little joys

it's been a busy week, filled with little joys

 open windows, spring cleaning, working in the garden, long walks, finishing some things, starting others, baby cuddles and playing cars with a three year old expert 

I worked on a thread colour study for this vignette of nature finds... thread-wrapped cards and a small colour and texture study of French knots and pin-pricking 

I've been enjoying my closer look at nature these past few weeks

it feels so good to be out in the sunshine and really paying attention to what's happening as the world wakes up from it's winter sleep

what I've found the most interesting is how the plants that have died over the winter look... at first glance they seem to all be variations of the same golden brown but there is actually a full spectrum of neutral colours - beautiful, soft versions of ivory, wheat, beige, tan, brown and black with lots of deep brown-reds in the mix

and don't get me started on the textures!

as well as all that, in my continuing desire to improve my sketching skills I have embarked on a new (somewhat) daily practice

three 5-minute sketches per day

(I say somewhat daily as I've missed two sessions this week thanks to the aforementioned baby and toddler)

here is the first set of three, along with the corresponding plant material  

I am loving doing this - it's short, absorbing, and now that I have a few of these behind me I am already noticing some differences

I'm starting each drawing immediately after setting the timer - no hesitation in where to begin at all, just pencil to the paper and go

the lines are getting less precise, more fluid

I'm getting quick enough that I have time for shading, adding texture and even some of the shadows now and again

I'm not wishing for an eraser

(I won't let myself use one)

I'm told if I keep at it for a month I'll be amazed at how much I will improve

a good week then... how about you?

what's new in your corner?

water, water, everywhere...

water everywhere, even in the sky... it's rained for days

and days, and days

a good reason to stay inside

ideas have been flowing and I'm having the best of times

working with water on a few fronts has me approaching it in a variety of ways though the common subject is certainly driving a commonality in the work

I thought it might get confusing but it's all rolling around in a big circle with ideas building on each other, one feeding another and so on

here are a few things I worked on this past week:

tracing the piece of driftwood that has inspired most of what I've been doing, I thought it looked like the outline of a lake or a map... and since the marks on the wood map out the journey from tree to what I hold in my hands, I added some of the marks using blue thread, to make them look like rivers... more to come with maps

working with layers, a printed photo of the wood, torn almost in half, chiffon stitched with a single strand of embroidery

I'm so pleased with where this is going - today I'm stitching the outline of the part I tore away and adding marks in the empty space - I did this overlay as a trial so it's a bit small and ragged - I'll need to make a proper one in the days ahead

here I've cut out the shape of the driftwood and now considering what to put behind me

the small sample to the right is one from the Insight Creative Sketchbook Challenge (which I am still chipping away at) - it was in the unfinished pile and last night whilst doing the last of the French knots I thought how much it reminded me of water and wave foam so I added a few straight brown stitched to look like driftwood - now I'm thinking strips like this might be interesting

the sample is now mounted on the sketchbook page where it belongs

one more thing done!

and a view of the whole page

I might add more notes, or I might just leave it - I find mostly these things speak for themselves though I did make a note of the brown thread colour as I really liked it and hate trying to figure things out down the road

and finally, here are some of the results of my first time gelli-printing

so, so much fun!

this first one was done by stamping off the excess paint from a stamp I carved of a frond-type plant I saw down at McGuire Lake last week

with black ink and dark blue paint - quite a grunge effect but I like it a lot

and a blotchy one

it feels good to be this engaged in creativity... it's been a long dry spell for me and this week, when things really took off I finally, fully realized just how bad it had been

nice to be on the other side...

noticing...

"notice what you're noticing"

I read that in book lately, I think one by Ann Blockley

I just googled it to see if I was right but it seems it's a fairly common mantra as the list of references was long

suffice it to say it's good advice, especially when one is trying to figure some things out

seems I've been noticing water, and for a long time now

as I scroll through the stored photos on my laptop water appears over and over again... the southern lakes and rivers of the Yukon,  "The Little Lake" here in Salmon Arm, The Bow River in Calgary, a black-brown creek in Tillicoultry, Scotland, the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Brittany, the English Channel at St. Malo, lake Windermere in the UK and on and on it goes

working with water as a theme began in earnest last year when I purchased a book on Japanese book-binding, which stemmed from a desire to upgrade my book-binding skills that developed during an online course on the history of book-binding in Japan that I had enrolled in after reading about the history of making paper which I started researching after learning about weaving with paper from reading a blog post referenced by an instagram post... 

that's how things happen in my world

the purpose of the box is to create a receptacle for a series of small books I want to make on the subject of water, but the box cover has taken a back seat since late summer

I finally got back to it this week

 if you remember, I was stitching feather stitch in a rather fragmented way... as I was familiarizing myself with the project I realized that it was flowing in the wrong direction for how I want it to appear when the box is constructed so I took it all out and began again

as I worked on it I was thinking that if done in a detached way, with a shallow curve, they could emulate the ripples on a lake - I'm very intrigued by that idea but did not have the heart to take these out yet again so that idea is being worked at on a different cloth

keeping it simple, at the other end some ferns - other than that it's only a bit of kantha stitching here and there, just enough to keep the layers from shifting as well as to add a little texture 

in other water work, I have been inspired by a photo I took of the Yukon River in 2018... sun glinting on steel-coloured water

{these are the little ripples I'm thinking of}

below is my initial stitched sample (done before the ripple inspiration hit me) along with a selection of silk fabrics that match the colours in the photo

{the stitched sample was also in last week's post but here I've pressed it flat with an iron to try and make the folds sharper, more like chop)

and then I thought about lake water and the trees that grow along the shore that eventually become the driftwood I love so much

it's been dull and dreary here with a lot of fog so I have been hunkered down inside working quietly on these small samples, feeling my way along, letting thoughts whirl and coalesce only to break apart again and send down other pathways 

the fog finally lifted one day last week and the sun was a very welcome sight - no staying inside!

I walked down to the Little Lake and though the snow was all gone, the ice was still on the lake... whilst trying to get a closer look at some cattails, I noticed branches from the willow trees that were caught in the ice, creating patterns that reminded me of free-form letters

tree-form letters?

within and without, partially submerged, frozen in layers, a range of colour and definition... it was absolutely fascinating to look at

I'm heading back down there tomorrow to see what it looks like now but I have these images, plus a few more, and they are enough to set me off on a new round of investigations and sampling

this has excited me beyond measure, like nothing has creatively in a very long time

I had thought this betwixt and between landscape would have nothing interesting to yield inspiration-wise but I could not have been more wrong

and so, water it still will be

or should I say "still water it will be"

however I say it, I've a feeling I'm just at the edge of all there is to see

and just beginning to grasp all there is think

**if you subscribed to my blog by email the platform is no longer supported so I am unable to offer that option... all I can suggest is bookmarking this as a "favourite" which will give you one-click access, and if it helps, I am trying to post on a schedule which for now is every Saturday

 (which means sometimes on Sunday)

trying...

I missed posting last weekend, and very nearly missed posting on this one

events of the world have had me in their grip and while they still do, I am making an effort to look beyond what fills my head and heart and try to spend some time each day on things that are absorbing and also have the capacity to remind me there is still good in the world 

nature does that so beautifully

I have been walking outside again, almost daily... it's a neighbourhood type of walk, through residential streets, alongside farmland, past an elementary school and a short zig-zag through a small park tucked into the middle of an extra-large block... all of these things remind me of the good there is and the children spilling from the school, as children do everywhere, give me hope and a much-needed smile as their chatter fills the air

I'm in the midst of a couple of online classes and I'm working with the same subject in both of them, Marsh Lake, with each course feeding the other even though the work I'm doing in each is quite different

you've seen work from the one with Karen Ruane (Contemporary Embroidery), the little collages...

the other class is hosted by Fibre Arts Take Two and is taught by Tara Axford, a mixed-media artist in Australia

Tara gathers leaves, twigs, flowers and such during her walks near her home, calling them pocket-finds (when I was young we called them pocket treasures) and then she arranges them in wonderful vignettes

the coursework progresses from doing that to colour extraction which is the stage I'm at right now and though all the other class participants whose work I have seen did theirs using apps on their smartphones (the course is mixed media, namely painting and collage), I have started with thread... of course

but I'm getting ahead of myself...

here's my first pocket find - it was still the dead of winter ten days ago, with lots of snow on the ground so all I found was some rosehips from last fall, a fallen bit of evergreen and some birchbark

but when you look closely at things it's amazing the colours you can find...

my sketchbook just arrived so I'll be sticking everything down soon and adding thread numbers

I'm also doing a cloth version of the wraps using my hand-dyed fabrics and tomorrow I'll tackle another  with watercolour paint

I like this all very much but it's rather Christmassy and I want Marsh Lake so I tried again, this time using dried flowers and grasses I picked up north a few years ago

a bit of dried plant from the roadside the other day, a shell from Marsh Lake and a pice of birchbark from here in the Shuswap that has been glued to bit of painted watercolour paper... a tiny pink flower and wild grass, all from the Yukon

these are the colours of the lake... the water, sand, trees, wild roses... they're all here, except the greens

this vignette isn't what the work itself stems from though it will hold influence - in colour, shape and texture

and in the meanwhile...

in Karen's class I've been working with driftwood... thinking of it's journey from living tree to what I hold so gently in my hands

a close-up of one piece yields wonderful marks and texture

I doodled them on paper to get the patterns into my head

and then I doodled them on cloth

they look like ancient writing, which I suppose in a way they are

has the water revealed the story of the wood... or does it write it's own on the once smooth surface after the bark has slipped away?

a bit of paper with French knots... a sprinkling of sand

thinking about driftwood always has me thinking of water so I tried some textural stitching to emulate the ripples of the sand underwater

this first version is on cotton with a silk chiffon laid on top - the cloth is a mottled beige and the silk a blue-gold in the softest, muted colours of lake water

the next one is the same silk chiffon laid on top, the underneath is pale gold silk cloth, again gathered with kantha stitching to create the ripples

next was a dark blue silk chiffon, gathered irregularly with tiny stitches to look like choppy water and tiny bits of lace stitched here and there to look like wave foam

I've stitched that to a small piece of beautiful waxed blue art paper a friend wrapped a gift in

the paper underneath was one I painted last year, a cardboard tube dipped in ink and "pounced" onto the paper... the little dots from all the splatter remind me of sand

lots of small stitch experiments, quickly done to catch the thought... tomorrow I start taking them further

and so I keep on trying

there's a lot of that going on in the world right now