GirlMeetsArt

Well, this week there was bad news and good. The bad news: I couldn’t sleep Monday night. My mind was racing with all the things to worry about regarding my pending move. I took some meds supposedly to help me sleep, but two hours after I went to bed, I woke up and tossed and turned. Finally, 45 minutes later, I gave up hope of getting back to sleep.

Here’s where the good news comes in. I got up and finished Doggie Heaven at long last. I’d been chipping away at it for many weeks, an hour here or there at night. Some (okay, many) nights, not at all. I really felt that I’d bitten off way more than I could chew when I signed up for the Art League School workshop, thinking I would have a piece done over the two days. Hah! That was in March. But something kept me chugging along. Guilt? The thought that I didn’t want the cost of the workshop and supplies to go to waste? The desire to see a fun concept come to completion? No doubt, a combination of all three.

Having caught the embroidery bug at Penland, when I saw that the Art League School was offering a two-Saturday workshop to make a fiber sculpture, I quickly signed on. Being a dog lover, I decided to create a stylized dog figure that would be large enough to use to hold the day’s mail and my cell phone and keys.

What would a dog’s version of heaven be? Well, for one thing, biscuits would rain down from the skies. Fire hydrants would be plentiful for those calls of nature. And of course, there would always be a hand to rub the tummy. These are a few pics of the work in progress. The head and tail were made from Sculpey. The fabrics have been hanging out in my closet for years after I picked up a pack of remnants at an outlet store.

Update June 20, 2009:

The dog gains some clothes.

If you’re like me, you buy lots of crafts books with good intentions of doing the projects within. They are kind of like porn for crafters, don’t you think? Well, over Christmas, while away from home for a week, I decided to try some paper quilting, inspired by Bridget Hoff’s book, Paper Quilting. I had made some thick paper, embedded with stray fibers and such, many moons ago at Penland. And when I’d first read Hoff’s book, I went out and collected and dried lots of leaves. Now, thanks to a Penland workshop on embroidered maps I took from Melinda Barta, I had some embroidery skills, too. Voilá, my own paper quilts! I used embroidery floss, usually with only 3 of the six strands, and an awl to pre-punch the holes for sewing. Then I just let myself play with integrating stitches, color, and the leaves, along with some buttons also stashed away in my crafts drawers.

This year, the creative urge hit me around the time I began considering what Christmas cards to send out this year. How could I combine some of the many techniques I’ve learned at workshops over the years? So I dug out some fabric I’d screenprinted, pulled out the embroidery stitches guide, and started working.

Thankfully, I only send out a few cards these days. Each one is unique. Half use those neat Italian paper clips as “ornaments.” Some include “snow.” Ho, ho, ho!

I’m sure that Mom was looking down from heaven last summer, asking “So, now you’re going to take up feminine things?”

As a child, I was so not into dolls or dress up. Give me a set of Legos or a wagon of Playskool wooden blocks, or better yet, let me run around with the boys playing shoot ’em up, and I was happy. Sewing in home ec? Yuk, okay, I had to do it, but once was enough. My sister was the girls’ girl who made her own clothes and did cross-stitch.

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