New collages

Water lily

Chloe

 

Rose

Today's Trash Art by Nancy

The pickins' were slim today on our daily walk. Everybody is being too neat!

Nancy wanted me to tell you that she cheated and added the angel face.

The rule is that she has to only use what she finds on her walk.

But who's checking?
(Look a little further down to see more of her Trash Art)

Watercolor Workshop with Robin Erickson Oct. 10

I learned a lot in this valuable workshop even though I mistakenly thought it was going to be just a demonstration. So I didn't bring any of the supplies I was supposed to have brought. Luckily, my friend Diane and the teacher loaned me everything I needed. We were supposed to bring something to draw, which of course I didn't, so Robin gave me this photo that was taken in Greece.

First we traced the basic shapes (narrowing them down to about 12) onto a piece of acetate. then we traced this onto tracing paper and transferred it to watercolor paper. The acetate seemed like a superfluous step until Robin said we could use this to try out different paint colors on our painting if we were dissatisfied with any of them.

She uses a palette of just three colors that are the basics to make most colors: Aureolin yellow, Permanent rose, and Cobalt blue. I did my painting with just these colors but she suggested others that could be added; Winsor(Phathalo) green, Quinacridone sienna, Cobalt violet, Sepia, Cobalt teal blue.

After transferring the shapes to the paper she demonstrated adding the paint. She filled in one of the shapes with a brush full of clear water then tipped her brush in one of the colors and added it to the shape. It pretty much just spread out to the edges of the pencil marks. Then she tipped in another color-she suggested trying the complementary color. It looked great. Diane used this technique beautifully on her flower painting. Penny Fedorchak did it on her stem and leaf.

My semi-finished painting:

Nancy's Daily Walk Trash Art

Nancy had a great idea while taking her daily walk with Tootie. She was picking up trash as she walked (like any good green person) when she noticed that it was beautiful! It didn't look so beautiful on the ground but when she sorted it and put it all together it made some great artistic statements.

Order Banar books right here.

Now you can order Banar Designs books here. Aren't you lucky?
This book is for all you stitchers out there. It's got a lot of cute retro designs that you can iron on to your fabric and start stitching using the easy instructions. When you click on the picture you'll get a larger view.

One of our vintage linens becomes the cutest lampshade, thanks to an etsy seller- sassyshades

We've always wanted to know what people do with the things they buy from us on etsy. Finally one of our buyers sent us this photo. This started out in life as a lovingly embroidered tea towel.  We hated to part with this. It was so well done and impossibly cute.

But we would have never done the work involved in making this darling lampshade. The shop name is sassyshades and you can see more of her lampshades at

etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=7101024

Five Peppers by Barbara Finwall, age 10

My favorite childhood book was The Five Little Peppers. I liked it so much that at 10 years old I decided to write my own Pepper book. I guess I thought by changing the title to Five Peppers it would be alright. I just found my slightly plagiarized version. It really made me laugh. If you read it you'll see that I must have been kind of a weird kid!  

Not much grieving in this family. I think Grandma would have liked it that way.