Bi-Monthly Report

Shall we try for a Quarterly Report next time?  Semi-annual?  Heck, let’s just jump right to Annual!  Or . . . maybe not.  I don’t really want to lose all my readers – all three of you that are left, anyway!

I’m going to skip the excuses (there are many) and get right to showing what I’ve done recently – of which there are many as well!

Quilts:

This was a kit from the local quilt shop.  I’ve had it for awhile, but it went together pretty fast once I decided to work on it.

This is from a pattern called “Take Five On-point”.  The package says you take 5 minutes to choose 5 fabrics and in 5 hours you’ll have a finished top.  Well, it took more like 10 hours, but that included coffee breaks and gossip time, so I’m thinking that’s about right!

This table runner was a quick project after a friend showed us how to layout charm squares for a simple runner.  I wanted something for Fall and I happen to have this charm pack from a Shop Hop – who knows when!  For awhile I was buying charm packs a lot, until I realized I didn’t know what to do with them!  I’m getting more ideas now.

Art Journal Emporium:

August was pretty busy, but things slowed down in September somewhat.  At least in my Art journal!  Here’s a couple of exercises from Pam Carricker’s “Creating Art at the Speed of Life”

Digital Scrapping:

Dolls & Other Things:

A couple of projects from my doll club’s August and September meetings.  Top picture is my box “totem”.  We collaged and embellished boxes or square cubes with symbolism that had a personal meaning.  I made mine so there are three storage compartments.  You know – for secrets.  Ha!

The bottom picture is two cone dolls.  These are literally cardboard cones that I’ve collaged onto.  We had a selection of clay faces to choose from, and multiple face molds.  I used several of the molds and I have a couple more cones, so I can do more dolls.  These are too much fun!

That’s about it.  Two months gone by in a rush – but fun projects got done anyway!

Want to see what I’m working on next?

It involves this fabric.  The fuchsia flowers match the trim in my sewing room.  Sarge was sooo nice to paint it since he really dislikes fuchsia! 

Now to get back to sewing and scrapping!

Not-Monthly Report

It’s past time for an update on my crafty doings, so here is what I’ve been up to in July into August.

Quilts

I have another finish! 

This was a Block of the Month from Julia Wood at The Hexie Blog last year.  I actually had all the blocks finished shortly after the New Year.  And it didn’t take me very long to put them together.  But then I decided to add the tiny hexie flowers at the block intersections, and that took longer.  A LOT longer!  I’m not sure why – when I decided to get busy and just finish it already!, it was done in one afternoon.  Isn’t that the way it goes sometimes?

Speaking of Blocks of the Month, this is the one I am doing this year.

This one is called Seasonal Silhouettes by Edyta Sitar, and my local quilt shop is providing the kits.  I am actually up-to-date on this one since it started in April.  Hopefully it won’t take me eight months to finish it after the twelfth block is done!

Art Journal Emporium

One of this month’s projects was a Glue Book.  This is just one of the pages I did.  Basically, it involves gathering pictures and papers together and glueing them down in a pleasing collage.  Not as focused as a regular collage because there is really no “message”, but not totally random either.  I have a small box that bits and pieces from other projects get tossed into.  For the Glue Book, I grabbed a few of them at random and then layered, tore, punched, and generally played until I liked what I had.  There will probably be more of these pages in my next – ahem – monthly review.

Digital Scrapping

Yeah, this is what takes most of my time.  A perfect match-up of my artistic side and my nerdy-ness!  Anyway, here is just a sampling:

There you have it – July in a few words and pictures.  Not so many pictures, actually.  I need to take them more often.  I’m pretty sure I did more than make a couple of quilts and play in PhotoShop.

On the other hand, maybe that IS all I did last month!

Summary Review for May –er- June?

For weeks now I have been thinking of showing what I’ve been up to.  May was an exciting month, but somehow yet another month has passed by!  Sheesh!  What is the matter with me that I can’t seem to post anything?  Well, some of it is that the photos are all on the laptop downstairs, while most everything else is upstairs.  But, let’s get real here.  It’s a LAPTOP!!  Can you say portable?

Never mind.  Let’s see what I’ve been doing for two months:

Dolls

The big news here is that I attended another workshop with Deb Wood.  Our theme this time was Night Circus.

This is my girl, Domino.  I am really pleased with how she came out.  We learned some new techniques and I feel much more confident working in the clay.  Not that there isn’t more to learn!  It will just take practice (lots of practice!)

For now, I’ve gone back to cloth for the Hoffman Challenge. 

Yes, I know – her head and arms need to be attached.  Sometimes it is easier to construct a dress on the body without arms getting in the way.  Depending on what kind of sleeves I want to do, I’ll put sleeves and arms on together.  And jewelry and embellishments are easier without the head.  I know what I want the dress to look like – sort of.  Since the deadline is in two weeks (Yikes!), I will need to finalize the plan pretty quickly now.

Art Journal Emporium

One of the Emporium activities was to work through Diana Trout’s book, “Journal Spilling: Mixed Media Techniques for Free Expression.”  It’s always fun to explore new techniques.  Some of my journal pages:

Digital Scrapping

I must admit, this is where a lot of my time has been going.  I have a LOT of photos to go through, both my own and my family’s.  The challenges put up by the various digital scrapbooking sites have been really great as incentive. 

If you’ve followed me for any amount of time, though, you know I tend to go overboard on my projects now and then!  OK – more than now and then . . . like ‘almost always’!!

So, Sweet Shoppe Designs has a monthly challenge called Bingo.  As the name implies, there is a Bingo card each month with prompts of all kinds.  A single row ‘bingo’ gets you a percent off coupon, a pattern (like X or square) gets a bigger discount, and black out is worth an even bigger discount.

For June, I decided I was going to get a blackout.  Who knows what I was thinking?  That’s 24 separate layouts and quite a bit more time than I would normally put into any one project.  In fact, every spare moment went to this effort.  And you know what?

I did it!!!!!

It may never happen again, but now I can say I’ve done it.  And I can go back to a reasonable rate of scrapping all these photos.

So here are some of the others I did in May and June.  I’ll put the name of the site the prompt came from.  Each layout uses papers and elements from that site’s designers.

The Digi Dares:

Scrap Girls:

OScraps:

That’s just a sample, really.  I could bend your ear and burn out your eyeballs with less successful layouts and boring excuses, but to what purpose?   If I were to post more often, I could share more of these, huh?

There has been some quilting happening, too.  Unfortunately, I haven’t taken photos yet.  There are two finishes so I should have something to show you in my next post.  Oh, and some fabric painting!  Wait until you see what that looks like!! 

But let’s not wait two months, okay?