Something New

Yesterday I told you about making Valentines for ourselves in my mixed media class at my local AC Moore craft store. You can read about it here. I took this and after a lot of persistence and patience I was able to get it in to this. This is a very cheap embroidery hoop. $1.99 cheap. I'm surprised it did not snap. Brown paper is not thin. I will finish the canvas and paint the hoop black. And you can use different sizes. Instant framing. How cool it that?! I'll show you when I'm finished. Thanks for visiting.

A Valentine to Oneself

I've never particularly been in to Valentine's Day for many reasons, but when I led my mixed media workshop on that Valentine's Day Saturday, I had big pieces of brown paper laid out on the table for each participant. My directions were for us to gesso the page. The next step was for us to draw a large heart in the middle of the page and scribble a letter to ourselves... what ever we wanted to say........... just fill the heart with words, scribble, babble, blah, blah, blahs. Didn't have to be legible. No one was going to read it. The next part was for us to paint, collage, anything to fill in the heart to our heart's content. What they did with it after that was up to them, but my thinking was that they could then use this piece as collage paper in several ongoing projects, such as our altered children's board book. Here are some of those ongoing and completed board books. I am having a blast creating with this small group of women. They are the high light of my week. We are all working at different paces; some have finished their board books and are moving on to altering a deck of cards, and at the same time working on a larger altered book. More on that to come later. Thanks for stopping by.