The Daily ATC Challenge: Day 12

Day 12 of the daily ATC challenge will be:  SNOWMEN

Here’s what I came up with:

PRANG watercolor on 140lb Artist’s Loft watercolor paper

The ATC Challenge: Day 3

Day 3 of the ATC challenge’s theme is: CLOCKS

That’s right, another new year sort of a themed picture. Maybe draw the alarm clock you’re dreading on Monday morning or a famous clock tower you’ve always enjoyed seeing. Or a cuckoo clock. Or a grandfather clock. Or a watch or a sundial. Even your cell phone could count! Just draw, paint, or sketch a time-keeping device. Here’s mine:

no.2 0.5mm lead mechanical pencil on sketchpad paper

Multimark marker and PRANG watercolor on sketchpad paper

I really love most of the marker and paint alarm clock. While the bells and ringer up top leave a bit to be desired, I adore the clock face and feet particularly. I’m thrilled with the style as a whole. It feels like it would be wonderful for  children’s book illustrations or possibly some note cards which I could have printed. I will definitely continue to experiment with this marker and paint combined media on more cards this year. Interestingly enough, all the colors used on this clock were directly from the paint pots in my watercolor set. I didn’t do any color mixing here and I wonder if those pure colors are part of what makes it feel so clean, crisp, and perfect for children’s books or even printing onto quilt fabric.

Daily Art Challenge!

For Christmas I received a sketchbook with 500 drawing prompts. I love it and am working my way through it. As cool of an idea as this book is, it falls a bit short of what I want for daily artistic practice and inspiration.

• I feel constrained by the variable size spaces given to each prompt.
• I struggle working effectively with the spine in the way. I’ve only done two drawings in the book and already I’ve torn the first two pages away from the binding along the top of the spine.
• The prompts are on both sides of the pages too so the graphite transfers between drawings. Since the paper is thin, you can also see the drawings through one another a bit. I can only imagine how much worse it would be if I were using ink!
• The paper is not suitable for any wet media. I definitely need to work on my pencil drawings, but there really isn’t much in the way of media options for this book.

So that got me thinking, why can’t I do something better? And couldn’t it be free for everyone instead of requiring a specific sketchbook? Of course! For Inktober 2015, I used artist trading card size sheets of paper cut from some leftover cardstock I had. I loved working with that size sheet. It’s not too intimidating, and if I wrecked a page, oh well! It’s not like I’m throwing away good art supplies nor spending too much of my day laboring over a picture I’m just not really feeling, you know?

So that’s what I’ll do. Instead of just a month of ink sketches as for Inktober, I’m going to do a whole year of prompts. I’ll use ATC size sheets of whatever sort of paper or board is most appropriate to the media I want to use that day. There’s super heavy oil & acrylic canva-paper or just plain printer paper. There’s textured papers for charcoal and pastels and glossy smooth papers for markers.

Any paper, any media in an ATC-sized piece of artwork. The goal will be just to make a little bit of art every day for a year. To step outside our comfort zones. To practice our skills. To learn new ones. To stop hiding behind excuses and let loose the artist we all have inside, even if just for as little as 5 minutes a day. Stay tuned for the details tomorrow morning as we start a year of art! Each day will include a prompt to get you started thinking about what to do and a sample or two from Maple Wool Farm.

Ravellenic Games are OVER

Whew. It’s been an insane couple of weeks for me with the Ravellenic Games in full swing. I challenged myself to get all 34 unique medals this year and I just barely made it! I was so busy spinning, knitting, crocheting, and weaving though that I’m quite a bit behind on posting. This means one thing for my readers: get ready for the deluge of awesome projects.

I’m going to kick off with my absolute favorite project of the games this year, my mini notions bag! You got a bit of a preview in the Rainbow Yarns post earlier. I posted those pictures of the yarn with the new electric spinning wheel right before the insanity started and I was challenged by a friend to get all 34 medals. So what did I do with this yarn? Well, not quite yet!

I didn’t want to use just rainbow yarn for a project because I’m just not very into the bright and crazy colors. My best friend teases me relentlessly about my ever so boring love of earth tones. So I went up to my favorite local fiber and yarn shop, Table Rock Llamas, and picked up some jet black merino wool. I quickly spun this into a 2 ply fingering weight yarn. It spun up fast on the new espinner and when a friend was helping me wind it into a center pull ball, we both marveled at how even it was as it flew through the tensioning fingers at high speed. I don’t think I’ve ever spun so much yardage so evenly, much less so quickly. There was approximately 125 yards from 0.8oz of fiber and I used every last drop.

For my project I opted to use the new black yarn with the rainbow crepe yarn. I set aside the rainbow light fingering yarn from the previous post for hexipuffing of course. How could I not? Here’s that crepe yarn again made from rainbow wool and two plies of polyester machine embroidery thread.

My best friend, K, was visiting the night I did this and so she helped provide extra hands to warp my four harness table loom with the black handspun yarn. We learned a very important lesson that night. Never, ever warp a loom with energetic yarn. You’ll be wrestling with it for hours trying to get the kinks out and tension applied evenly! Still, eventually we succeeded and I began weaving a plain tabby cloth immediately working with a shuttle of the rainbow crepe. I made this particular shuttle from lacewood last year for a specific project, hence the absurd length. But it was the only one I could find and I wanted to weave right that second. If I’d had patience, I’d have soaked and possibly weighted the black warp too! Or, you know, put on something other than jammies for the picture.

Before long I had a beautiful finished fabric but more space to go on the loom before running out of warp. Since it was handspun warp I felt extra horrible about wasting it and spent a while glancing frantically about my room trying to find something I could weave across my black warp to make a useable finished fabric.

I settled on a mini skein of solid black aran weight handspun and a second mini skein of DK weight black and gold thread with sequined yarn, both spun at Distaff Day this past January. I quickly worked them up for a bit in a striped pattern until I lost my patience and just had to cut my rainbow fabric off the loom.

From here it went right into the bathroom sink to be hand felted before being stretched out to dry. Given our difficulties warping the highly energetic black, it was a rather surprisingly flat and even fabric that wasn’t trying to curl up on itself. I had expected it to skew like the bias that forms in knits with energetic yarn worked flat.

I spent a day agonizing over how to cut up my fabric. I finally settled on three rectangles to make three little bags, a black and gold coin purse, a small rainbow notions bag, and a large project or double-pointed needle storage pouch. All three would have cotton liners and zipper closures.

Since I was trying for all the medals and the multiple bags would have all earned just more duplicates of the same medals, I didn’t finish them all. Each woven fabric has been sewn into the outer bag and the lining fabric for each liner cut. I did completely finish the bitty rainbow notions bag though and I couldn’t be more pleased with the result.

At about three-and-a-half inches square, it’s just the right size for a tape measure, stitch markers, a package of yarn needles, and a bit of lifeline thread – you know, just the knitting bag basics! It’s my first ever handwoven from my own handspun. I just love running my hands over the lightly felted fabric.

This was also my first ever bag with a zipper and I’m thrilled at how nicely that came out. I didn’t have any directions or idea what I was doing. I just made it up as I went along and it was so successful I’ll definitely line bags that way in the future too!

Keep an eye out for a bunch more posts loaded up with wonderful finished objects from my 2014 rainbow of Ravellenic projects!