Serious Fun

Seriously. Fun is serious stuff.

This little tin came into our lives as the packaging for a rally car drive gift certificate. And no, it wasn't me doing the rally driving! I leave that thrill seeking stuff to the man in my life (the one I married - though the ones I gave birth to are all up for that as well, as I think about it!) I was, however, quick to grab the tin, and squirrel it away in the studio, because, really...what could be better than to open your traveling art supplies tin and be reminded that what you're doing is Serious Fun? 

There is a group of Serious Fun seekers hanging out here with me on a Sunday afternoon lately... I'm teaching them the basics of art journaling (and art, as well, with a focus on low pressure and low anxiety) and, as is inevitable when one teaches, they teach me things as well. One of the important things I keep discovering is what a great benefit it is for grown up women (and men!) to set aside their responsibilities and obligations for a couple of hours and just muck about and have some fun. To play. They leave looking somehow lighter, and brighter; and seeing that is Serious Fun for me.

This trolley (which my Dad made for me many years ago) has seen duty in my life for all manner of purposes. It's current role is by far my favourite. All those drawers are chock full of inks, sprays, pens, pencils, pastels, paints, stencils, stamps, watercolours, tapes..... so many opportunities for Serious Fun in there; and it can wheel out of the studio and onto the verandah, where all my Serious Fun seeking companions can dip in and share in the fun with me. 

Play is recognised as being critical to childrens development... and there's more and more evidence that it has powerful importance for adults as well. (Check out the writing of Brene Brown if you need  any convincing). I know for sure that I've got more to give and am much nicer to be around if there's been a little play time in my day. How about you? What counts as Serious Fun in your world? I'm always on the lookout for an opportunity to have fun - tell me what works for you!

Art Journaling - It Feels A Bit Like Therapy

 

Does this pile of luscious goodness look like fun to you?

 

 

How about all this snowy, fresh paper and clean brushes?

 

Wheel that trolley out onto my back verandah and into a gorgeous autumn afternoon, and the stage is set for some serious Art Journaling fun.

 

 

A while back, I sent out feelers to see if maybe one or two people might be keen to spend a bit of time here exploring a few art techniques and materials in the safety of their very own Art Journal. While I love where I live, it is a small community, and I thought I might be lucky if I could find any takers. To my surprise and delight - there were nine! All keen to excavate the creativity they hoped was buried in them someplace. 

 

Over the course of three hours, they were introduced to Dyelusions Sprays, Distress Stains, stamps, stencils and all kinds of markers and pens, which they used to create some really fun backgrounds and play with lettering styles. Of course, many of them (OK - most of them) looked a little horrified when I suggested it was time they write - in their own handwriting - in their journals. When I asked how many of them hated their own writing - hands went up all around the table. What I told them in essence, was this:

 

 Every mark we make, every word we write, comes from us. Is us. Our essence cant help but show up in everything we do. Hating our handwriting (substitute voice, thighs, drawing, tummy, crows feet, toes, teeth.... you get the idea) is to hate a unique and authentic part of ourselves.

 

I know we all do it (I am guilty of it often!) But, I'm coming to believe that we have more to give when we give ourselves a break. When we are OK with ourselves and our efforts.

 

 

I reckon they all found the tip of their creative icebergs. Which makes me really excited for next week, when we'll have a play with acrylic paints, try drawing faces and dedicate a page to our Inner Critics. I've named mine "Muriel" (apologies to any wonderful and beautiful Muriel's out there...) and she can be a real shrew. Should be fun to share our stories and see the portraits these great girls create of their own versions of Muriel.

 

Zentangles as Therapy

A while back, we talked about Zentangle here on the blog. I shared with you how much I enjoyed this, as it legitimised my incessant need to doodle!

Recently, I was invited to share some Zentangling fun with the residents and clients of our local HACC (Home and Community Care) - mostly more 'mature' members of our community - which was great fun. So  engaging, in fact, that the camera sat idle in my basket until there was just one lady left. So, I grabbed it and shot a few quick photos. I was even fortunate enough for one of the staff to think to suggest she take a photo, so that I might be in one for a change! Jenny and I are having some kind of deep and meaningful discussion about her efforts by the look of this...

My friend Kathy had asked me along; this lovely piece of work belongs to her.

For the uninitiated, Zentangling is really all about making complex looking marks from simple, repetitive lines - and while you're at it, achieving a very centred, almost meditative state - it quiets the mind, slows down your pulse and breath rate, and is generally a feel good kind of thing to do. It was wonderful to watch the participants get lost in their paper and pens, and suspend, even for a short while, their concerns with their health and for some, a focus outside of constant pain.

I loved having the opportunity to join our HACC team for this activity...They are a great bunch of women who care so very much about the welfare and well-being of the people in their care. (Just a few of them are pictured here: L to R. Jenny, A HACC client, experiencing some challenging health issues at the moment; Kathy - my special friend  responsible for me joining them - thanks Kathy! Jenny, who has been the face of HACC in this community for the longest time, and Diana, the activities officer - who also happens to be one of the most precious friends a woman could wish for!)

I have long held the belief that art has the power to transform our experience...this activity showed me that even something as simple as doodling within a framework, can have a powerfully positive effect. Will you give yourself twenty minutes today to create something (even something as small and simple as a doodle) for no other reason than your own well being? I hope so. Today, I'm hoping, you'll take care of you. 

Soluble Film Scarf Making (Or, it's so cold my brain can't think of a more 'catchy' title for this post!)

Last Saturday, a handful of lovely ladies (including Meredith, here)  gathered at the CWA hall in Theodore and made scarves. Beautiful, colourful, snazzy, yummy scarves!

The scarf workshop is my favourite one to teach - everyone finishes at least one scarf in a day, they are always really excited with the results of their days work, and participants seem never to fail to have fun. What's not to love?!

I mean, how happy does Melinda look here? And that smile of hers made me extra happy, because she lost pretty much everything in the floods earlier this year. Her enjoyment heightened all our enjoyment.

Andrea showed everyone how to tie her "Andrea Knot", which is quite possibly the coolest way to tie a scarf that I have ever seen.

Thanks to all the gorgeous girls who shared their Saturday with me, and let me take their photos so I could share the day with everyone here. While I know you all enjoyed the day, I'm not sure that you will ever know how much I enjoy sharing these techniques with you all... your delight in the works you create is infectious and exhilarating!

Step by Step Scarf Lesson 2

Yesterday, we stitched lots of ribbon onto some soluble film as the first step in creating a scarf. Today, thanks to my young friend Andrea, you get to see me cutting out lots, and lots, and lots of circles from silk fabric (It's possible I was about to topple off my chair from tediousness!)

But, how cute are they?! So, in the spirit of this being a 'lesson' and all...find yourself a couple of lovely fabrics, whose colours sing with your stitched down grid of yarns, and go ahead and cut out a bunch of circles. These are 3 different sizes and the templates I used were the bottoms of : a powdered stock jar, a tiny tea cup and a teeny tiny paint squirt bottle. Please don't ask me how many...I'd have to go dig out the scarf and count them...and numbers just don't make me happy! Trust your own sense of what looks good and what makes you happy...I'm all about making you happy.

Time for a little more stitching. This is my free machine embroidery foot on Bertha, my very old, and very trusty Bernina (poor Bennie - my trusty new Bernina had to go to the doctor for a check up; she's been feeling a bit scratchy lately.) You can use your machines free machining foot - sometimes called a darning foot and the Janome's call it a pogo foot. OR, you could use your ordinary straight sewing foot, and do a bit of straight stitching, throwing in some reverse and a few U turns. Till you get something that looks like this:

What you're aiming for here, is to stitch this darling little circle onto at least two different strands of the yarn underneath. also layer smaller circles over bigger ones and stitch them all in place, quite randomly across the whole scarf.

Time for the fun part! Get thee to the laundry tub, fill it up with cold water (that's what Romeo likes) and send your scarf for a swim!

The Romeo will dissolve, firstly by going kind of cloudy and gluggy (at which point you may feel dismay and panic - but don't! It's all OK!) The best thing is to pop the scarf into the water and nip outside to hang out your washing or fed the cat, or even better, make yourself a cuppa. My point is that you need to leave it to soak and soften and fully dissolve for a while. When you return, your scarf will look limp, saggy and sad. This is good. Empty the water out and run some fresh cold water over your glorious creation to remove any final traces of soluble.

Next - dry your scarf. I opted for a trip to the clothesline and the sunshine (wasn't it a beautiful day?) but, you can drape the darling over the back of a chair inside, or wherever it is you hang damp stuff to dry and drive your family nuts...

The finished product! There are a few straggly ends there that need to be trimmed off, and we're good to go. Have fun creating one of your very own!

Step by Step Soluble Scarf Lesson 1

I have been promising...well, it's time to make good on the promise! Get settled in for part one of your very own soluble scarf lesson!

Begin by procuring some soluble film. There are a number of soluble films on the market, and if you're into research and discovery, you could test all of them to see which ones you like best, or, you can take my word for it that for this particular style of scarf, Romeo is best! I tell you this because it's reasonably heavy (in soluble film terms), tolerates a reasonable amount of humidity in the air and moisture on your hands without turning all gooey, sticky and generally disgusting while you're working on it. It can also handle quite a lot of heavy stitching without tearing - that's not such an issue with this particular scarf, but makes it a very versatile film.

The Romeo is the clear plastic looking stuff in the photo above, it is joined by some hand dyed silk ribbon/yarn, which will be the 'guts' of the piece, and some silk yardage, which will serve as the snazzy details.

Begin by cutting the romeo into a long, narrow rectangle (pretty much a scarf shape...who would have imagined?!) an inch or two bigger around than you want the finished scarf. If you need to create a bigger piece - just whiz it together with your sewing machine, one piece on top of the other.

 

This little foot is an optional extra. You can achieve the same result by carefully running the yarn under your normal machine foot, but if you have one of these - this one is on a Bernina - your life will be complete!

Now - get sewing! Feed your ribbon/yarn (sorry, I can't decide just what to call it...) through the little opening in your foot and start stitching rows of ribbon down the length of your Romeo.

Keep sewing...These are stitched lining up the edge of the foot with the next row of yarn - no more than a half inch gap between the rows.

OK, now it's time to change direction. The trick with soluble films is to create a net or grid effect, so that when the film is washed out, all your yarns and stitches will be well connected to one another. You'll see up in the top left hand of the photo that instead of cutting the yarn and starting again, I've just swung it around and left a loop - saves yarn and saves time - and I'm all about saving time! We'll just snip through those little suckers later on.

Here is the piece, all stitched up, it's 'guts' in place...ready for part two, which will involve that delicious looking silk from the first photo.

You'll notice that as it hangs around Audrey's neck, I've left some more spaces between those short runs across the scarf. You can go this way, or you can stick with the even, close together spacings right along...whatever blows your frock up really!

If you're hunting for Romeo (or, like me, live a long way from anywhere you can walk in and buy some), I can share with you that I get mine from Dale Rollerson at the Thread Studio. Dale looks after her customers wonderfully well, and has all kinds of treasures that I can't live without!

Lesson 2 coming up soon!

Teaching - A Wonderful Way To Learn...Blackall Style!

Meet Jill. It's all her fault. She's the one who tracked me down and asked me to do a couple of workshops in Blackall. I have to wonder if it really is OK to get paid for having that much fun! She's also the one who patiently directed me to find her home in the drizzly rain (that took three separate phone conversations, at the end of which, I'm certain she was worried she'd employed a complete fruitcake!...I did struggle with the 'head west ' direction when there was no sun out though! We had a good laugh about it all later...) Jill looked after me SO well! I enjoyed wonderful food and hospitality throughout my stay. My 'flat' at the Cultural Association Centre (which I'll do a post on soon) was very comfortable, and everyone I encountered in this lovely town was remarkably welcoming. There is much to tell you about the trip, so there'll be more photos to follow, including the fabulous sculpture dotted around the town and the great Cultural Centre facility that this creative community puts to excellent use.

While this isn't a great photo, it gives you an idea of the size of the workshop area - this was once the dining room in the days the centre was a student hostel. The girls are busy exploring different mediums, making beads, silk paper, textile bases...we managed to make a lot of mess while they created some very cool little pieces!

Lisa is Jill's daughter. I seem to remember her suggesting she hadn't sewn much...I think I must be mis-remembering, because she powered on and produced a couple of gorgeous scarves on soluble films. The one she's working on here ended up very lacy and light - a perfect summer accessory! (Clever girl, this one.)

In fact, they were all clever girls! Above, Penny and Jenny show off their creations, along with Robyn and Yvonne below... I was fascinated that at the end of the workshop, their scarves - that had been started the afternoon before -  all matched what they were wearing very well!

Jill had finished two scarves by 'modelling' time, and Lisa's lacy one is off drying on a railing while she has her picture taken.

My greatest hope is that these terrific ladies enjoyed the workshops as much as I enjoyed being there!  As is always the case, when I head off to teach people something new, I learn such a lot myself...watching these girls pick up the techniques I was sharing with them, and taking off to use them in their own unique ways was fascinating to me - they instinctively did things that I have never thought to try - like including wool tops in the scarf, that we washed the soluble out of with boiling water! I have always avoided that on the assumption that the wool would felt...Yvonne's didn't, and it created a lovely warm, thicker scarf - perfect for those cold Blackall winters! Of course, we were very careful not to agitate it too much as we washed out the soluble.

Thank you to each of you for your warmth, hospitality, thoughtfulness and interest (including Veronica and Sandra, who weren't available for modelling shots on Sunday afternoon.)

Stay tuned over the next few days for more about beautiful Blackall on the Matilda Highway...home of the Black Stump (which Jill tells me isn't the same black stump, in the same location, that was in the back of the school yard when she was a child!)

Thursday's Country Life...Making Silage

They say a picture paints a thousands words...some of the words that this picture paints for me involve the detail that this man will not happily have his photo taken, so the fact that he's standing here, asking me to snap him in fornt of his forage sorghum crop tells me two things 1. He's pretty proud of his farming efforts and 2. He knew that in order to fit him and the crop in the one image, I'd have to be far enough away from him so as not to see his face! So, if you haven't worked it out...this is "Pa" with his awesome forage crop, which is in the process of being cut for silage...

 A little hard to make out here, but there is a silage cutter (a little along the same lines as a harvester - it's the green thing, spitting out finely chopped forage out the top), and a truck. The silage cutter drives through the crop, chops it off close to the ground, sucks it into it's beastly innards and chops and smooshes the forage plant into little pieces, then spits that out the top, into the bin of the truck, which drives alongside. Here, they are beginning the paddock.

And this is the very last little bit of another paddock. When the truck is full, he whizzes off up the road to the silage pit, where he unloads his bounty...

...and the tractor takes over. Here, the pit is full, so it looks more like a mound! That groovy little tractor has some very heavy weights on it and a nifty hydraulic 'pusher' thingy to move the silage around and pack it down as tightly and evenly as possible. (I think I should contact the contractors and see if they'd like me to write their advertising copy for them - I'm so good with all the correct terminology!). When the pit is full as can be (anytime in the next three minutes after this photo was taken), an enormous heavy plastic sheet is laid over the whole she-bang and held down with loads of old tyres, then you leave it...wait for a while for it to ferment and get all manky...and then it's great cattle feed!

This is how it looks fresh out of the silage cutter...It occurs to me that a photo of it after fermenting and turning into wonder weaner feed would be good...but can I stand the smell? Let me know in the comments if you really need a follow up to this to see how things change (and glean a greater understanding of the word manky)!

I'm off on an exciting adventure next week to teach a couple of workshops in Blackall! There won't be much blog action until I return, but you can be sure that when I do, I'll have lots to show you! I'm really looking forward to heading off on a road trip alone -I don't get much alone time...I wouldn't want alone time all the time, but I love to soak up just a little every so often!  I'm also looking forward to the fun of teaching something I love, and meeting more kindred spirits!

Teaching - A Wonderful Way to Learn!

A couple of weekends ago, I had the great privilege of teaching a workshop to members of BAVA (Biloela Area Visual Artists). They explored making fabric paper and handmade beads.



Here's Gwen - I couldn't resist snapping a shot of her in that delicious light beside the window! She's busy making the coolest bead from nylon lace - wrapped a round a satay stick and zapped with the heat gun to melt and dissolve it into one organic, funky lump! Gwen was once a dental assistant for the dentist I used to see - it was so much nicer to be in her company as an artist!! No drills and suckers...only heat guns and satay sticks!



Meredith and Michelle were cooking up unique ideas for procuring a heat gun of their own! The unanimous decision was that every girl should have her very own heat gun - they are way too much fun to live without! I think there was one going on each of these girls Mother's day lists!



Glenda added the finishing touch of a light rub of gilding wax to her fabric paper...such a beautiful colour!

Come day's end, none of us wanted to go home - there's such a marvellous energy when a room full of people get together to explore, discover and create! And, as always, I found I learned so much from these great women - teaching is a most inspiring way to learn!