Art and Dance (plus an impromptu lament for my favourite TV show)

Good Day, Blogger world!  

     I've got today mostly free, for which I am thankful.  Once again, it's been a while.  I've been keeping on.  Got a few things to share with you:  

These were works I got done on Remembrance Day as well.  Always glad to have time to make art.  I felt like doing more dance-themed work, especially now that I'm having fun with the expressive potential of ink again.  I've been doing a bit of crafting too:  

This is a partially finished coin belt I'm making, hopefully to try out in belly dance class :).  It's a combination of crochet, chain mail, and even a bit of beading with the bells and coins.  If it works out well, I may have to make more.  I've actually been collecting the coins that fall on the floor from other coin belts during the course of the classes, which is where all the coins you see on this belt came from.  Anything to save a few dollars ;).  

     Dance has been a major inspiration for me.  I started when I was 16, and I've tried a few different styles.  Belly Dance has been my favourite, but jazz and ballet classes have also been really good for me.  I like capturing motion and energy in my work, so going through those motions helps a lot.  But beyond that, I just find it beautiful and inspirational.  I'm a huge fan of So You Think You Can Dance, Dancing with the Stars, and America's Best Dance Crew - and I'm still not over the cancellation of So You Think You Can Dance Canada ;_;.  Of course the finale of the last season would have to land right on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, when so many people would be too preoccupied (rightfully so, of course) to tune in >_<.  It just seems so needless to scrap it then.  It's nice to see some of the Canadian choreographers on the American show, at least (heck, they were there before SYTYCD Canada existed).  Anyway, I could go on, but that's not what this blog is about.  

    Dance is a beautiful thing.  That it is connected with music brings together my 3 favourite forms of creative expression.  I've often thought of music as a form of magic.  Few things stir up the emotions and imagination quite as powerfully, and dance is evidence of that.  If I can bring that to my work, all the better.  I try to keep a good balance of dance, music, and visual art in my life (and craft, which I tend to think of as visual art too).  They're good for the soul, and the mind for that matter.  Dance has the added advantage of being good for the body.  That's why it was such a good thing for Canada to have its own SYTYCD >_<.  And I'm at it again.  Sorry!  

    That is all for now.  Glad to have made it back here again, and hopefully I'll be returning before too long (lets say a matter of days rather than weeks).  Until next time, Blogger world :)!  

Extra Post: Blog Consolidation

I've decided to consolidate my blogs into one again.  I tried making a go of a craft book review only blog, but that's slow going right now, and I think I might as well combine the traffic.  I only got 2 posts in, so now is the best time to combine the two.

I'll still review craft books - in fact, I think I'll start reviewing a lot of things, art and craft related.  Maybe I'll splinter the book review blog off again once I really get this one on its feet.  For now though, my life is in a little bit of disarray.  I'll be able to keep up the blogging, though perhaps not in an orderly fashion for now.

First and last posts of the Art Rat Craft Book Review:

Post 1:


Hello Blogger world :)! I am sitting here surrounded by stuff, because I’ll be moving out soon. I hope to sell at least some of it to defray the costs of my new condo. As I pack up, I’m looking at all the craft books I have. Barely used, most of them. I have a lot of craft books, and a lot of craft stuff. I find it very hard to resist buying them, especially when they’re on sale. I guess there are a few reasons why. All those possibilities, all the ideas and little gems to dig up….like catalogues of things I can make exactly as I want them. Somehow I underestimate the time, energy, and (frankly) excuses I'll have to use these books on a regular basis :P. BUT, all that is about to change...

This blog is going to be dedicated to reviewing craft books. I will endeavor to make my reviews as informed and objective as possible – yes, you guessed it – by doing the crafts. Will I become a better craft person from this? Hopefully. Will I become rich? No, but with any luck my growing skills will at least help defray material costs through Etsy, or the occassional craft market. And who knows? I may well end up making something I need every now and again.

I think the most appropriate book to start with will be, “It’s a Wrap – Sewing Fabric Purses, Baskets, and Bowls”, by Susan Breier. I’ve chosen this book for a few reasons. Firstly, I’ve already tried the crafting technique described in this book, and I like it. This will make it easier to keep up with my blogging responsibilities while moving, having done some of the work already and still having supplies left over.

I was fortunate enough to have come across the book as I was wishing I could somehow convert my leftover fabric stash into something useful that wouldn’t take that long to produce. This book offered an unusually fitting solution. It does require many yards of cotton clothesline, and many more yards of sewing thread, but it’s pretty satisfying to be able to cut those old remnants into a pile of strips and watch that pile dwindle away to nothing. In the end I am left with a flexible but relatively solid vessel, and since I'm often looking for things to put other things in, this is actually pretty practical.

I will be documenting my work as I go through this book. I won’t be doing every single design in the book, but I will try to at least do one craft from each section. At the end of the month I will write a full review. In the meantime, I will also use the time between the beginning of the month and the end to review other craft related products. These may or may not be related to the book of the month – they are simply to keep this blog interesting.

I'm starting this blog with the hope that I'll be able to sustain it within my means. I currently have a pretty good surplus of crafting goods, but I will be on a limited budget as to what I can afford, at least at first. Hopefully I'll be able to keep this up for more than a little while. At any rate, I feel like it's worth trying. If you are reading this first entry, thank you kindly for stopping by. Until next time, blogger world! :)

Post 2:


Good day blogger world!

It's been a week of crafting for me.  Between "It's a wrap" and a knitted birthday gift project, I have spent the time being crafty.  Here is a peak at some of the wrap craft work I've been doing:  So far it's an enjoyable book, now that I've got a an excuse to read it in depth.  Still fighting the urge to jump ahead, but as always, it's worth it to read the preamble.  And, the directions - that too.

While I'm on the subject of fabric crafts, I'd like to showcase a site that came to my attention a little while ago, and which I'm still pretty psyched about. It's called Spoonflower, and I love it! It's like the best parts of cafepress and deviantart, in a site that allows you to design your own fabric.  To explain what I mean: like on Cafepress, and to a lesser extent Deviantart, you can upload your designs for use on printed product - in this case, various natural fabrics. There are a number of repeat options (for creating patterns with your designs), and the option to size your fabric design too. Like deviantart, you can follow different designers, giving and receiving feedback on your work. And like both sites, you can have your own shop, where other users can purchase fabric with your designs on it. You do also have the option of keeping your designs private, just for you to purchase, which one may have reason for. I've worked up a modest collections of designs myself, and the samples I've bought have been pretty satisfactory (particularly now, with the new & improved colour system). I should also mention that they have a designer tool built into the site as well, though I havn't actually tried it yet.  Anyway, this is Spoonflower in a nutshell.  Here is a link if you'd like to see for yourself:




 ...and, if you're curious, here is the link to my shop:



I do so like widgets ^_^.  They make a blogger's life much more enjoyable.

This has been the second instalment of The Art Rat Craft Book Review.  Still getting a feel for this project, so I hope you'll bear with me.  I'm already reconsidering how I originally planned to structure this, but I will do my best to keep the content coming, and interesting.  Later bloggerverse!

Checking in Again! Also, Spoonflower :).

Good day blogger world!

I woke up today feeling pretty cranky. Easy to do these days. Wish I had more time, but am coming to terms with the fact that I don't with the new job. Then I took some time to to get some sewing, ironing, and dying done, and now it's not so bad.

I've been using Spoonflower.com lately. More so now that I've had one sale :D! Someone bought a fat quarter of my "Seahorse Herd" fabric, which I hope they will be most happy with. I had already bought a fat quarter myself, so I can show you what it will look like:

Spoonflower has been something of a revelation to me. Combining, as it does, all the things I concnetrated on in art school (painting, drawing, and textiles), the possibilities are tantalizing :P. I'm currently dying the fabric shown above, hoping to create a nice tie-dyed patch for a quilt I'm working on. I'm also dying this piece of fabric,

which didn't turn out quite as even in repeat as I'd hoped:

That is why we buy samples first :/. I've since uploaded a different repeat file, which will hopefully turn out better. I just want to upload a few more files so that I can buy a bulk sample of swatches (better deal). Normally they'd cost $5.00 USD each, but when bought in bulk they can come to as little as $1.20 USD each (Between 16 and 30 swatches). I'm waiting on a few samples as we speak. You have to order samples before you can sell things, and rightly so. Sometimes the colours don't come out right, or the repeat is off (hence the jellyfish sample). I've already got a handful of swatches, which I will be including in a quilt I'm working on right now. I'm pretty excited about this because, no only is it going well, but it's another way I can break down my mountainous fabric stash. I love when leftovers become useful in surprising ways :).

So that's where I am right now. If I can stay productive right now, hopefully I'll get to the point where I can afford to spend more time on my craft. Here's hoping.

Later blogger world!

"Seahorse Herd" fabric on Spoonflower:

http://www.spoonflower.com/fabric/1154880

Lots of things (new structure)

Good day again, blogger world! :)

What's new
I've decided to divide up my subjects so that it's easier to get to everything I want to talk about. My last post was pretty much entirely a news post - but it was big news, as least for me ^_^. In other news, I'm going through a bunch of my old paintings, mostly from 2007, from Advanced Painting, Intro Figure Painting, Largescale painting and Intermediate Painting. Some of them still look pretty good. I've let some auctions go by already, which is a shame, but hopefully something will come up where I can donate a piece or too. I'm having to move them out, you see. This is hopefully just a precursor to moving myself out, but that's a whole other story. I'm not sure all of these are exactly auction or art store material. Some are more fleamarket grade, now that I look at them again. It's sometimes hard to know what to do with the nudes. The ones that don't show faces can be sold (though you have to be careful what you post online), but the ones that do require a little more though. Some of these are just so big I don't know how I'll get them from point A to point B. Hopefully I can get someone else's help with that, if need be. Right now I'm getting them cleaned up (painting the edges and whatever else needs doing). Hopefully I'll be able to sell at least a few, and find good homes for all of them, (or at least a fitting end, in one or two cases).

Shown first here is "Baby Puppet". Possibly the best of the bunch. Always hard to part with those ones, but that's what makes them good enough to sell. It's 4X4', which might make it a little bit harder to find a home for, but we'll see. Below is a study I was doing for a larger work. Unfinished, not really a sale item (though I am noticing it looks alright in this post). I may simply get rid of the canvas and keep the stretcher - always a little bit painful, but sometimes that's what has to happen.






Latest work
Still working on the silk painting. I'm feeling good about how recent experiments have worked out, particularly this sample.





Shop
I continue to do housekeeping in my Cafepress. Going back through the sections of my shop, I can see how my process has become more streamlined. I've learned a few things about what works and what doesn't.

-Wide boarders work well. Having a lot of room between the edge of an image and the subject of an image makes things a lot easier in terms of having room for "bleed" (the sides of the image overtaking the sides of the printable area. Also...
-Images without backgrounds work well too. You can't do this with a jpeg, but you are allowed to upload photoshop files to Cafepress, and that means you can have the edge of the subject be the edge of the image, making the surface of the product itself the background.
-Certain shapes (particularly circular and square designs) work well for printing on multiple items. Particularly because a lot of items have print areas that are specifically circular or square (patches on shirts, for example). Sometimes a square image can be used on circular print areas as well, as long as it has enough of a bleed edge.

One thing I haven't done yet is work with the templates for each product. That will add a whole new dimension to the work, I'm sure.

Before I move on, here is a recent addition to my shop, just posted today:


IB Wine Glass Jewelry Case Inkblot Wine Glass Inkyboots Designs (by Robyn MacKinnon)


The design isn't new, but it's one of my more popular ones. The jewellery case is one of the newer products on Cafepress. A nice little thing. Lends itself to a lot of designs.


Book review







Still getting through "Generation T". My disintegrating pink nightgown is now a pile of pink yarn, which I've decided I will turn into a sachel, with the pocket sewn on the side. Or maybe on the inside, where it won't get ripped as easily. This might be the most versatile idea from this book (T-shirt yarn). One things they should have mentioned, though, is how to pull the individual pieces of yarn so they curl in on themselves, making more convincing yarn. I actually learned this from a youtube video (0:39). It's a little thing, but it makes all the difference.





Haven't tried this particular craft yet, but it looks like fun. The web is such a great resource these days, for everything, but definitely for arts and crafts.

Alright, I'm going to wrap this up here. Gotta love a good long blog post (as long as it has plenty of visuals ^_^). Later blogger world!

Day by Day.....

Hello again blogger world!

I've been able to get a lot of artmaking done lately. It feels really good, and I'm so grateful to be able to do that. I feel like I'm making it work, little bit by little bit. Sometimes it takes a while to get started, but hopefully in the not-to-distant future, I'll have something that looks like a career I can stand on.

The silk painting is going well. Freestyling with it is really fun, but I'm also getting used to the effects I can create and use. Having worked in ink helps a lot. I even tried using brush pen the sketch on the silk/cotton. I think it gave the wash some coppery tinges, though it could be that there was extra paint in the brush. The tinges remind me of the colours you might get from letting a drop of water fall on a black ink mark. More interesting things to explore.








I'm trying an actual silk painting at this point, or at least a first draft of a silk painting I'd like to execute on a larger scale. I feel good about it so far - again, it's acting something like brush and ink, which I've enoyed working with before.






As for the "Generation T" experience, that is inching along too. I've tried the corsette back idea already (the best part of a not exactly successful project...), and I've done a couple of ruching experiments. One of these resulted in an accidental bikini top :P. Not realistically wearable for me, but probably for somebody (my duct tape body double from college wears it pretty well, at least).




At the bottom of this page is another of my favorite T-shirts. Though it is technically a nighty, it's the same kind of fabric, and roughly the same shape, as a T. I wore this until it started fraying off it's seams. Now it's time to move on.

That's probably enough for tonight. It's late - I'm up late watching a Discovery channel program called "Alien Encounters". A hypothetical first contact scenerio. Gets me thinking. What would I do if aliens were coming? It's hard not to think of it as a potential armageddon scenerio. That's a good question to ask one's self too. There are definitely things I want to do that have little or nothing to do with my career. Moving long distances would be necessary, fair amounts of money would likely be necessary, and a considerable time investment too. As with anything worth doing.

I've got 3 big wishes. One is independance. Nothing unusual. Hopefully I'm heading for it. Maybe not on the fastest course, but heading for it. I suppose one of my requirements must be an independant life as an artist - otherwise I'd be on my own by now. The second is....to meet Evan Lysacek. Yes it is. I won't go on about it, I'll just say it would make me very happy. Doesn't sound that hard when I write it out. And hey, at the rate he travels the world, maybe my chances aren't that bad. OK, number 3. To be on So You Think You Can Dance. That used to be "Be on So You think You Can Dance Canada", but evidently I took too long preparing >_<. That CTV chose to axe my favorite show (and, well, my dream) burns me up just a little. Reason? Low ratings on the season 4 finale, if I remember correctly. The finale that coincided with the 10th anniversary of 9-11 (people might have been watching other things that day - and yes, I still caught the finale). Maybe I've prepared too half-hartedly. It isn't too late yet, technically. At least I have a deadline. 30 years old, then time's up. On to the next thing. Where was I going with this? What would I do if the world were about to change forever? I guess I know one reason why it's a good idea to ask that question - because even those plans take time, and we never know what kind of time frame we're really working with.

*Whew* It is defintely time to pack it in! Whoops - almost forgot tags! OK, that's it. 'Till next time Blogger world! -_-zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

On to the next thing....

Good day, Blogger world!

As I type, I'm watching Mythbusters, with a laptop resting on 3 boxes full of fabric strips. These will appear in this blog again at some future time, if all goes according to plan. The silk veil from post 2, and its subsequent twin, worked out well, though they also yielded some lessons and things to try next time. Next time I need to paint two of anything, I'll have to see if I can't do it by letting the paint saturate through both layers (suggested by a friend). Silk saturates pretty fast, so I anticipate interesting and unexpected effects.

On to the next thing. I have this book. Actually, I have lots of books. Craft books. I can't get enough of them! They're like catalogues full of customizable goodies! Also tricks, secrets, and ideas to try in my own experiments. This particular book is big on those last three, though it's got some good full-length projects too. This is something I'd love to start doing on this blog: Craft book reviews. Not just reading them and writing about them, but making the projects and writing about my experiences :). I've already started the review for this one:

The book is "Generation T: 108 ways to transform a T-shrit" by Megan Nicolay. Like most people, I've always had T-shirts. I have a couple of old T-shirts that I’ll wear right out before I even think about cutting into them. My beloved “Summer Rock Camp ‘95” T shirt, which I’m wearing right now, is one of them. It’s comfortable, loose, and comes with good memories of the Rock and Roll music camps I went to as a kid.





The other is one my Mom found at a flea market. Splashy red to purple dye job with black outlined stars and moon, plus a large red comet-blob above text pronouncing a fiery end to the cow that jumped over the moon. The back simply says 1988 Jason J. Brown (upside-down, as I just noticed :P).







These are my sleeping shirts, and I am so very proud of them ^_^. I had (and still have) a large number of T-shirts I was sentimentally attached too, but didn’t wear nearly as often as I do my sleep shirts. Many of them went into the first project I completed out of this book (yes, I’ve already gotten some use out of it) - the Quilt that now covers my bed (must remember to get a snapshot next time I make my bed).





On to the book! Right off the bat, I am assured that I’ll find something to inspire me in “Generation T”. This has already proven true. I am also told that I won’t have to learn a new skill (many of these projects don’t even require sewing) and I won’t have to shop for materials at “specialty stores”. Rare is the craft book that can promise that (we’ll see if it holds true). With any luck, the farthest I’ll have to go is Value Village (what would really impress me is if I managed to explore this book in full without making one shopping trip). I may have already defeated that hope by picking up those Neon Ts from Michaels a while back, but if I don’t have to go shopping during the course of this exploration/book review, I’ll still consider it a success.

(Note to self - plug my Cafepress T-shirts at every opportunity! @_@)

It isn’t often that I read the preamble at the beginning of a craft book (even if it’s for my own good :P). It’s all I can do not to plunge ahead with this one too (I suppose I have already, having already done the quilt). It occurs to me that they aren’t including a sewing machine in the list of tools I’ll need. I may end up going to the machine anyway, though I’ll be relieved not to be restricted to the sewing room. The explanations of different tools are detailed, even going so far as to explain what things like needles and straight pins are. At least it's comprehensive.

(Note to self - I can design pins - as in buttons - in my Cafepress to…O_o).

I'm now writing this entry a few days later than I started it (in fact the review itself is something I started writing a while ago). So I'll wrap this up here, with a little more self-promotion for good measure ^_^. As I mentioned before, I have a Cafepress shop featuring products with my designs on them. And yes, many of those products are T-shirts. I promised myself I would avoid making new purchases during the course of reviewing this book, but really, it's all I can do not to think of the possibilities where DIY meets customization :D.

Cafepress has a widget generator, but I seem only to be able to get a few products on it, all with the same design. No sense is being made by this, but at least I can (hopefully) show you this adorable pet T-shirt with my Inkblot Dragon design on it :).

Make Custom Gifts at CafePress

It turned out to be a button instead. Fine, Cafepress, fine >_<. I hope you like my self-designed dragon button :P! I also hope that it actually turns out to be linking to something, because otherwise it isn't all that useful. More mysteries to be solved....

On that note, before I do injury to this innocent computer monitor, later Blogger world!