Friday Inspiration - The Colors of Spring

Spring in Phoenix is colorful!  The bright bougainvillaea in red, pink, orange, purple - lemon trees in full bloom and heavy with ripe fruit - and the bright orange poppies that are everywhere.  A great time of year for a color freak like me!

Last fall I found a great color palette generating tool that I'm beginning to use more and more.  Big Huge Labs has quite a few fun, free photo tools you might want to explore.  The color palette generator takes an uploaded photo and builds a set of twelve colors - even if you aren't planning on using the subject of the photo in your art work, it's great for taking a photo with colors you like and seeing what palette it gives you.  I've found there are always colors in it I didn't pick up on.

Happy Creating!  Deborah

Wednesday Sewing - St. Patrick's Day Shamrock

I don't usually decorate for St. Patrick's Day - mainly because it falls at a busy time of year for me.  Spring Break visitors or trips, four March birthdays in the family, changing out winter things for spring and summer, spring training baseball, ... one of my favorite times of the year!  I had an idea for vase decoration, though, so this year our table has a bit of St. Patrick's Day decor.  

This is really quick and easy!  I put ribbon on the back so I could tie it to a vase, but you could also make it a pin or hair clip by putting the appropriate hardware on the backing.  It might be on the big side for those items - you can reduce the pattern size on a copy machine.

Materials:
*green felt - I used green glitter felt for the backing and two shades of green for the middle and top layers
*white felt for the flower
*3 large and 3 small beads - I used cream colored large beads and gold small beads
*1 yard green ribbon (or a pin backing or hair clip if that's what you're making)
*green embroidery floss
*white sewing thread
*patterns found here

1.  Cut one of each pattern piece from felt.  Sew the ribbon or backing hardware to the right side of the backing piece.

2.  Sew the top layer to the middle layer with a running stitch and three strands of embroidery floss.

3.  Attach the flower by sewing on the beads - bring the needle up through all layers of felt, slip on the large bead and then the small bead, put the needle down through the big bead through all the felt layers.

4.  Sew the backing to the middle layer using a running stitch and three strands of floss.

I tied mine around a small vase and trimmed the ribbon ends a bit.

Happy Creating!  Deborah

Monday Project - Learning to Knit

I'm learning to knit!  That probably doesn't sound too amazing, but I've tried several times in the past with less than glorious results.  I've crocheted for over 40 years, can embroider, sew, surface design fabric, do simple weaving, ... pretty much any fiber art, but not knitting!  I knew that knitting would be part of the fibers class I'm taking this semester and was a little worried, given my past track record.  We've been working on it for the past couple weeks and between help in class, a good book, and a set of great videos on the internet I do believe it's taking!

If you've been thinking of learning to knit, here are some suggestions from my own experience.  Find someone to help you - take a class, hang around a yarn store, find a friend who knits.  That's not enough, though!  While you're actually in the presence of someone who knits, everything makes sense.  It's like their knitting aura envelopes you!  Then you go home, try to continue, and amnesia sets in.  There's so much that seeing it done in person helps with and having someone to answer questions is invaluable, but they won't be there 24/7 so .... I highly recommend the set of beginner videos on knittinghelp.com.  And if the English (also called American) style doesn't feel comfortable, try the Continental method.  That's when everything started really clicking for me - maybe because it uses a lot of the same hand movements as crochet does.

I also bought Leisure Arts' I Can't Believe I'm Knitting!  There are great color photos of everything covered - and everything I'm wondering at this point is covered - basic stitches, troubleshooting, how to change colors, how to add or decrease stitches, .... And it goes into some more intermediate subjects like knitting socks and cable stitches.  Enough to keep me busy for a long time!  If you follow the link above, you can preview the book on Amazon.

I dislike making swatches - I'm doing a few required ones for my class, but they seem so useless to me.  So I'm beginning a set of dish washing cloths that use all the stitches and techniques I'm learning.  I have a few inches done on the first one (actually a few inches several times - I'm getting really good at taking out rows back to mistakes) and will show you how it turns out, with instructions in case you want to try it too.

Okay - back to knitting!

Happy Creating!  Deborah

Friday Inspiration - The Dinner Party Place Cloths

One of the highlights of being in New York City last week was being able to finally see Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party at The Brooklyn Museum.  I missed it during it's previous installations at different museums and then it sat boxed up for so long.  It was worth the wait!

Unfortunately, it's so dim in the viewing room that none of my pictures turned out.  Fortunately, I bought the exhibition book which has numerous photos of each place setting and lots of background information.  Definitely a great purchase!  

While the plates are beautiful, it was the fiber art on the place setting cloths that mesmerized me - wonderful needlepoint, tapestries, weaving, embroidery, crochet, ... and more.  If you haven't had a chance to learn anything about this amazing piece of art, take a look here.  I have a few of my favorites to show you from the book and if these intrigue you, be sure to look at the museum's website, where you can see views of every one of the 39 settings. 

The embroidery on the place cloth for 17th century astronomer Caroline Herschel is beautiful!  I especially love how delicate crochet was used to represent the three nebulae she discovered.  And as gorgeous as this looks in a photo, the actual piece is even much more so.

I've been intrigued with Eleanor Aquitaine's story ever since seeing A Lion in Winter as a young teenager.  Her place cloth is done mainly in perfect needlepoint. 

Hypatia's (a 4th century Roman mathematician) place cloth is a colorful and moving tapestry weaving.  The blended colors are wonderful!  This is a fiber art I've never tried, but have been thinking about getting into.

Even the corner holding pieces are done in fine needlework!

I can tell I'll be getting a lot of inspiration from reading the book and remembering my visit.

Happy Creating!  Deborah