studio barometer

over the years I have come to notice a few things about myself and the way creativity happens for me

it cannot be forced

the spark can fade quickly if not acted upon

notice the state of the studio

specific to that last one,  there are degrees of disorder in there but sometimes it gets downright messy, referred to as:

 "the piles are piling up"

if the room is neat and tidy not much is happening 

but when every surface has several stacks of paper, thread, cloth, books, drawing materials, half-done things, etc. etc. - that's when I'm in a "full-on, the fire is lit, my hands can't move as fast as my thoughts"state of working

and since my last post the ideas have come thick and fast and my sketchbook has several full pages already... and there are many piles... many

first a straight stitch join, then the staple version

I have a stapler that uses small brass staples that quite lovely but trying to line them up for this was a challenge

I've figured out a method of getting them mostly lined up but it's definitely a challenge

next I trialed several different binding stitch patterns from a book I have to see what they would look like as a design element for joining two pieces of appear together

the "snowshoes" one is a nod to the Yukon

several more I want to work with but then a different idea struck, and yesterday I went back to the silver leaf

I'm on a texture quest, along with a few other ideas, so I started with this...

letting the brush lines show has some interesting possibilities

as does piling on the adhesive medium, building up the layers

bumpy layers to be exact

there are definitely a fair few ideas stemming from this one

and in the midst of all that, when I thought I had parked the ice texture inspiration that had me fired up for much of the winter months, I noticed a few random torn pieces of paper (one of said "piles") that had happened to land in a manner that looked like the ice so before anything got disturbed...

multiple pieces of torn paper laid against a scrap of my ink-painted paper and I was off again

the layers are tacked together with a dab of glue 

next comes stitch

thinking I'm liking this better than the fabric...

and so it goes in my world

the 100 Day poetry project is going strong

35 and counting...

a Winter Haiku for you, in honour of the ice:

unyielding river

with flashes of summer blue

fights the icy grip