Haiku a day

I am still plugging away at various exercises from Sharon Boggan's Studio Journals class. I have lots of pages of wonderful design "seeds" and am having lots of fun.

Yesterday in one of the forums for the class, someone mentioned Virginia Spiegel's daily Haikus, she writes five of them each day about ordinary things she sees from where she sits to have her coffee each morning. She tells how examining the object (whatever it is) helps one to see. I thought the idea was great, but I am only aiming for one Haiku each day. Click on the link above to see her process of writing Haiku. I did not use her method exactly, but did borrow the idea of thinking about the bar from all five senses. Today's Haiku is about a mini O'Henry Bar sitting on my desk.

Bright yellow wrapper
Nutty sweetness in the bar
Conquers my hunger

Yesterday's Haiku about my mini tripod:

Orange, silver, black
Strange three legged bird stands tall
Holds digital eye

OK, a poet I am not, but I think this is a useful daily exercise -- sort of like stretching the noticing (focusing and seeing) muscles. It helps me to focus and see that which is around me, to notice it and focus on it in more detail. Perhaps with a start like that to each day, during the rest of the my day I may notice more and more richly.

Going Around in Circles

Just let me say, I am glad I did not get arrested this week. I have been going around in circles or at least in search of circles (one of the assignments in my Studio Journals class with Sharon Boggan). So here I was walking around photographing circles. They are everywhere and it was fun. One of the multiple examples that Sharon had in the class notes was hub caps -- well you know, there are an endless variety of hubcaps out there and I got a little carried away.


Shocking, I know. With every cool hubcap I saw (and had to photograph) I felt like a thief staking out these cars. I was sure that at any moment someone would call a cop and I would have to explain. Of course I did have a camera full of circle photos and only circle photos to back up my story (plus my course notes, but they were at home). But even had the police been convinced by my camera full of circles, there was no way to guarantee that they were not going to haul me off to the loony bin. So, over all I had a blast taking all these circle photos, but am hugely relieved that I still have my freedom!



I had great plans of taking photos different shapes each day, but life got in the way. Also, quite frankly, I am now a wee bit obsessed with circles. I may just have to go with that for a while. I want to take the hub caps further (no pun intended) and play with the other circle photos too.

I painted some beautiful papers last week and some not so beautiful papers (grin). I used watercolours and I used acrylics as well, both artist grade and those lovely, cheap bottles of craft grade that I still have hanging about and am trying to use up. I feel very virtuous.

The first photo shows the whole stack of papers. Though there are a few rosy pink pages, there are not as many as appear in the photo. As always, the notorious camera is showing colours that are not really there. Many of the rosy coloured papers are actually golden and quite lovely.

The next two photos show the same papers up a little closer.
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The last two photos are of some of my favorite papers that I have painted. Yum! Again, there is virually no pink in these at all -- trust me.

Many of these papers are really thick and rich and wonderful. I almost want to frame them as abstract pieces of art on their own. But, I won't. They will mostly be used for various backgrounds for my sketchbooks.

Postcard swap

In my last post, I mentioned that I made a box with layers of various materials. I made a similar background for eight postcards that were sent out in a postcard swap with some of the other students in the class. After creating the background, I cut it up so that there would be interesting bits on each postcard.

The postcards did not look finished to me at this point, rather they looked like exactly what they were, chopped up bits of background.

I let each piece speak to me and added hand stitching where the background told me to. That was fun and mostly successful.


I really enjoyed creating these and have enjoyed receiving the postcard from the other swappers, I am still anxiously awaiting the rest of the postcards. I love the feeling of anticipation that comes from knowing great mail is coming into my mailbox any day. Of course, that thrill does occasionally get me into trouble when I longing browse some of the wonderful products that are available in on-line stores. I just have to remember how difficult it is to clean out my studio and make room for the things I already have -- I keep hoping that thought will make it easier to say no, but it is not easier yet -- I will let you all know the minute it gets easier.

I have been busy with classes and with cleaning up my studio. Everything is progressing slowly, some things are even progressing surely!
The items in this post were created in Sue Bleiweiss's class "Mixed Media for the Fibre Artist". I really enjoyed working many of the techniques and making them my own. The orange vase shown is gossamer thin silk -- a little too thin, on a really hot and humid weekend it totally collapsed! Oops. I inserted a glass cylinder vase and all has been well since. The dark green vase is a little thicker (a full layer of silk cap) and sturdier, but I miss the beautiful translucency of the orange one.






























The box shown below was fun to make and will be useful to hold small sewing notions.














It has three drawers and a top storage area as well. The cover fabric is a rich combination of painted cheesecloth (I love painted cheesecloth and hoard the bits I have made over the years -- thins time I actually used some!), bits of silk roving, bits of yarns and Angelina fibres. Yum!

There were other projects in the class, but those are still works in progress.

I may not have been posting a lot in the last two months, but I have been doing some creative things. I have taken more of SueB's classes. I was not able to keep up with the first one completely and do need to finish up a few items for it. The second class, Creative Mixed Media Journalling Techniques started just as the school year was winding down and I have had little time to really get into some of the great techniques that have been covered so far.

In other news . . . I was involved in a book swap. Coincidentally, the person to whom I was to be sending a book mentioned that she had seen some of SueB's books and really liked them. Therefore, I used some of the techniques from SueB's class and created a book with the theme "Our Town" -- my town happens to be Ottawa, Canada's Capital.

The cover is made of a stiff stabilizer that was painted red. Then I used a added printouts of photos that I took, mostly of famous building in downtown Ottawa, including our Parliament Buildings. I covered the first layer of photos with a sheet of white tissues and used gel medium to hold it down. This also made the tissue more translucent. I added some focus photos of top, to highlight them. The whole was then coved with fusible web and a layer of off-white tulle. The first photo shows the cover opened up with some of the photos being more prominent than others. The second shows the book closed with hand made cord to keep it closed. I searched everywhere for red maple leaf buttons to make the closure, but could not find them.

The last photo shows the inside of the book with the sewn in signatures.