Chilling....

Hello - how are you? We are in Winter here in NZ, and this week at my house we've had white frosty mornings and only making a top temperature averaging 8 degrees celsius (that's around 46 degrees fahrenheit) during our day. 

I don't mind a crisp day like today when the sun is shining, but grey days make me feel blah, and rain means we haven't been able to get out and have holiday outings. 

Have to say though, I love living where I get to have distinct seasons. Winter means snuggling by the fire, having a good excuse to make art or stitch because it's too cold to be in the garden, reading, watching DVDs and appreciating hot coffee and lovely roast vegies for dinner.

This is the shape made by the soot in my fireplace

- honestly not altered in any way ♥

I'd been a bit concerned this week that with the extra time holidays bring, I haven't felt much like creating. Then I thought I'd look back and see how I was feeling in previous years....2014 I returned to blogging 9th July after I thought I'd stopped blogging altogether in May. 2014 was also the year I started my new job so I needed to learn to balance new expectations. 2013 I was at Taupo quilt symposium - which was hugely inspiring, but in June I was grieving for my Grandmother, and reminding myself that downtime is still part of the creative process. 2012 I needed to get to the beach to recharge.
I've now realised that mid-year is my time to rest, absorb inspiration, think, and try and get to the beach for an hour when possible. I'm going to just chill and be kind to myself.

Of course I've been catching up on a few blogs while I'm on holiday. Until I've got some finished art to share (it's still happening, just slowly), here's some online inspiration for you :
Julie Fei-Fan Balzer recently produced a video where she was testing out a new product Exploring Ken Oliver's Color Burst Powders. I'm not recommending the link because you need to see the new product, but rather because of the interesting ways she played and used the powders as watercolours, turned them into sprays (a good reminder) and also how she made them permanent.... applicable to any of your watercolours. This is one of her tag examples - delicious

I follow Roben-Marie Smith's blog, and through her found out about Quirky Dutch Summer. 

Starting June 15th, Marit has 10 weeks of fun detailed tutorials by herself and some guest artists. You can treat it as a free "summer art school" so I've also added it to my list of cheap and free online artful classes that you can always get to on the top of my right side bar. I'm sure there's something there for winter inspiration too ;-) Read the introduction about it here or go HERE to get all her listings about this project - she also did it in 2012.
Today Alisa Burke shared a tutorial about how to make VERY lovely turquoise rings out of rocks

And if you are in New Zealand and visit Gordon Harris in Wellington (highly recommended for fabulous art supplies), you need to know they've moved

Did you know I also have a link to online and NZ sources of where I shop for supplies in the right hand bar of my blog?  Hope your weekend contains whatever you most need....

Week 26 : DLP 2015

Information about the FREE weekly Dcoumented Life Project is HERE. We're half way through the year! Here's our first 6 months of challenges :

and here's what 26 weekly challenges look like in the front of my journal

Each background to the challenge information is a bit of how I started each page.
This week's challenge :

For this week, the quote "A picture is worth a thousand words" made me decide to focus on a photo for each of my daily journal spots. This made the spread set-up quite different from my usual. I started with lovely Dylusions sprays and stencil

I sprayed on the left hand page (stencil still in place here) and then folded the right hand page over and pressed to take the print off the stencil. Here's the spread with the stencil removed and pages dry :

My usual habit is to do the spread, and rule off a daily journaling space on one side. Usually this includes photos on at least some of the days - 

I liked Lorraine Bell's take on this week's challenge. She did image transfers of printed photos onto watercolour paper, and they are the main feature of the spread. Here I am trying out how the space might look if I had 7 photos - one for each day of the week.

Then I realised that there were 4 days left of June, and 3 for July this week, so I rearranged my pieces of paper and added the months and some initial doodles - the challenge is "photos and words" so that fits nicely.

Next challenge - to have a photo a day. Some days it's easy - had coffee with Wendy from Late Start Studio and she gifted me one of her beautiful handmade kete. Feel very blessed with that. Other days I had to be a bit more creative and I decided to capture some of my currrent routine - it will be fun to look back on this in years to come (the basketball practice which we have early Tuesday mornings). I liked the idea of image transfers, but didn't have the time/energy this week for that, so decided to take an easier option which was to print the photos directly onto watercolour paper through my home printer.

I like the texture of the watercolour paper. I tore them apart, dated and wrote on them, then glued them on the page. The sizes and shapes are much less regular than my initial squares and I like that a lot better. This also gave me more room for adding tape and more doodles between

And here is this week's spread all done

Click on the photo to enjoy it larger or see it in the Flickr album I've created for all my Documented Life 2015 spreads HERE. You can see all my posts about this project HERE. Can't wait to see what our new theme for July will be...

Mid-Year review

Welcome to the second half of the year! In the northern hemisphere, blog posts are about summer holidays and play and colour.
Here in New Zealand, the weather has been grey, and wet, and much cooler - but inside my studio it's still play and colour....and it's 2 weeks of school holidays in July starting this Saturday :-)
Thought it would be a good time to review where I'm at creatively now we're half way through the year. I made a list of creative projects for 2015 HERE, and I'm pretty happy with my progress. 

1. Art Journaling.

I've done really well with keeping up with my 2 main projects in this area so far. Here's what my Documented Life journal looks like :

And here's what 26 weeks of challenges looks like :

See all my posts about that project HERE - I'll be posting this week's 26th challenge on Friday (all going well!)

And I've completed 14 Life Book projects (currently working on #15) :

See all my posts about Life Book HERE. You can still sign up - we are only 1/2 way through, and you get to save and keep all the lessons for ever - including the videos!

2. Collage and Mounted Art

In March, a friend had her birthday and I turned a wooden word into a piece of wall art.

In June I made this collage inspired by the work of Anne Brookes - another tick off my wish list :-)

3. QUILTS
I really enjoyed symposium in January and did 3 blog posts about my experiences there. I then attended classes with Karen K. Stone. 
I finished my "On a Lark" class project quite quickly (the size helped!) :

In March, I finished this quilt for a 21st present

At the end of May, I was really REALLY excited to get a new Janome 8200 QC sewing machine :

I really hadn't been using this enough, and I'd only been making slow progress on "Wild Women Don't Get The Blues" (my other class with Karen K. Stone) so starting 15th June I've been working on a spiked-border-a-day challenge. Here's a sneak peek of my design wall

This is where I would like to spend more of my time for the rest of the year. Wonder how many more quilts I can make....
4. Mary Ann Moss online classes
The classes I've had with Mary Ann Moss will expire at the end of this year. I will make sure I set some time aside this holidays to at least make sure I have all the notes I need saved for future reference.
Holiday plans also include relaxing in my warm PJs instead of making school lunches, doing some day trips and walks with family, catching up with friends, and on the days it's just me and the boys, I'm going to do jobs in the morning and hopefully have studio playtime for me in the afternoon....I'll keep you posted.
That was a good review and re-focus for me. If you're trying to find ways to fit more art into your days, you might like this post I did in February. See you again soon.