Art, Art and More Art

Last weekend was pretty wonderful. While I had some things to accomplish like laundry, cleaning up the house, getting the car inspected, and so on I was able to sleep in a little on Saturday, finish a good book and then hang out with some good friends and create awesome cards.  My friend Marcy is a card making guru. I don’t know where she comes up with the ideas for each card but they pretty amazing. One of my favorites is her hand carved/made godzilla stamp.  A bunch of us met ate great food and made the cards you see below. I love these get togethers. I just wanted to keep on creating.

My creative juices carried over to the week. On Tuesday evening instead of coming home after work and running I took a nap and then got up and searched for a piece of wood that I had laying around to start working on an art piece idea I had.  When at my friend’s house for the card party I saw a piece of artwork on my friend’s wall, took a picture of it and used it for inspiration.  My student worker has been “bugging” me for a while to receive a “Casey Original” piece of artwork as inspiration.  

I used this painting I saw that my friend purchased from an artist at the Cornhill Festival.  I found a piece of new pine wood in the basement and used that as my canvas.  I gessoed the wood with a few good coats and then using white paint, I used a few others colors and some water and created the base of the painting.  I took some stamps to add texture to the piece and then used a blow dryer to dry everything quickly.  I took a couple of images I found online of leaves/branches and a bird and cut them out. I added black paint and then pressed them on the canvas.  I rubbed the cut outs on and then pealed off. It was a spotty transfer so I took a brush and gently applied more black paint on to touch up the images.  I used block lettering stamps to put on the quote to finish up the piece.  Total project time 1.5 hours. Cost nothing as I had all supplies. I love the end result and I think my student worker with like it too.

The creative juices continued into my AT groups at work.  The directive for group members this week was to depict something/what inspires you.  I liked this quote I found about being yourself. I used tissue paper and decoupage to plaster an art board with tissue paper. I used a blow dryer to dry it. Then once dry I took pages from an hilarious book I found at the library sale earlier in the week.  I cut an owl image with one of the pages and then used the other pages to create where I would eventually put the quote. I adhered with decoupage.  I used my letter stamps to put the quote on. Then with the owl I used acrylics, watered them down and painted it. Once dry I used a permanent marker to outline the owl and the outside edges of the quote pages.  Overall I like the painting. Not sure what I’m going to do with it. Probably give it to someone who wants it. :)

While visiting with my parents I helped my mom make a doggie birthday cake for our family dog fatty Patty. She got this batter from a neighbor. It was pretty dense. I added the peanut butter frosting and the mini doggie biscuits.  Fatty Patty appeared to like her cake. She scarfed it up pretty quickly! :)

Winter Break and Creating...

While on winter break vacation visiting my sister in South Carolina and having a house full of my family I still found some time to create. I made a pair of baby booties for a good friend of mine who is having a baby in January. I used smaller knitting needles this time and yet while my stitch is tighter my booties are still bigger than anticipated. :) I think I will need to look for a different pattern the next time around.

I also worked on starting a new small journal/sketchbook.  Since I discovered during last semester's art therapy groups that I enjoy creating on a smaller scale as I've found I'm more likely to find the time in my busy schedule to create if I'm working on a smaller scale with some easy/quick materials. I brought a package of new ink gel pens (which I ended up being slightly disappointed in the lack of color options in the package and the fact that the black pen stopped working after 3 images) with me because I wanted to have the quick materials at my disposable.  Using ink pens I created the following images. I seem to be in a reflective state lately. Perhaps it's the time of year...

So the arm knitting infinity scarves project planned with my mom, sister and me didn't go quite as planned. My sister had no interest in it. I created one and then started another one and did it along with my teaching my mom how to do one. She struggled a bit but eventually by the end caught on. The material we used was suppose to make 4 scarves but only made 3 with a little left over and that was combining all four yarns and mixing to make the third one.  We discovered that using only 4 stitches across would have worked the best and then ending them sooner even though they may have looked short because we think they will stretch. This might have then allowed us to make 4 scarves out of the material.

My nieces crib (a hand me down from her 3 cousins that have used the crib over the years) ended up breaking a bit in the rallying portion over the past couple of months. While my dad was down visiting  my sister he and my brother-in-law engineered a way to rig up the crib to be sturdy enough to hold my niece for the next 1.5 years. Of course it means it doesn't look the prettiest so my sister was wanted to buy a new one. Unfortunately cribs apparently are made to have railings that slide down anymore (due to a safety hazard- that I'm not in agreement about). So all new cribs don't slide down on the one side leaving it extremely difficult if you are short (like me) or have neck/back injuries (like my sister) to lift a baby up and down in the crib.  I volunteered to try and spruce up the new wood work on the crib with a one of the kind paint job. My sister and I headed to Michael's and got some art materials. I could have done something intricate but we didn't want me to spend the rest of the time during my visit working on it.  I finished it within about 2 hours worth of work. Suggestion- don't use paper/cardboard stencil letters! They stick and the paper peels off with them. Overall I think it turned out pretty cute and spiced up the crib.  If I had my way I would have sanded down the entire crib and done a cool antique/chalk like finish on the crib to begin with. But that would have had to have been done before my niece was born and no one thought of it then since the crib wasn't broken. The true test will be if my sister notifies us that she got a new crib within a month. ;)