internet, my pal, the artist, Lauren, is offering a really amazing giveaway on her site. An original painting/postcard. I'm already signed up so now I can send you over to sign yourself up. I hope you get one--her work is awesome.

And a few blogs I've been loving lately: Bookhou and Poppytalk. Always fun places to check in.

 

Friday nature walk

It's possible this is turning into a trend. I hope so. Today Biscuit and I went for a walk/bike ride at the American River.

 

I was trying to take pictures to use in the collection I'm developing for the show at the California Museum on March 20.

 

I'm very excited about this show and want to do more laser engraved wood items but all with images from the river. (actually, the stuff I'm creating will be very similar to what I did for that show). I'd love to use pieces of fallen wood from the river too but I think that's illegal.

 

It was a very pretty day and we saw lots of cool stuff.

I took lots of cool photos but my favorite thing was the scans I made of the decaying leaves we found. Isn't this cool?

 

I can't wait to laser engrave it on something.

Lazy and trees

I have been hit with a walloping case of lazy. Not so much at work where I've been busy. Mostly at home. So I'm trying to focus on small goals.
A load of laundry.
Wiping the kitchen counters.
Catching up on my DVR recordings.
Spacing out on the internet finding cool things like this blog with sneak peeks at upcoming books.
This interesting article about universal health care (via Snickollet)

And, unrelated, I've been obsessed with tree silhouettes. Like almost driving off the road while observing birds in roadside trees obsessed. Harder to photograph than you might guess.



Biscuit and I went for a walk on Sunday to have a picnic and take photos of trees at the river. She was SORELY disappointed to learn that, no, she couldn't put on her swimsuit and swim in the river in January (in the rain). What is UP with this kid's swimsuit obsession lately? After the meltdown subsided we had a very lovely walk. And this photo is terrible but this feathery (fungus?) inside the dead tree is one of the coolest things I've seen in a while.

Eye candy

I love the illustrations in this book I found at the thrift store:

A sampling:

I'll stop...these photos are awful.

But, there's more! Marie Claire Idees. I'd been looking for this mag at bookstores with no luck when lo and behold it arrived in my mailbox. I completely forgot I subscribed ages ago. I love when my bad memory leads to nice surprises (rather than unnice surprises)

Photos continue to be awful but hopefully you can tell how awesome this mag is. It's in French (obviously) but the photos and styling are worth the purchase.






Anyway, I love it when folks post photos of magazines I don't have access too so I hope you enjoy! I can't believe it's nearly Christmas!

Inspiration: Old books

I made this birdhouse a few years ago for my mom.

I still really like this project.

I have been thinking for the past month or so how much I enjoy using cast off books as a medium for other projects.  Like book clocks. This one (from an old copy of Horton Hatches an Egg) was my favorite. I may be the only one but I kinda like the embroidered book pages I've been working on.

I've started a list of projects that could be made using books as the primary (only?) material. I'm kinda excited about it. Who knows, maybe I'll burn out on the idea before it goes anywhere but I could imagine creating a whole line of work to sell online or at a show. If I think big I could even imagine a small gallery installation (where I would have to pretend to be an artist). 

As with everything, this is not an entirely original concept. I've seen a lot of work along the lines of this piece on Etsy

But I haven't found anything as amazing as these INCREDIBLE sculptures. This is one link you should really follow. Enjoy

Finally, here's some info about altered books

P.S. Photos in this post are by my dad. Thanks, dad.
P.P.S. YouTube is down tonight so videos tomorrow(not that you're losing sleep over this or anything)

Inspiration: Soft stones

I really like UNIFORM Studio Blog because she talks a lot about the inspiration for the pieces she makes and the process she goes through in creating her clothes. I think it would be fun to keep a log of what is inspiring or interesting to me (I realize this may not be at all interesting to you--sorry!). Also, I think it will be fun if I do make something to have a link to the source of inspiration.

Over the holidays I got into wet felting roving into balls. It started with a purchase from Wool Handcrafts. Then I went to the local yarn/wool store and ended up with $15 worth of roving (credit card minimum charge--$15 will buy a lot of roving).  After making all the Christmas ornaments and balls and felting kits I still had boatloads of wool.

When I saw this photo (via Design Sponge) (please follow that photo link, it's not even that exciting but took me a seriously long time to find again) I realized I wanted to make a bowl full of brightly colored wool "stones."

Tonight I finally got around to it:


I think they'll be a fun, toddler-friendly table decoration in a wood bowl (or maybe a felt bowl if I really get my act together).  They're all slightly different roundish shapes from about the size of a tiny tangerine to the size of a potato from the cheap 5# bag of potatoes (a smallish potato).

This was a fun evening project--I recommend it.