Out Of The Loop

I feel a bit blindsided by this week, and to be honest, there's no real reason to feel that way. K is back in school for the last leg of Reception, I'm back to working Saturdays after half-term with classes booking up rapidly for September, and we should have a clear run of regular routine for a while. But I have this sense that so many projects and committments are slipping through my fingers, even though I haven't really got a lot going on. I think I probably hang out too much on Pinterest...so many beautiful things whizzing past my eyes, so many projects I want to do that I can't find the time for. My dreams and the idle-cycles of my brain (you know, when you're powering down at night) are really vivid, too. So much colour - and so much frustration that I really don't know how to get this down onto paper. Or any other media, really. The last two weeks are littered with experiments and failed projects. I learn something each time but it's very unstructured and I don't feel like I'm getting anywhere - certainly a long way from having that "voice" that makes you an artist rather than a dabbler.

The drawing challenge is going...spottily, I'd say. I've had a few successes like this:


...but I've found the first week or so's topics ridiculously hard to come up with ideas for. I really don't have "favourite" anything much - no book I could rank as "best ever" (how could I, when I haven't read all the books?), no film that I'd always watch whenever it came on. So even deciding on something to draw before I get the pens out has been hard work and I've let it get away from me. For my recent birthday I bought Drawing Lab for Mixed-Media Artists: 52 Creative Exercises to Make Drawing Fun which is, I hope, closer to what I'm looking for. I need to be able to draw so I can do stuff with the drawing, not to have an image on a page (nice as that would be).

The button swap is moving along slowly and I do hope my partner Meridian Ariel will forgive me for being a bit tardy...I finished one piece the night before last but I'm waiting for some teeny-tiny buttons to arrive; I think they may just be the final tweak it needs. I've been distinctly uninspired so far - mostly due to paucity of button stash (which was fixed yesterday as I managed to pick up a nice lot on eBay and some lovelies from Debbie Cripps), but also because...well, I really like Apryl's drawing and I was feeling a bit intimidated! You always want your partner to like what you make but sometimes it's really important to you.


On a final note of feeling totally out of the loop, I've really been neglecting my Etsy shop - for the last year since baby D arrived, really - so I hadn't even noticed there was an "activity" button. I got featured in two treasuries! They are Gingham Summer and Keep It Tidy. I'm so chuffed!


PS This blog is now optimised for mobiles, apparently - let me know how it looks as I don't have one of these fancy phoneamajigs.

No such thing as can't

K: "Mummy, when I grow up I want to be an artist"
Me: "Oh? Why's that, then?"
K: "I just love painting."

For a long time, I've lived by the maxim "There's nothing I can't do, just things I haven't mastered yet". I really do believe that there's nothing you can't learn*. Ok, so I will say "I can't knit" or "I can't run" or "my sewing machine scares the crap out of me" or "I can't draw". But you know, I can. I just haven't been bothered to do so as yet. As time goes on, though, the need to be able to draw is increasing. It's becoming one of those bloody annoying things you have to get round to because you can't fly any higher without that particular skill. I have a major problem with "art for art's sake", mostly because finding the point of art - in my head, at least - requires a whole lot of space and time I don't have, and that's been one of my "not learning to draw right now" hurdles.

I'm aiming to fix - or at least, improve - on this. I can draw. In a very untutored, unsophisticated way, yes, but I can make marks on paper and that's a start. So I'm doing a 30-Day Drawing Challenge along with some of the ladies from Crafteroo (Flickr group here).

Day 2: Favourite Animal

I suck. No two ways about it; I don't know the first thing about drawing. But I'm willing to try, and that makes all the difference.


* Ok, smartass, maybe you can't learn to sing if you're tone deaf or something, but I'm talking about things for which you're physically equipped here. Being mentally equipped - shedding the laziness, the inertia - is a state of mind which most of us are in denial about.

A Tale Of Two Pens

Oh dear, it's been rather a while, hasn't it. The Easter hols were pretty busy and broken-up with various days off school and so our family rhythm was almost completely shot (the arrival of Dragon Age 2 has nothing to do with my lack of crafting, honestly). In a desperate attempt to tidy my craft corner I made myself finish a crochet jacket for D - more of that in another post because I haven't actually blocked and photographed it yet; it's at least a size too big, thankfully. I should really be working on a crochet top for K, and a further top each for both girls, but I've become completely side-tracked by drawing. I've been mucking about with Zentangles for a bit and recently bought The Mandala Book, which K and I have really enjoyed looking at.


My dear baby sister is starting to plan her weddings (her partner is Hindi so they're having both a Western-style and a temple wedding, how cool is that - I get to have two awesome outfits!) - which won't happen for a few years yet, but when did that ever stop people daydreaming? :) And by people, I mean me, hehe. A few weekends ago I picked up a copy of Making magazine, which was the "paper" edition - the front has a glorious papercut on it, a craft I've wanted to try for a while. After some fiddling around with paper and a craft knife when I should have been crocheting, I decided I needed new knives and to that end a parcel from Fred Aldous arrived yesterday (I love Fred's. I've haunted it off and on since I was a student and no matter how they revamp it, it'll always represent magic to me. Also their mail order service is truly awesome).


In the meantime A has been working on illustrations for a story he wrote for K, and I've been thinking about drawing some inspiration from mendhi henna patterns to convert to papercuts. Thusday night we were sitting on the couch together, sketchbooks on laps, whinging about our drawing pens. I have a Pilot Drawing Pen, and he has a Faber-Castell Pitt Brush Pen. Being artists of very little experience, we'd just picked them because we liked them, but they were totally unsuitable for what we were doing. So we swapped - and voila, his illustrations rapidly improved and I actually had the courage to draw something. Drawing has eluded me since I was in school - the fear of getting it wrong and pissing off the old dragon of a teacher has been incredibly strong even though I ditched art at 13. I'd done some searching about for mendhi patterns earlier on in the day, so I put pen to paper and this is what came out.

Just having a go at various techniques - I need to practice my ffffs!

Indian Paisley hand

North African-inspired geometric hand


Indian Floral hand

A more Arabic-influenced style hand

Mostly out of my head hand -
I like the heavy lining which is closer to the North African patterns

A little hand for K - she specifically asked for spirals

What I've learnt so far:

- the right pen can make a lot of difference to my confidence.
- mucking about is a good way to learn (doh - I've always said this for everything else but the ghost of my art teacher wouldn't let me play with drawing!).
- I need to learn a lot more about mendhi patterns and techniques but I think some of the nuts and bolts are in place already.

I am just messing about with these at the moment and no doubt a true mendhi artist would be chuckling about my amateurism, but hey, everyone's got to start somewhere.

80's Fantasy Film Swap - received!

Doesn't that look delicious and exciting! This is my parcel from Amiee, aka Fraggie Rocks who I've had the pleasure of getting to know over the last few weeks. I'm a touch embarrased as my parcel to send to her is not ready yet; I can only plead all that work in the last two posts and crack on tonight.

Want to see what was inside? Of course you do. I nearly forgot to take the above photo, I was so excited!

The whole parcel. Matching brooch and fascinator inspired by Labyrinth - aren't they gorgeous, I never would have thought to use the beech nut shells like that! A print from The Dark Crystal - I've always loved the gentle but firm Mystics. A Brian Froud card of O! That Gnome - he always makes me smile when he comes up in a reading (I have Froud's Faeries Oracle). A sketch pad and bundle of pencils - I WILL learn to draw this year, I promised myself! and some great little sword charms, for lo, I am a sword nut.

Fascinator close-up

Brooch close-up

Thank you so much, Amiee - it has been an absolute pleasure to receive this. I only hope you like mine half as much!

PS apologies for the photos - I can't seem to get Blogger, The Gimp or Flickr to behave properly this morning. Better composed shots are at Flickr.

Rocket Ship T-Shirt

Rocket Ship T-Shirt, as requested by K - she's at preschool at the moment, so I'm looking forward to seeing her face when she gets back! I'm quite pleased with this, other than the red and yellow pens being not so good - the yellow seems run out already, and the red comes out as this wishy-washy pink. The blue, green and black have come out well, though, and I like the sketchy effect from the black. They're brush pens, so a little difficult to control on a stretchy fabric like this, but overall I'm rather chuffed.

Must go and get the soda bread on...so much for working with the buttons this morning!

Why is it...

...that the best ideas come to you when you're a million miles (metaphorically speaking, anyhow) from a sketch book? Last night cost me over an hour's sleep with fabric patterns floating around my head - I would have got up, but one of the mogs was determined to come up and be a pain and I'd had quite enough of barricading the stairgate so she couldn't! And I've just had to practically run down the stairs after getting K off to sleep so I could scribble down the perfect doorstop idea for her bedroom. It will match her picture book shelves and I need to practice ribbon embroidery to do it - just a very simple set of daisies and some nice buttons for the centres and some butterflies, and it absolutely positively has to have a green handle with a pale yellow and white polka dot ribbon along the middle. I like these Injabulo Fair Trade buttons, for example.

I'm so glad I got a nice big sketchbook and had the courage to get scribbling. There's not much in there yet but when inspiration hits, it's brilliant. I must dig out my little sketch book to go in my bag...


I've been furtling through my fabric boxes recently. I seem to have the most amazing amount of voile/organza stuff - not a vast variety, it must be said, but yards and yards of the stuff. I haven't the faintest idea what to use it for. The plain blue is the remnants of a cloak lining, the pale blue starry fabric has a half-finished Egyptian dance coin belt made out of some of it, but the blue-green and the silver are completely uncut. What can I dooooooooo with it? I thought about bag linings but no way is it strong enough for that, and I don't have any need for lots and lots of favour bags. Our house also has a severe lack of natural light due to the way it faces, so even net curtains are out (not that I'd be able to persuade the cats not to climb them) What else is it good for? I'm almost tempted to paint on some of it, see what happens, but I am trying not to spend much atm and that would involve a fatal trip to Hobbycraft for paints. Even if I did come up with a good pattern on it, I still have no clue what to use it for. Damn my magpie instincts, and damn .Abakhan Fabrics for having too much nice stuff. Crumbs, I haven't actually been there in years, not since probably 2000 or so when we lived in Manchester. That's how long this stuff has been lurking for!


Woodwork is happening in the kitchen; the cat-sized Swahili bed begins to take shape. I want a Martini but I'm too scared to go in there!

Right, it's about time I got organised

Because my head is just spiralling out of control with projects...I'm not so much unblocked as flooded! The trouble is, I have so many ideas and things I want to try out that I can't get anything finished as something new comes along almost straight away.

Today I've bought a lovely hard-backed A4 sketchbook, which is going to hopefully be a place I can put sketches and snippets of designs for fabrics, crochet, jewellery, painting and so on. I must also dig out my small sketch book to attempt to carry around with me (yeah...along with the sling, nappies, drink, snacks, entertainment etc for K, brolly, purse, phone...it's a good job I carry K a lot cos she balances out the weight of the bag! Maybe I need to make a bigger bag).

As for the rest, I think I need a checklist of projects otherwise I'm going to forget something.

Things to be finished soon/quick wins:

• Drawstring bag for A's didgeridoo (it's getting awfully scratched in the cupboard)
• Xmas Westie (still not finished, argh!)
• Xmas Stockings (six left then make up)
• Crochet Scarf for K (halfway through, hope new wool is not a bad colour match)
• Monster feet and paws for K (got some fab green fur today!)
• >del>Papier mache bowls etc (made, some painted)
  

Works in progress/UFOs

• Geisha Girl
• Baby Afghan
• Bunnies' Bathtime
• Blessed Samhain
• Chinese Dragon
• Weather Station (had actually finished this for xmas but K promptly pulled the velcro off)

New Projects In Planning

• Crochet hat for K (got wool, pattern, hook)
• Crochet bag
• Silk painting
• Felted mittens
• Crochet and knitted flowers
  

I also potentially have a design piece coming up for a birth sampler...not sure yet. Now add to that regular flute practice when I'm not scurrying around between lessons on a Saturday, trying to write some short stories before my head explodes, a WIPs box I daren't even look into, a strong desire to get an Etsy shop off the ground this year, a two year old and my own business, and you see why I'm a bit messed up at the moment!


Aaaanyway...in terms of Art, have you seen the stuff coming off the catwalk from Gaultier's latest show? Annoyingly I can't find the pic now but it was in The Guardian last week (and frustratingly not on Gaultier's own website). I am totally not into fashion (as anyone who's met me in my mummy uniform of jeans and top will attest), but the fabrics are absolutely amazing, all graduated florals, like wearing a painting. That's the kind of thing I want to do with my silk-painting.

I think I'm in love

Much kudos to Debbie Cripps again for super-fast delivery - no sooner do I think "shishas" than they're on my doorstep. This time I ordered the "real thing" rather than the cheat version - proper mirrored glass pieces, diamond shapes, and three skeins of Rajmahal Art Silk. Which is just gorgeous, such vivid colours and it feels wonderful. It's not silk - says "viscose stranded" on the pack - but it's soft as anything. Better still, there wasn't a colour pallette on the site so I had to choose the colours blind, and shade no 256 ("hot plum") is the exact colour of the red pashmina I bought a few days ago. I also bought "vermillion" and "wheat gold", which I think I'll use on the black pashmina I have squirrelled away. So these, with the silver square sequins I bought, should look really lovely.

Fast delivery award also to Fred Aldous - three squares and a rectangle of silk should give me plenty to play with; I have in my head to make Tarot deck wraps out of these squares if they're big enough.


Been to the library again today and borrowed Hamlyn Craft School: Over 80 Step-by-step Craft Projects (Art & Craft) (now I'm interested in decoupage - what?!) and Drawing (Teach Yourself) because I woke up with the most gorgeous silk-painted pictures in my head the other day and damn me but I will never be able to get these images out of my head and into any kind of medium unless I do something about my crummy drawing skills. Yes, we have some books about drawing already but they're not really mine and tbh they're a bit intimidating.


The Numbers mobile is finished, too - actually completed on Tuesday night but not in situ yet. K has pronounced it "oooh, luverly!", so I feel happy.

The Family Arty

Tut tut. I couldn't hold out any longer - I've opened a new kit and I am having so much fun! I was enjoying Blessed Samhain but there are a lot of thread colours, which is complicated to travel with (they're not all carded, unfortunately), and anyway, I needed a break from all the orange on the pumpkin. Six shades is no joke!

Coming on, isn't it?



Anyway, I'm sure it'll be complete by Halloween this year, there's not all that much left to do. In the meantime I am working on the Bothy Threads Row of Fairies, which is ever so sweet without being terribly twee and Victorian. This again is for K's room, which has a jungle theme at the moment but I just couldn't resist this one. I think it'll be nice to have in for when she decides she needs a change, and there's a lovely matching number sampler which I just might get if she really likes these. Three out of seven fairies done in just three-ish sessions so far, so assuming I don't get too side-tracked I should have it done by next week sometime.


That was the sewing update, anyway! Over the weekend we visited family in Newcastle and went to the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, which was enjoyable not so much for the actual exhibits but for the responses they elicited. K particularly liked the Dazed & Confused vs Andy Warhol exhibit - well, actually she just liked the big video projections, which is about all you can expect from a 20 month old! The open spaces of the Baltic are very good (although I believe the centre was heavily criticised by my civ eng/architect BIL for poor use of natural light and so on); it certainly felt less cramped and "busy" than what I recall of my last foray into "modern art", the Tate Modern, when I was still at school. There was actually space to step back and get a feel for the scope and size of exhibits (and still conclude they were derivative, self-referential hogwash in the main, but that's just me). It's certainly a place I'll keep an eye on for future visits (and the chocolate sauce muffins in the cafe are rather nice too, even if the staff are in dire need of a spell checker).

Actually the thing which most inspired me at the Baltic was in the shop (ok, ok, stop rolling your eyes, this is important). They had some of the most beautiful Marimekko design items in stock; I very nearly fell for a black & white flower print scarf in the Pieni Unikko print. But my "small aubergine" complex kicked in when I saw the price and I realised that for the price of an "art" print on a rather small piece of cotton, I could easily buy a silk painting kit and reproduce something similar myself, thereby not only getting a nicer scarf but learning a new skill in the process. I am quite fired up about fabric design as a consequence and need to dig out a sketch pad shortly before the ideas disappear again.


I am not the only one feeling artistic at the moment. Dear Other Half has recently bought The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and the accompanying New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain Workbook: Guided Practice in the Five Basic Skills of Drawing. As a neuroscience postgrad I am naturally sceptical about anything claiming to tap into hemispherical skills, but the word of mouth so far seems positive. So much so that we will be paying a visit to the nearest art shop at the weekend to collect some basic equipment (pencils and the like). Drawing is not something I've ever had the natural knack for and is a constant source of frustration, so it will be interesting to see if this technique works; I'm sure I'll give it a go sometime.

Finally, given the horrendous weather, K has also been flexing her creative muscles in learning to scribble in different colours, stick stickers and stamp stampers. Here is the current display: