Down the garden path : stitched roll finished

2 blog posts in 2 days! I knew that having school holidays would enable me to get some things finished.

I have loved Roxy's Journal of Stitchery Vol 3. It's been a 6-month stitched roll challenge and since it's now finished I thought I'd share all of my photos and a video in one post.

January : the beginning

Wild flowers and Garden gate

February : Vegetable garden and Garden shed 

March : Pots of flowers and Visitors to the garden

There was an extra week in March so time to add one more garden visitor - I finally found the perfect addition for behind my garden gate. I'd been exploring photo alteration in a class with Jane Chipp and decided that my own dear mum would be perfect behind my gate.

Details of the method used here. 

April : Garden Seat or Bench

May : Pond (April prompt but I was late!) and Tree

Favourite flowers - embroidered ribbon gifted by a friend, a piece of my great grandmother's lace, roses and a pohutukawa. 

June : Bird house - with the addition of a cute bird pin gifted for my birthday

Finish as you wish. I wanted to include a few more fun layered flowers, plus the sweet fantail print which is cut from a gifted cotton tea towel!

Finishing with words to remember when I did this and then attached it to the spool

With a tie closure at the front using my beloved sari ribbon (don't think I can do a fibre project without using it ♥) The button was made by me many years ago from polymer clay.

I did not back the roll with fabric, because the stitching on the back is mostly neat enough

And here's a video so you can see how it unwinds

All the prompts and instructional videos from the challenge remain here on YouTube if you want to join in at any time.  

Looking forward

You may have noticed my last review post was April! While I've made progress with some projects, and watched lots of inspirational lessons, I've not got many finished things to share. It's now school holidays again, so I thought I'd give you a bit of a review since April and share what I'm looking forward to, including some more free classes. In May, I did make Mothers' Day cards

and I managed to make some master sheets from May Fodder School lessons with Tiffany Sharpe

I've enjoyed watching cool lessons in June with Karen Elaine in Fodder School and I'm hoping that this holidays I'll be able to combine both ideas into one project for me. 

I've been working in my JIYA Journal created from Megan Quinlan's class and combined with lettering techniques learned with Wendy Solganik's lettering class. Here are a few of those completed spreads : 

June was the final month for Roxy's stitched "Down the garden path" project. I have loved having these prompts and am so happy with my progress. These are the bits you haven't seen yet : Pond, Tree, Favourite Flowers and Birdhouse (not yet complete)

Our final prompt is "choose your own adventure" - decide how you want to finish. Hopefully in a few days I'll be ready to share my completed roll.

I've been looking forward to my 2 week July school holidays which started this past weekend. As well as having planned a couple of mini breaks away and play days with friends, there are lots of free creative events that I know from experience will inject some arty joy into my time off. See the free events in my previous post, which includes information about the Make, Create, Express weekend, Get Messy's Junk Journal July, and the Free Fodder Challenge from Fodder school (preparing for Fodder School 3) Register HERE. 

Laly Mille is reopening her Free Art Journal Dreams retreat from 19-25 July. Join here. It's the same as the one she did in March 2023, but you are welcome to repeat or join fresh. 

As well as those, Francisca Nunes has announced a free class on making a Flowers Magic Art Journal. 

This is in preparation for her upcoming Flowers Magic Art Fest event - I'll share more details when I know them.

Go HERE for links to both. The art journal class is available right now. You may remember that last year I took part in the 2022 Flowers Magic journal class and created this beauty. 

Looking forward to this year's offerings and hopefully some progress made in taking this journal to the next stage. 

So plenty to look forward to, but I always struggle to be as productive in our NZ Winter months. This year as an added distraction, I've got myself a new job! It was my last day as  part-time librarian and part-time office adminstrator at Carncot Independent School on Friday. I am now on school holidays for the first 2 weeks of July and then I will be the Palmerston North Intermediate Normal School full-time (40 hour/week during term time) librarian. I am so excited. I know this will impact my art practice and I need to think about my expectations of myself, but for now - it's school holidays ♥ I hope to continue to post here on my blog as time and motivation allows, but I do so more regularly on my Instagram and Facebook Artist's page. Hope to share again soon.

April review

April has been a lot of time at home with school holidays. I am very lucky to work at a school so get good breaks and no longer have small children so I can be more flexible with my time. After a week of holidays, I was feeling a bit torn about my lack of finished creative projects and thought I would share some of an email I sent to a friend about this: 

I am still being creative but it seems to be a slow process and I'm not posting much completed stuff at the moment. I seem to be able to keep going with my stitched roll project - lovely to have something small and achievable each fortnight - and recently there was a special deal so I joined Wendy Solganik's Love your imperfect letters class which I am enjoying but there is a lot of ground work to do before it ends up in my journal. I am currently on school holidays so have been socialising with extended family and friends and getting some housework catch ups done (cleaning the oven, deadheading roses for final autumn flush), as well as some time for reading. All good stuff but there are only so many hours and we have to make choices. I sometimes feel despondent when I scroll on Instagram or FB and see others creating a lot. It's a tricky balance to be inspired rather than tipping the other way.

A top tip from me is to take photos of your creativity every day so that you notice that you ARE doing something and save them electronically to look back at. I have a folder on my computer where I keep a record of what I'm creating, reading and watching each month. Creating this monthly review on my blog also helps. We can be so hard on ourselves and some of the stories we tell ourselves - "I'm not being very creative" - are just not true. I've addressed this topic a few times on my blog in the past. There's a good summary of my philosophy here and I even have a link to all my posts on this topic if you want to explore more:  Finding time to create. Recently I've been re-inspired by Gretchen Rubin

Scheduling blocks of time in your day means you can make time for what matters to you. I hope you understand the dance of creative seasons and can give yourself some grace if you are not creating or finishing as much as you would like. 

I decided to use some of my holiday time to work on the altered photo project with Jane Chipp from March. See my full post about this project here. These are a couple of sneak peeks.

And I was also very lucky to have a play day with a couple of friends where we revisited some techniques from the lessons with Liz Constable in January. Still a lot to explore from her book too. 

You can still join us in Fodder School (that link will take you to both 1 and 2) plus there is going to be a Fodder School 3 and you can already register for the Free Fodder challenge 2023 event which introduces us to all the teachers in July. 

Progress on my stitched "Down the garden path" roll. This is a free youtube fortnightly prompt and demonstration. See the entire playlist HERE. One of the early prompts in January was Garden Gate. I did mine and then had to wait until I was inspired for something to go behind it. Inspired yet again by Jane Chipp's lessons, I decided to do a fabric transfer of my mum in her garden. I used a laser copy (reversed the photo) glued face down to a fabric serviette.

Left overnight so completely dry and then sprayed with a little water and gently rubbed off the paper layer leaving the image.

You need to keep letting it dry and then removing the rest of the paper gently. It will show up white once dry.  Inktense pencils, beads and stitching to finish.

April's prompts have been A Garden Seat or Bench and a Pond. I'll have to share the Pond next time since I've had a headcold for the last few days. I am very happy with my Garden bench and the extra visitor ♥ 

I hope there's lots more creative joy for all of us in May. 

March review

To be honest, I've been struggling this month. I have been feeling flat, tired and unmotivated. It's a combination of living with regular migraines and sadness that we are heading towards winter with less daylight hours to play. As always - this monthly review post is a great reminder that I am still being creative, and have lots to look forward to in April. 

I had thought that the #100 day project was just too much for me but then I thought of trying #100daysofstamps and I was inspired...for a few days! I've let go of this idea, but as you look through this post you'll see I've had stamps on my mind. I managed to create a little collage fodder with commercial stamps

and I had a lovely creative weekend with a friend 

where I was able to finally have a play with our fodder school lessons from last month with Lucie Duclos

Fodder school in March has been with Jane Chipp. I've made a start and will share more detail in another post when I've done a bit more.

I've been working a little in my JIYA Journal. I used some of my own stamps to do this page 

And I did this page too 

No supplies purchased this month, but I would like to add lettering with more confidence to this journal so I signed up to Wendy Solganik's Love your (imperfect) letters class when she offered a 3 day special. I like to support artists I love and Wendy's classes are life-time access and always packed with information.

I've made progress on my stitched "Down the garden path" roll. I'm keeping up with the fortnightly prompts and loving how this is evolving. This month our prompts were Pots of Flowers and Garden Creatures or Visitors. Another use of stamps : since it's a New Zealand garden I stitched over stamped images of a fantail and a bee

I've seen this free online event come up again for its sixth year: 

The initial release of workshops was from March 20 - April 1, with 2 new sessions released each day. After that you can able to watch all the sessions until April 20th. More information about the artists involved and sign up HERE.

Our first lot of school holidays start from Easter and I am looking forward to finding more motivation and creative time. I see there are less visitors to my blog and I think many people use the quick instagram fix now. You can find me there and on Facebook with more regular updates but I will continue to blog my main projects and a monthly review because it's a nice record for me.  I hope you are finding time and enthusiasm for creativity where you are.