DIY, Part 2

Hope you've been enjoying the summer! It's been a busy month, but i managed to squeak in a couple more of the DIY projects i picked to make from one of my Pinterest boards. This one i like to call "Doodle Dishes". Pretty simple and fun to make! I used Pebeo Porcelaine ceramic markers and a couple white porcelain dishes from Ikea and created these... 

Once the dishes are baked in the oven, the markings become dishwasher safe. So far, so good and we'll see how they wear over time. If you try this, be sure to wash your dishes first and try not to touch the surface as you work. You can see some spots where the ceramic pens resisted the plate surface and resulted in thin, faded lines — probably from finger oils. But no biggie, after all, "handmade" means you actually use your hands and i don't mind the irregularity at all!

Next up...shibori tie-dying of cotton napkins. Some of you may have seen the live photo-feed on Instagram when i was making them. It was an amazing and super-satisfying experience that i'll share more details with you soon. Until then, have a beautiful day!

xo,

kate

Seeing Spots and Dots

 I love dots. In our bathroom alone, there are dots on

our shower curtain:

on our bath mat:

and in a framed doodle i painted using a strong brew of tea:

I love them so much that i think i could design using only dots and never tire of the possibilities!

Are you familiar with Yayoi Kusama? She is one of my favorite dot artists. Recently, she did an interactive installation called "The Obliteration Room" at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art in Australia. It started out looking like this:

 Then over the course of two weeks, each child visitor was given colorful dot stickers and was invited to collaborate with the space. After thousands of visitors, the room soon looked like this!

 There is a wonderful series of photos that shows

the progression over time on Colossal.

Another of my favorite dot artists is Georges Seurat. Long before pixels, his pointillist paintings are composed of small dots of pure colors that are placed next to each other. For instance, blue dots next to yellow dots that when viewed from afar, our eye actually mixes the colors so we perceive them as green. Amazing! Someday, i hope to stand in front of this one at the Art Institute of Chicago:

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884

And then there's artist Paul Klee, who once said, "A line is a dot that went for a walk". It was my high school art teacher who shared that with me and the humor in it stuck. I think of that every time i open my sketchbook and touch my pencil point to the paper. So i like to think of a drawing as a dot on an adventure...and each collection of designs as a journey. Packing now. Bon voyage!