Today was a grand day

I went for a bit of a drive at noontime and took some photos - I particularly love the ones from the gardens at Pt. Defiance Park

Learning New Things

I'm getting very excited about attending ArtFIBERfest next month - in a very few weeks I'll be up at Fort Worden with a bunch of my peeps taking three days of wonderful classes. I'm taking a traditional rug hooking course with Mary Stanley
where we'll make one of these sweet little houses. I think I'm going to make mine a mermaid house and decorate it with shell buttons.
The second day I'm taking a fabric book class with Kristen Steiner who is a wonderful teacher and about the sweetest person I've ever met as well. The class is a fabric accordian book and the class includes lots of fabric altering and embellishing techniques - yum.

The last day I'm taking another fabric book class, one that appears to be not as structured as Kristen's, called Sew FAB(ric) Journal with Pam Garrison. This book has paper pages sewn in. I'm thinking the cover with give me ample embellishing opportunities
as well as being an easy, relaxed project for the last day.

When I return I'm taking two on-line classes at Joggles.com -'encrusted crazy quilts' and 'fabric art picture frame' with Alma Stoller - Alma is teaching at ArtFIBERfest and it was a difficult choice between her class and the rug hooking one, so I was happy to see her teaching at Joggles. I've never done an on-line class like this before - I think it sounds like a lot of fun.

Today I learned about a new learning resource on line, Quilt U. I'm looking forward to taking a class there after the first of the year as I believe my plate is quite full for the rest of this year.

In the Spring, there is ArtFest. I didn't go last year and I really missed the 'kick in the pants' it gives me to push my art somewhere new. I was very lucky to get all of my first choice classes - a precious metal clay class with Catherine Witherell ,



Symbolic Icons with Anahata Katkin






and Creative Characters with Karen O'Brien on the last day of the retreat.






My head is spinning with the thought of learning all this new stuff. Lots and lots of photos to follow.

Thinking ahead to October

I love the month of October - I love Fall in general, the way the air smells, the way the wind kicks up and first and foremost, I love October because it marks the beginning of the "candy holidays" and is also my birth month. I may end up doing two pages again in October because I have two projects that I want to do that relate to this month. First of course, is a Halloween page because I love Halloween - I have amazingly wonderful childhood memories of the holiday and I really want to do a Halloween page. I have the perfect bead to start the page, made by my friend Pam at The Blue Between - how precious is this?

and the second page, a birthday page - I'm still thinking about it but I think that I have an idea. I'll keep you posted.

September Bead Journal Project Page Completed

And I am very happy that it's done. I learned quite a few things doing this page. First and foremost, that if I'm going to do something like this again that I'll attached the canes/vines/stems/whatevers first, then do the entire background, then apply the flowers/leaves/berries/whatevers. Attempting to do the background beading around all of the details was not pleasant - particularly for someone without a lot of experience like myself. But it's done and I'm pleased with it for the most part. I can see all the mistakes but I suppose that is normal. Now in the drawer it goes with all of it's sister pages waiting for binding.

One step closer to the finish line

I've just the background left to fill in on this piece. My beauty and pain page - it seems rather fitting to me that I will finish this today - September 11th.

in the home stretch

September page - day 7 - not much more to go

Ready for thorns

I've dyed the cording to make the blackberry vines with and found some wonderful little dagger beads to use for the thorns - but alas and alack, laundry and dust mountains call me today - Hopefully there will be some beading time this evening.

Plugging away on September

Sometimes I need to be a bit more planful and remind myself of exactly how long it is going to take to cover an area with 3mm sequins