When It Rains

This weeks meeting was unique in that I walked over in the pouring rain and left in snow. That's been the theme for the weather the last few weeks though! Here's hoping we eventually escape into spring and summer.

Because I'm eternally optimistic, I brought my bird project - a customer requested bird shaped, flower covered beads which are in progress here (finished pics here):


Louise was showing off one of her projects from the Quilts Canada convention she attended in Calgary last week. The book has pages with all sorts of techniques in it:


Mia was working on her needle felting. She brought along her first completed sculptures, little tribal or caricature type figures. From wool. Very neat.

Later she was taking advantage of the machine that combs wool Laurie brought in to play with. If you think it looks like a torture device, you're not the only one:

Jean was working on a transfer based collage, slowly washing and rubbing off the paper backing from the transfer that she'd applied to a prepped canvas. You can see it in progress here (the white parts of the picture transfer clear, so the canvas colour shows through):


And we have Laurie's wood fairy with the sparkles - I should say, Angelina fibres - mixed in with her outfit:

We Were Quiet This Week

Only four of us showed up this week so it was a fairly quiet meetup. We all had our projects to entertain us, too. Laurie had her little woodland faerie, of course, and was busy figuring out her clothes. Here she's felting the leaf like portions of her skirt.



I brought a batch of my smaller pendant style beads and turned them into keychains. I long ago learned that not everyone can be talked into buying jewelry, even something as casual as a single pendant style necklace. So I offer keychains made with the same art beads. My grandmother, for example, wouldn't let me make her necklace (I'm not offended, she only wears her wedding and anniversary rings) but I made her a keychain. My mom has several, some as purse jewelry. And the nifty little tool roll in the left of the picture is a crayon roll from Tamara of Barefoot Tams.



Mia is doing much better with her needle felting than I did with my attempts! She's jumped right into sculpting it. Her little head has such personality already and she was beginning work on the body when we finished up for the day.



Marg was fighting with her watercolours to get the perfect setting sun sky. Eventually she decided indigo was the way to go. You can't see it in the photograph but she is working from an older photo of children silhouetted against a sky with a setting sun in it.


Friday, April 30th a few of us - Cindy and I - will be at the Craft Fair and Flea Market held from 12 til 8 at the Legion in Swift Current. I'll have some of my work there but I'm also going to take advantage of the flea market / garage sale type venue to destash some of my extra supplies! This is only because I need to make space for the next shipment of new clay...

The Best Part About Making Things

The best part about making things (and talking about making things, teaching making things and selling things I've made) is that I get to see how other people are using what I've made, taught or sold or what they're doing themselves and how it's progressing. For example, here are a couple of pieces from a class I taught last weekend at the gallery that I brought to show the 'gang' this Tuesday:


Over here we can see Cindy poking through a stack of baubles Pearl brought us from her cleaning efforts. In the back of the photo you can see a little of Pearl's ongoing rug-hooking project.


This is a pic of Mia trying out needle felting after she confessed an interest to Laurie last week. She's doing it much better than I did by the way. She doesn't seem to be stabbing herself which was the result of my first efforts!


And here we have Marsha working her way through this tiny, intricate bit of needlework. In the background you can see Marg working on our project of the day: conquering Photoshop Elements. I'm not exactly sure if we won or not though. In the lower right of the picture you can see a few of the little heads that Mia sculpted from Paperclay.


Laurie's fairie is getting outfitted in needle felted clothes, bit by bit. Here's our weekly glamour shot, against a backdrop of Louise's scarves: