Out With the Old: Some Unshared Projects From 2014

Hello!  I was organizing some photos the other day, as I was tucking 2014 into bed, and realized I had some projects that I hadn't shared here!  Would you like to have a look-see at some of my favorites?

Mini Albums

I love this mini album I made to record memories of a trip to visit my dear friend Christine in Denver. I adore the rustic piano hinge binding that I made using twigs that I gathered from the birch tree in my front yard.

Another dear mini album is the one I made for my dad for his 70th birthday.  Yeah, the cover doesn't really match the style of the interior pages, but I'm ok with that.  The focus of this project was to express the love I have for my dad, and I think that I conveyed that pretty well.

While presenting in front of a whole lot of family, I didn't want to provide explanation for this "Do Not Poke the Bear" card from Cocoa Daisy.  But, growing up my dad always referred to my mom as "The Bear", and during those smarmy teenage years he would often coach me not to provoke her with my attitude.  :)

Art Journal

I worked quite a bit in my art journal this year, and most everything in it was black and white work. I practiced sketching and shading, and I doodled and journaled.  

Scrapbook Layouts

Here are a handful of layouts to peruse.  I think all the seasons of the past year are represented, though chronological scrapping is not my thing.  My guides are emotion, nostalgia, and pretty paper.

I love that these kids truly love each other.
I hear them say it to each other all the time.

Love this bouquet of dried sage flowers picked up on a local walk.

Blaze loves the beach! It's nice to finally have a kid that enjoys it as much as I do.

Documented Bliss*
*Mine, not hers.

Jillian's costume from Halloween 2013 finally scrapped

Dorking out, just because it keeps me entertained.

Aw, sweet little ol' me.

Off-the-Page Projects

We started 2014 off with a fun commissioned project for our new local scrapbook store.  Anna, one of the other design team members, Mike and I worked together to build a huge magnetic chalkboard for the store's grand opening.  It was so fun to work on this project with Mike.  I must say, as difficult as they were, I truly miss those years where we worked side by side creating and running his bike company.  :)

Photo by Tonya Wade

 Here is a cute little gifty inviting a friend to Tea for Two.  I love that I had a couple of teabags from Trader Joe's whose tags perfectly matched the paper I used.  It's Ginger Pear White Tea, if you are interested.  Pretty good with a vanilla and white chocolate biscotti.

This was a failed attempt to do some free-motion sewing, challenged by the One Little Word blog to create something inspired by the word "aspire".  I didn't continue the piece, annoyed by puckering, impatience, and lack of stabilizer.  But I enjoyed the practice, and will keep at it.

In the meantime I finished these pillows for our sofa, which I hand-emboidered with the artsy look of free-motion sewing.  Mike drew the dogs for me and I traced them onto the fabric along with the words "sit" and "stay".  I crocheted a scalloped trim, and hope they send a welcoming invitation to our guests.

 Aw, here is Blaze modeling how to use one properly.  :)

This is another commissioned piece made for a teacher's retirement.  The kids later added their thumbprints as foliage to the tree.  

I love these little Halloween trees!  My favorite part are the tree stumps made from wine corks.  I painted the corks black and scribbled on them with gold glitter glue--totally looks like bark!!

Also, for the love of all things pumpkin, I crafted these wire pumpkins and tacked them to canvases.  One canvas I painted orange, and the other I left primed white.  I rather like both of them!

Here is another wine cork craft.  I made these cute place cards as a design team project for Craft Envy.  Just a simple circle folded into a rectangle and slipped into a slit cut into the cork.  

And finally, a gingerbread luminaria, which has been on my bucket list for a dozen or more years.  I had seen them in a Sunset magazine long ago, tried, failed, and have long lost the magazine.  I was able to come up with a great "construction" gingerbread recipe online that made for much more predictable and sturdy pieces.

So, there you have it, assuming someone actually made it to the end of tis monstrous post!  It is my intention to share more regularly in 2015.  I will be sure to put out more manageable sized chunks of content.  No one should have to take a potty break in the middle of a blog post!!

Thanks for stopping by!

Beautiful Girl of Mine

My daughter, Jillian, is an amazing artist.  She is constantly sketching and drawing, creating with polymer clay or origami-ish paper sculptures.  It has ben a pleasure to  see her explore different media in her art class elective in this first year of high school.  Not many of the projects make there way home as the class collection fills every bit of wall space in the school studio, so I was so giddy when she shared a little tidbit with me recently.

The challenge was to create a face as a contour line drawing, meaning drawn from one continuous line, trying not to trace back over any parts.  My immediate reaction was, "Oh!  This is beautiful!" I followed the line in awe; I studied the brilliance of the abstract suggestion of hair, the use of negative space.  I pulled back my gaze to take in the piece as a whole again, and was struck with the realization, "Oh!  This is YOU!"

"Yeah," she said with a soft chuckle.  Then she explained that the drawing was just Part 1 of the project.  Once the students created a contour line drawing of their visage, they were given a length of copper wire to bend and curve following the lines they'd drawn.

This is part of the collection now hanging in the front lobby of the school.  I loved looking at all the different faces, seeing where each person decided to start and end their sculpture.   Here's a closer look at my beautiful girl!

Thank you for visiting!

Local Girl Triumphs

Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Laugh if you must.  I've lived in the Los Angeles area for almost 18 years.  And the first three years I had a job that required me to drive to a lot of different areas.  I am really good at driving from A to B.  But if I have to get from B to C, it'd be best for me if I drove back to A and then headed out to C.  I'm a homing pigeon of sorts, I guess.  Also, my A point in those days was the LAPD Crime Lab, so if you need any directions, I'll have to send you there for a layover before heading you out to your final destination.  Except, now that I think about it, they have since relocated the Crime Lab.  So, unless they've also moved the duck slaughtering facility that was next door to the lab :-(  , and Chinatown adjacent, you're better off asking somebody else for directions. 

Which is why this seemingly trivial event is really a notable achievement for me, and I felt kinda like a local for the first time. 

Here's the story:

 

And here are those girls!  My daughter, Jillian, is there in the middle,

dressed as a favorite character, Lichtenstein, from the anime Hetalia.

It really IS the little things! 

Thank you for sharing in this triumph with me! ♥

Toilet Paper Art (?!?!?)

My daughter, Jillian, is a creative dynamo.  She always has been.  At age 3 she would cry that her Barbie didn't have a couch to sit on, suck up the tears, go draw one on paper and be completely satisfied to continue with her imaginative play.  Her aunt and uncle have talked a play-doh pizza she made at age 6 into the stuff of legends.  But in between the playdoh stage and the introduction to polymer clay there was...DUN-dun-duuuun....Toilet Paper! 

 

She and her friend, Kirsten, were so prolific when they'd get together.  These little sculptures of sopping wet toilet paper mush would constantly line the bathroom counter to air dry.  There would be dogs, chairs, bathtubs, cradles, baby chicks and ducklings, all waiting to dry before being embellished with felt pen faces and decorations of bits of string and this and that.  I loved and despised it all at the same time. 

I think this dog is the last standing relic of the toilet paper sculpting phase. 
I was surprised that she still has it!

I found an old picture of the girls from that era to commemorate the passing fad.  With guidance from the artiste, I made some wet toilet paper pulp, sculpted a heart to add to my layout, and molded some onto a couple large foam stamps to form the impressed letters "T" and "P".  Once dry, I painted the depressed area with acrylic paint and a very fine brush.  I used an empty toilet paper tube to stamp white paint circles onto my painted patterned paper as a variation on the theme.

This layout was created last month as part of the Cocoa Daisy Fall Crop for one of the challenges.

Thanks for visiting!

Turkey Hunt

It's getting close to the Big Day, Thanksgiving, my most favorite holiday of the year!  A day of delicious food, family, and gratitudes galore, steeped in traditions that without might make the day seem less than whole.

Sometimes it can be difficult to keep the little ones entertained with all the cooking and football and napping that is happening around the house.  When my kiddos were small we spent some time making pinecone turkeys.  You know, with the construction paper feathers tucked in between the scale-esque seed wings?

We went on a walk to gather up a few pinecones for the project, and I was surprised at how small some of them were.  Easter egg sized, really.  *Ding!!* And that's when the idea for the annual turkey hunt was born.  We collected even more pinecones and made quite a gaggle of gobblers.  (Technically, a group of turkeys is called a "rafter" but my fondness for alliteration sometimes trumps *ahem* truths.)

As is the case with the springtime egg hunt, the turkey hunt will start off with the birds being hidden by the grownups, but the game usually continues as the kids then take turns hiding them for each other!  Ah, a little respite for the chefs and sports fans as the little ones entertain themselves for a while!

By the end of the long weekend, we would pack the turkeys up till the following year, keeping our rafter in the rafters.  

A fun tradition, indeed!  So, will you be making some turkeys for your own hunt this year?