circle craft goodies

I recently attended the annual Circle Craft Christmas Market. I really enjoy wandering through the booths. There are several booths that I always visit. Kama Soap (fabulous!) and becki rose, and her wonderful primitive patties, among others. This year I was thrilled to come home with this Laura Gibson piece.

"Tea in the Afternoon"

Her art always makes me smile. I love her tongue-in-cheek style. If you go to her website, do check out "Tippi's Making Some Friends"...and you should have seen "Well Hello, Benjamin", a tribute to Mrs. Robinson. It's a great piece. Unfortunately, it isn't on her site...must be a newer piece.

I also acquired another Mud Puppy Clayworks piece. Michelle Wilson creates, what I call, wonderfully Seussian type pottery houses, amongst other things. I still haven't gone all the way and purchased one of her high rises, but my little house is a good start...maybe next year.

teesha inspiration

Teesha Moore has recently produced some great YouTube videos on her journaling techniques, with her fabulous hubby Tracy working the camera.

Having had the opportunity to learn from her first-hand last year at Play [can't wait for next January...it's and awesome way to spend four days...I highly recommend it], it was great to be able to watch each step in her process again. I have watched each one at least twice already and can't wait for more.


So, after watching the videos last weekend, I pulled out my journal and painted a few pages. Then I added some collage borders.




This is one of the pages I have a bit further along. I have also incorporated a bit of what I learned from Anahata.


Thanks for the continued inspiration, Teesha!

seredipity of doodles

I have always doodled...for as long as I can remember.

When we received our registration confirmation for Journalfest (which I attending in late October - more to come on that in the future, if I can get my act together) we were given a small journal and a bunch of images from the teachers, as well as Teesha and Tracy. One one of the journal pages I airbrushed a grey background with Copic marker and attached one of Tracy's images to the middle of the page. The intention was that if I couldn't think of anything else to work on, during our evenings around the dining room table, I would continue his doodles. Part of our goodie bag, when we arrived at the Fort, was a (0.1) Copic black multi liner marker. I knew how to put that to use. I ended up working exclusively on this page for the first two evenings at Journalfest and the first picture is the end result.

Then in Ingrid Dijker's class (Octopus's Garden), she had some doodled images in her journal and called them "Zentangles". I hadn't heard that term before. I have recently been googling them to get some additional inspiration for my doodles. These ARE really relaxing to do. Guess that is the "zen" part of the title. Who knew? I just thought it was doodling. :)

I started a new page with some random shapes and began doodling around and in them. Last evening, as I was working on it, I looked down at the page and saw an distinct image that had evolved inside the doodles, totally on its own. I decided to stop and take a picture (the second one attached).

The last picture was the additional work I did to enhance the image. I loved the serendipity of the whole thing. I call the piece "balancing act".

Give it a try sometime.