Shimmying through life with needles and thread…
A possibly recurring series of cool needlework things I find on the web.
I found this on an old post on Craft recently and was just amazed at the lengths artists will take things. 
It’s kind of cool, though. Go look and then tell me what you think. Embroidery on Toast? Cross stitch on cereal? Cameos made out of oreos (OK, those are pretty cool…)
The artist is Cayce Zavaglia, and her work is amazing.
I’m going back to nursing an ear infection now.
New Elmow on Wednesday!
In the “How to doodle” post way back when, I examined how I doodle around geometrically, creating geometric designs, subdivided and filled with yet more shapes. That method can be done using dice for inspiration.
My organic doodling is less structured – take a scribble – any scribble – on paper or digitally and then expand on it.
First Doodle Step
Finished and titled doodles. Click to enlarge.
There are no rules in doodling – and it’s about playing, not “real” art.
Blue is one of those strange colors… Where does it end and indigo begin? In Rainbow, blue was always light, and indigo dark, but it’s more than that. Indigo should have a more violet hue. But we’ll get to indigo.
This week, it’s blue. Which is almost unfair, since so much in my world is blue. When the EO and I got together, we both a bit surprised to find that we also shared a love of blue and silver.
So anyway. Blue things. I wanted to include a photo of the Carolina sky, but the day I went to take the photo the clouds rolled in, and it looked like Seattle!!!
Next week… Indigo… blue or not?
In photography, depth of field refers to the distance between the camera lens and the object to be photographed so that the subject remains in focus. When you change the depth of field you can decide whether the subject or the background has more clarity. It’s an advantage in SLR cameras that you can play with this.
Block one with many (not all) seams stitched!
Recently I have been focusing my depth of field on backgrounds in my art. Simple is beautiful. but as I discover some of the more detailed and deep layering in mixed media art I want to figure out how to apply that to my tixtile work. A while back I took Sharon Boggin’s Sumptuous Surfaces class — which set me on this path. This year I am taking her Encrusted Crazy Quilting to continue this line of thinking. What better format for adding this kind of depth than crazy quilting? I stitch slowly, so I can’t promise you quick results on my original blocks (though I seem to be moving faster than I originally expected!)
In addition to the quilting class, I took Kelly Kilmer’s Prompt a Day mixed media journaling class last month. Can’t justify the time this month since I havent’ done all the prompts from LAST month yet! But what I’m finding is that the more layered the background, the sharper, and more prominent the focal image appears — a way of adjusting the depth of field in hand-made art as well as photography. This should be an interesting experiment.
I highly recommend sidestepping out of your normal media choice and play for a while. The results to your focus may surprise you.