A Little Art

I don't think I have shared the little baby portrait that my father, Pete Turner, painted of my new great-niece Ragen. Isn't it wonderful! She looks so angelic. He did this from a photograph.

Not this one...she has already changed so much!


Last night I was thumbing through my new Journal Bliss book by Violette and suddenly remembered, "Hey! I have a journal!" It is really just my quilting doodle sketchbook that I made in an online class with Sue Bleiweiss. I created this little fantasy garden while watching TV last night. First I drew the doodles with gel pens, then colored with watercolor pencils. Then I decided, "Why not wet a paintbrush and get the watercolor effect?" Well, I found out why. You lose most of your sharp line designs. You can see that by the little blurry flourishes on the top right. I guess I should use a more permanent ink if I want to preserve the lines. I went back over some of them with a black marker. Can you see any secret garden creatures watching you?



Here is another older page of doodles, drawn in gel pens and colored with colored pencils. This one reverts back to my Green Man quilt.

I had made a few divider pages for this sketchbook by painting Lumiere on heavy watercolor paper. I doodled some quilting designs over top with a gel pen. This might be a nice background for a collage or scrapbook page.

I think I mentioned that I made my husband a scrapbook for his 60th birthday using old family photographs from a couple of awful old albums his mom had put together with cellophane tape over the photos. I have been scanning like crazy to preserve the pics and crop out the bad corners. My hope is to make an album for each of Charlie's two brothers and his sister. I have them sorted and scanned, and am working on another one. Time-consuming and not my thing, but I want to do this for these wonderful siblings I inherited when I got married almost thirty-eight years ago.

Now, time to pack for a grand-parenting trip to South Carolina. We are leaving as soon as I get home from school this afternoon! Yippee!

Two New Artsy Purchases

After not spending much $$$ on my fabric and art supply and book addictions lately, I splurged on not only the Lyric Kinard DVD (check out her comment on my blog) but two new books that arrived yesterday from Barnes and Noble.

The first, Stitched Collage by Sherrill Kahn, provides even more inspiration to create beautiful painted and stamped fabric and embellished art quilts.
The colors on these projects make me drool. Sherrill manufactures a line of rubber stamps called "Impress Me" and uses them to create background fabrics and papers for collage, as well as embellished buttons and and jewelry. Her stamp sets are expensive- $25.00- but you get quite a few designs per set. Of course, Lyric teaches how to carve your own stamps from white vinyl erasers. Sherrill also has designed fabric lines that mimic the design elements of her collaged works. Between these two fabulous artists, I have so much inspiration.

But wait...if that is not enough, I decided to splurge on a new book by Violette, of the whimsically painted house and painted, glittered, winged van. She has been inspiring me for several years now through her blog, U-Tube videos, and magazine articles. If you search my blog for Violette, you will see an art quilt that I made from a line drawing she created for a Cloth, Paper, Scissors challenge. Not to mention the blogiversary package I won from her, or the little "house-head" I purchased from her etsy shop.

Violette's book is an idea-starter for journaling, Journal Bliss: Creative Prompts to Unleash Your Inner Eccentric.


What a fun collection of artwork and techniques! This book would be a godsend for those who are a little bit afraid to think of themselves as artists, or even as "creative." Although you may not be into "journaling," these ideas would translate easily to art quilts or even scrapbooking. Here are some of the chapter titles: Fanciful Lettering, Bodacious Borders, Doodling, Groovy Backgrounds, Funky Envelope Art. Okay, so maybe "groovy" went out with the hippies, but those of us who remember the wild colors and free expression of the sixties and seventies (beautifully recreated in the movie Across the Universe) know that groovy can be a good thing.

After all this, I will have no excuse for anything I create to be boring or ordinary.

I still want to be groovy.