Week 3 : DLP 2015

Information about the Documented Life Project is HERE.

The minute I saw "colour wheel" I knew I wanted to use the bright happy colours of Dylusions sprays. I am in this Dylusions journal, so no prepping needed. I just sprayed in a loose colour wheel order around the spread (the colours blend so nicely with that order) and then rolled a paper towel over the ink before leaving to dry.

When I think of Georgia O'Keeffe, I always think flowers. So my first thought was to doodle flowers with black pen like I did in my flower power class with Alisa Burke. But while my ink was drying, I saw a wonderful piece on FB that reminded me about my gelly roll moonlight pens....so I combined the techniques which I'd used separately HERE

And this is what developed : click on any photo in this post to make it larger

My doodled flowers were inspired by the "shapes" I saw in the ink on the page. 

Base page

Flower inspired by ink shading

I have had a fabulous week of warmth, colour and inspiration, and the completed spread reflects that :-)

You can see all my posts about this project HERE and I've created a Flickr album for all my Documented Life 2015 spreads HERE.

NZ National Quilt Symposium : Part 1

The main thing I want to make in 2015 is quilts - lots of quilts. I've started the year right with our national Quilt Symposium that's been right here in Palmerston North.  

I am full up with inspiration and thought I'd share some of it here with you over a few posts.
First up, I attended some great lectures. The artists I saw are all very talented in quite different ways and I took something away from hearing each one. I have provided links to their sites and photos of the quilt they had in the tutors' exhibition ::
Sue Benner creates original dyed and painted fabrics which she combines with recycled textiles. She fuses and then cuts her fabrics to create detailed quilts. Her quilt on show was one of her cellular structures : click on any photo in this post to make it larger

"Cellular Structure V" by Sue Benner

She shared some of her landscape quilts in her talk - tiny detailed pieces and wonderful colour - see her gallery HERE.
Betty Busby works with all kinds of fabrics and uses a layered approach to her work. It was really interesting to see her work inspired by the natural world through a microscope in contrast to Sue Benner's work above - go HERE to see her gallery of that work. Her tutor's exhibition quilt was one of her waterscapes - see similar work HERE. But what I'm sharing is a piece from one of the other exhibitions in town since I far prefer flowers to fish :

"Buffalo Gourd" by Betty Busby

Linda Beach creates all her quilts with piecing and commercial fabrics. It was fascinating to see her take on landscapes in contrast to Sue Benner above.

"Evening Wall Shadows" by Linda Beach

Go HERE for her gallery of quilts which includes many trees and lots of colour - the one above is much more muted than most of her pieces.

Helen Godden is an Australian quilter. Her work is predominantly pictorial, with strong design and colour. Lots of free motion quilting is a feature of her work.

"Rainbow Lorikeet" by Helen Godden

Click HERE to see her gallery of art quilts.
Here are a few of my favourites from the Tutor's exhibition  which might inspire quilts from me this year :
Sheena Norquay's lovely quilt pair inspires me to make a seascape quilt :

"Summer and Winter island strips with oystercatchers"
by Sheena Norquay



Jo Dixey is a New Zealand quilter - I love the way she uses fabric. It was hard to get a good angle of this quilt because it is quite large, so see it and more of her work in her gallery HERE.

"Watching" by Jo Dixey

I think I might have to make 1 abstract quilt this year - I just love the colour and composition of this one by Deborah Louie from Australia.

"Medallion #8" by Deborah Louie

I am very lucky that at the end of January I'll be spending 2 days with Karen Stone - love her work and a good way to start the year with fabric and colour design ideas. This is her tutor's quilt, but not one of the classes I will be doing.

"Reptile wisdom" by Karen K. Stone

I particularly love the circles in the border

There will be more posts about Symposium so I can share other exhibition quilts. I also shopped!...More soon.

LB 2015 : The Artful Wordsmith

Life Book week 3 was a lesson with Joanne Sharpe. If you click HERE you will link to all my postings about what I've learned with her previously. So this was a lesson of familiar techniques but great to be reminded. The lesson was to illustrate the phrase "Art feeds your soul". For obvious reasons, I had to change my phrase slightly ;-)

This is worked on watercolour paper. I wanted to reflect my NZ, so first I added ferns by using a sponge to apply stamp pad through a stencil. You can see here I added pen lines to give my own details

I drew my own flowers, similar to those I learned from Alisa Burke's class. Here's a shot of how line drawn flowers are transformed by watercolour

click on any photo to see it larger

Of course a big part of this lesson was about lettering

and if you saw my last Life Book lesson, you will have seen that I want to include stitch in every project, so I finished by framing this piece by machine stitching with metallic thread

I just love my wee fantail stamp - one of my favourite New Zealand native birds. And I'm not usually very good at leaving white space, but managed to leave the border on this one.

You can see all my posts about Life Book HERE and I've created a Flickr album for all my Life Book projects HERE.