Lettering School

I have always been a huge fan of fancy lettering and such and just never felt like I was any good at it. I always found myself disappointed with any attempts to add a word or phrase or quote to my art. Well when I saw that Martha Lever was teaching an online class on fun calligraphy style techniques, I signed right up.

The class started this past week and I've been practicing every day with the writing style. This is so much fun and Martha has such a laid back, easy going teaching technique. You can't help but have a blast.

So here is one of my practice sheets. At this point I'm basically writing the letters in the way Martha has taught us. In time and with more and more practice I will probably (hopefully) take the letters in my own direction or style.


The next photo is my brave attempt to add some lettering to an artwork that I have had on my painting desk for a few weeks. I did try and add a little of my own flair to these letters. I practiced this quote for I don't know how many times before I felt I was ready to put it on the canvas. And even then I think I held the pen poised over the canvas for so long because I was afraid. Afraid I'd ruin the artwork. Once I started and got going, I was having fun and I should really loosen up and if a mistake happens, well paste something over it I guess.


Happy Weekend!

And now for our featured attraction...

Last night we had our second Annual Outdoor Movie Night. Last year one of our campers brought a projecter and big screen, and we showed Ratatouille outdoors. The kids loved it. The adults loved it. This year he brought an even bigger screen.

The kids started showing up early, getting a front row seat and waiting for it to get dark. Mark popped buckets of kettlecorn on the outdoor grill while we all waited.

We watched Cars, a very family-friendly movie with enough humor to keep the adults happy too. We put the movie on pause at about 9:53 so we could watch the space shuttle go by. We could see it for about two minutes, easily visible among all the stars. It was very surreal for me. Here we were in our home-away-from-home, surrounded by wide-open spaces and all the glories of nature, watching thirteen people in their home-away-from-home, cramped in a space shuttle but also surrounded by wide-open spaces and the magnitude of the universe.

And the sewing update: lots of time to actually sit down and sew, but then my table got relegated to be part of the "projection room,"

So maybe later today? Or maybe not....I think maybe I'll just wander down to the lake and think about it.

Something New

So I had to try my hand at something new. Just couldn't resist. WEAVING!


You might remember about a year ago I got started with hand spinning my own yarns. Well I have so many lovely hand spun yarns in small amounts (not enough to really make sizeable somethings with) so I though that weaving with them might be just the ticket. Like I didn't have enough tools and gadgets around here. So my first weaving trial (above) was just using some of my purchased novelty yarns. You can see I started out at the bottom just going back and forth the full width. Well I got gutsy later on and decided to try a design, the heart. The heart is centered on the warp threads but you can't tell that because the beginner that I am, I was pulling my yarns too tight and the right side of the weaving looks tighter or smaller in width. Oh well, I'm a beginner, right?

Oh here's something else that's new. A new technique for surface design on fabric. Well new for me anyway. This is a flour paste resist method that I've been wanting to try for ages and I came across the technique recently while browsing through some of my books/magazines. So I decided now is the time to do it. I think it was a fun technique and one I will play with some more. In the photo below, I applied black Dye-Na-Flow starting on the left side and soon ran out. I didn't have much left in my bottle to begin with. So I took some black textile paint and watered it down to the same Dye-Na-Flow consistency. The textile paint area is the right half. I think I like that side better as the Dye-Na-Flow side seems to have seeped more into the fabric and blurred the web-like lines more.


And I couldn't write a blog post without showing my lastest two-color gradation. This is chartreuse and turquoise. Mmmm yummy!


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