Lesson

Sorry about this, I realise I’m a little late!

The subject of Alexandra Hedberg’s Weekword was lesson. I drew this right after I’d read about it, but then forgot to photograph it.

You will remember from previous posts that I can’t draw, so please don’t judge this on its artistic merits (although I’m fairly pleased with the Japanese landscape-esque feeling), it’s more of a meditation on paper.

The basic premise is that the only way to know if you can do something is to jump off a cliff and see what happens…something I seem to be doing a lot of at the moment. (Results are still pending)

Lady Sings the Blues

I’m very excited, I’m in my first ever Etsy Treasury!

It’s called Art…Some Blues and I love the rest of the images that skoshisbits chose.

 

Etsy Treasury Art...Some Blues by skoshisbits

 

 

Bunnies!

Well, not quite…

I’ve been faffing, a lot. But in my travels, I’ve discovered a site called Art Rabbit.

Essentially it’s social networking for art exhibitions, workshops, talks and just about anything else you can think of. You create a profile, pick your favourite venues, browse upcoming events and see what other people are interested in. You can print out a list of all current exhibitions with a map and make a day of it, or you can see what people with similar tastes are interested in. They’ll even email you three days before an exhibition closes so you don’t miss out!

You can tell they’re an arty outfit, they have about 16 different logo options to link to their site… in different colours and background options.

I’ve added a link to my list of favourites to the right, let me know if you’re going to something cool!

Hand Idle, revealed-ish

Here’s a bit of an unveiling to cheer your Monday up (or maybe to cheer my Monday up).

The Beige Extravaganza has a proper title and frames… and will now be known as Hand Idle.

I’ve been trying to get a fair whack of the pieces finished so that I could add them to my application.

Here’s what I’ve got so far:

Of course now that I’ve seen them framed, I want to change everything…

This is my favourite one, which is a little unexpected, it was one of my least favourites while I was making it.

Just goes to show, there’s no accounting for taste!

Lost in a Sea of Words

I’m a little fed up with writing at the moment. I’m trying to finish an application for an artist in residence position and I’ve hit the frustrating talking-about-myself part.

So I’m faffing a lot, which is why I’ve made this lovely Wordle. Click on the rather small image (can’t seem to get it to be any larger, sorry) to see it in a sensible size.

It provides such amusing juxtapositions as:

• Knutsford fruit
• Sweden tipped creative fingers cutting clockwise
• smug idea stuff
• Knitty miscommunication jam, and
• yarn blogs missed gratification

 

 

 

Oh, and if you’re in Manchester this weekend, come see the lovely people of the Manchester Yarn Collective and me (teaching you how to sit up straight while knitting so you can make more and hurt less). Even if you don’t knit, the workshops are free, and will do you lots of good if you sit at a computer all day. There are two workshops at 4.00 pm and 4.30 pm, see you there!

From the Jaws of Defeat

I’m teaching a Pilates workshop for crafters this weekend at the Manchester Yarn Day (details here) and I thought it would be a good idea to get a top printed up and look all professional.

Unfortunately, it didn’t quite turn out how I had expected. Due to some miscommunication and less-than-spectacular customer service, I ended up with two tops that looked fabulous on the front…

…and less fabulous on the back. I did the usual wailing and gnashing of teeth, and then went to whinge about it to a friend. Now I am careful to have friends who are nothing short of genius, and I was not failed this time.

‘Why don’t you disguise the mistake?’ she said, ‘You could put trim on it..’

‘I can do better than trim,’ I thought, ‘I have sequins!’

So I may just be the world’s most unnecessarily glamorous Pilates teacher…

I was feeling pretty smug, until I did this…

Oh well..one step at a time…

Sherry for Breakfast

I’m making Christmas cake tonight, but as usual I forgot to get the fruit soaking overnight…

So I found myself in the unusual position of licking sherry off my fingers at the breakfast table.

…the way the day is going, I probably should have gone ahead and poured myself a glass.

New and Exciting Things

I’m a little behind on my list of things to do, so just a quick post today. Part of the reason I’m so behind is that the list of blogs I read seems to be expanding rapidly. I’m not complaining, I’m just saying it takes a little time to absorb all the fabulousness.

So here’s a little guide to my updated links (they’re over there on the right.. they may have been accidentally removed for a little while…but they’re back now and everything is as it should be):

In alphabetical order:

Alexandra Hedberg

An artist in Sweden who gives very sensible advice about how to sell your art, and also does amazing drawings like this one.

 

Alexandra Hedberg: Cheetah

 

Born Knitty

The lovely (and incorrectly named) rubbishknitter has adventures in wool…and sewing…and jam. She lets me thieve from her allotment and helps drink our endless homebrew, what’s not to like?

Hand Embroidery Network

Promoting hand embroidery and other creative endeavours, a subject of which I heartily approve (plus, they featured a photo of mine)! Plus they do a Stitch a Day with nice clear photographs and beautiful examples.

 

Hand Embroidery Stitch a Day: Double Chain Stitch

Yarn Harlot

 

She knits, she teaches, she writes, she’s Canadian. Very funny and terrifying prolific…

So there you have an update. Anyone good I’ve missed? I always need some new blogs to read (it could be worse, my mother reads something like 15 newspapers online).

Playing the System

Remember these little guys?

I’ve decided to give the crochet a rest for a while and work on some other stuff. Second on my list (but with a higher instant gratification factor than the first thing on the list) is the shirt quilt.

When Dad came to visit in June he brought four more shirts, and in tidying up the Garret, I’ve realised that I should really start cutting them up. So I’ve disected them into their constituent parts (in the car on the way to and from a journey to Knutsford to convince ourselves that we had picked the perfect birthday present for Batman) and started filling the Champagne Tin of Finished Hexagons.

As I pinched and stitched hexagon after hexagon I got a phone call from Dad who said he had more shirts (some of them were even not blue), which meant that the hexagons I had were not a representative sample of the finished piece. But if I wanted to make more space in the CToH I would need to start piecing hexagons together into rings….

We needed a system:

If the level of hexagons in CToH reaches 2/3 (which has now been marked at 8″ from the base of the tin which measures a convenient 12″ high) then the tin is closed and shaken vigorously.

Some of the contents are then tipped out and a ring of seven hexagons are selected, starting with the centre piece and carrying on clockwise.

Selection must be made not by fabric but by position or angle of the piece on the floor,  or detail of the paper template which may be showing. Once selected, the hexagon can be rotated, but its position in the ring must remain static.

For every seven hexagons which are removed from the tin, seven new hexagons must be added to maintain the correct level. Then the process starts again.

Heaven knows how I’m going to decide how to position the rings, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Learning from My Past

I’ve been preparing course materials for the Sketchbook for Beginners course, and in doing so I’m revisiting a lot of the drawing techniques that they tried to teach me in art college.

At the time I was so desperately trying to transform myself from a reading writing talking person into a drawing painting photographing one. I knew I was creative, but it was usually expressed by the process of making something, everything was informed by time, space, budget or some other practicality.

Everyone else had done art at school, and then done a foundation course before starting First Year which was essentially another foundation course. I had done one semester of unfocused art in my penultimate year of high school, done Latin and Scottish History for a year at Edinburgh University before realising that I was in no way prepared to learn two highly unintuitive languages at once and that I really just wanted to get my hands dirty.

The next two years were miserable.

I couldn’t draw, I couldn’t paint,  I couldn’t sculpt.

I could almost understand what they wanted from me some of the time, but didn’t have the skills to create it or confidence to explain that it was going to take some time. I truly believe that I passed because I was paying overseas fees.

Then we did the photography module…

All of a sudden they wanted ideas, they wanted a story and they wanted a title. There was a process that, when followed, gave you a better image than if you hadn’t followed it. If there was an image in front of you there was an image in the camera, if it was in front of you it could be pulled through the lens onto a page.

I distinctly remember going to the interview for entrance into the Second Year, I had four images, one of them was of a Lego plane. There must have been some discussion of my pictures, but I can’t remember it. Mainly I remember that we just talked (the art of being able to fill three-quarters of an hour with nonsense and sound good doing it was definitely encouraged) about pictures I’d seen, what I liked, and what I read.

It was absolutely the best course I could have done, and I am overwhelmingly grateful to the tutors and technicians who ushered me through it. (In case you’re reading, I always have a title in mind, I sometimes find I’ve even written a statement…)

…and now I find I can draw, if not well at least comfortably enough to try some of those things they were going on about in First Year.