Lightness of Being...& A Wish Tree

Just reporting in! I feel a wonderful sense of lightness - I finished my clean out of my paper arts room (read "spare bedroom with heavy investment of paper, stamps, paints, canvas, inks etc etc) at 3:30pm yesterday afternoon and I cannot believe how good it made me feel. I could of course have quite reasonably downsized supply-wise but all I did was throw away rubbish (especially stuff I had kept because it was something that I could potentially recycle/use - that is, if I live a couple of extra centuries!) and re-organise my supplies. It was a huge effort and has been at the cost of more than a week's creativity but IT WAS WORTH EVERY MINUTE!! I have floor space again!!

To celebrate I started my Seasons Journal Quilt (unadorned but pieced fabric above - although I did afterwards use Terracotta Color Wash on the bright autumn section to make it a bit more autumny!), did some more work on my Australian Autumn quilt, decided to do a small quilt for the "Take it Further" challenge and chose fabrics for the specified colour scheme - see below (I am possibly being a little liberal here in my interpretation but I really want to do something with an oriental flavour and I just love text on fabric) and started a paper arts project for Stamping & Papercraft. Such bliss...

And then today I received three wonderful fabric postcards in the mail. The first one came naked (no envelope!!) and is a wonderful felted piece of artwork by Dianne McGrath for the January Calendar Girls exchange. The texture and tactile qualities are just wonderful!

And the next two came from the wonderful Fiona Mortimore as part of an exchange a small group of Australians have been running this year. The first one with the vibrant felted background and blanket-stitched ribbon binding is for the "Pattern" theme and the other beautiful birdy one is for the "Paper Fabric" theme. How lucky can one person be?



And talking of luck, today I have somehow stumbled across this wonderful blog and found out about Rachel's Saturday Seeds and the wish tree!! I just love this idea and it is so easy to participate. I love these ways of connecting up with others in a way that just wasn't possible before blogging...I can see all those ribbons blowing in the breeze from that beautiful dogwood tree!

January's Challenges - Take it Further & Journal Quilts

I think I may have mentioned that I have signed up for Sharon B's "Take it Further" Challenge this year. It involves creating a piece (fibre or paper) on either of two options that Sharon presents each month. There is a requirement to blog about it as well of course!

So the January options are either the concept of admiration of a person (who, why, what) or a colour scheme. I have been thinking about both for the last week or so and I am finding it hard to focus on a single idea let alone a "resolved design"! I think the colour scheme is probably a bit too muted for me but then again the whole point is to challenge ourselves and the recycled book cover piece at the top of this post is pretty muted colour-wise and I loved doing that one...


Anyway I have promised myself that by tonight I will have fine-tuned the myriad ideas I have floating around and get started so that I have enough time to finish it by the end of the month, which seems to be rapidly approaching.

The other thing that I am pondering (as I continue my craft room clean-out) is my January Journal Quilt for Aus_NZ Quilters. This is my first ever journal quilt (A4) size so I am looking forward to participating in this challenge as well, although I am glad this one does not have the same requirements regarding participation (if you don't get it done you can still participate the next month!).

The January theme is Seasons and I am pretty sure I am going to do a variation on a small art quilt I did last year for an exchange (picture below) - the theme was elements and I enjoyed representing fire, water, air and earth in fabric and I think the fours seasons will work well done in a similar way. I'll just use a sun as the central point. The journal quilts also have a series of techniques that you can use each month and January includes embellishment so that is another reason to keep the quilt design simple.

I'll post some progress shots soon (I hope).

(And to finish here is one of my pages from a colour based journal
from a few years back - just because I love green!)