Sunday, June 3, 2012

Big Creativity: Crafts Projects

These are the projects we did in the Crafts course I took Spring semester.  From the left:
*Basketweaving.  This didn't thrill me.  It's made from 2 round hoops and long skinny strips of bendy wood.  The liner is from a wooden bread tray Darling Man and I received as a gift many, many years ago...wedding maybe?

*Cardboard loom weaving using yarn, yarn needle and a fork to make a pouch that was lined and embellished to make a purse.  The blob in front of the purse is a pom-pom attached to the handle which is an old 70's era chain belt.  The big button for the closure loop is my old Target name badge covered with yarn.

*Latex Mask, stuffed and mounted on foam board.  First a clay sculpture was made, then a plaster cast in which may layers of stinky latex was applied in thin layers.  Every layer had to be dried with a hair dryer.  It was tedious and hot work and the result way better than what I expected.  The background is cloth and the mask is painted with acrylics.

*Enameling on copper using stencils (the yellow flower on green background)  It's glued to a wooden box from the craft store - one of the few things I had to go out and buy what with being the Queen of Clutter.  The inside of the box is finished with fleece squares leftover from a tied blanket I made a few years ago.  I knew they'd come in handy someday!!!  Also learned cloisonne using silver wire to make the pattern for the enamel but I couldn't find it for this pic.  Sigh.

*Wire Sculpture.  Can't tell from the pic but it is a woven wire bracelet with spiral wire and bead embellishments.  We had to embellish everything.

*Metal Working.  We learned to use a drill and a thin sawblade to cut patterns in copper to make a bracelet.  It's way too big for my wrist and the cutting was painful to my old joints so this project, like basket weaving, didn't blow my dress up either.

*Paper Mache bowl.  Used a pottery dish I already had as a mold.  Decorated with decoupaged flowers I already had cut out for some other undone project from the past...sigh.

*Book with handmade paper pages.  I really enjoyed this since I already have dabbled in making books and was excited to learn how to make paper.  It was messy and the paper was too thick to be really useful but it was a fun project.

*Final Project was a Concept Book and this was my favorite thing we did.  The book was supposed to be non-traditional and tell something about me through color, text and concept.  I wanted to do something about the secrets I keep and what I've learned from them.



The "cover" is a wooden cigar box.  The pages alternate, a quote from a Zen calendar reflecting a lesson learned, a handmade tissue paper envelope containing a secret about myself that I keep and a page with a "secret" I tell about myself.  The binding is accordion folded ribbon.


I go back to work full time tomorrow and I don't know how that will affect the Small Life Big project...but that is another post.



Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Big Creativity: What I did during my break from blogging

So...what have I been doing for the last 4 months? you ask.  What I haven't been doing is de-cluttering.  Instead I took the last 3 courses I needed to graduate from community college and made the decision to focus on that and let the rest slide.  And slide it did but more on that later.  All three courses turned out to be great classes for learning about myself.  The big surprise?  Math was my favorite!  Who knew I like math and I'm good at it?  Well, except for probability...

The other 2 courses were Communication/Speech and Crafts.  Big Creativity provided by Crafts (of course) and Math.  Speech provided opportunities for introspection and working with classmates all of whom were young enough to be my kids.  Well, not all at the same time, of course, hee, hee.

For the next couple posts, I'll share pics of Craft projects.  For now, here is a pic of my final Math project currently displayed on top of a bookcase.



Our assignment, in lieu of a final exam, was to take something we are interested in and find out how math is involved and then to share it with the class.  I chose art because when I was young I wanted to be an "artist named Ramona."  I don't remember why the name Ramona... Anyway, I didn't have any traditional artistic talent, couldn't draw, paint or sculpt (Play-doh lumps anyone?)  I did like crafts like making purses out of random boxes.

As an adult I've done some collage but often don't know where to start or get ideas and I didn't have a lot of confidence about what I was doing.  So for my Math project I decided to see if I could use Math as a basis to make an art piece.  I read several Math books and looked through even more...




I settled on combining the Fibonacci Sequence and the Golden Ratio to make the piece.  The triangles are the right triangle that's used to make a Golden Rectangle and has the special quality that 5 copies can be put together to make a larger copy and five of those can be put together the same way and so on and on.  (Any old triangle can be made into a larger copy by putting together 4 copies of the original)
Put together enough (1250) little Golden Right Triangles and you get a Pinwheel Tiling

I used a picture of the tiling to find the "super" triangles and enlarged 2 on graph paper, transferred that to plain paper and Darling Man made 50 copies on watercolor paper for me to cut, arrange like a giant jigsaw puzzle and paint.  (May I just say watercolor pencils are a great invention)  I used taped together graph paper (89 X 144 squares, a Golden Rectangle drawn using the Fibonacci Sequence) as the base with the triangles in the center and black cardstock around the border.  The frame was found in the clown closet in the basement but we haven't talked about that yet!

I loved how it turned out and that it's really big (24 x 36)  I think it's neat that I put it together and painted it vertically but like it better displayed horizontally.

Here's a closer pic so you can see the triangles a little better


 There's a cool thing to do with pentagons, too...



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Sunday, January 22, 2012

Small Stuff - much is gone but the basement's full again

 There was a desk under all that cr**!  A big ugly desk that is no longer with us, I'm happy to say.  The old printer and computer has been recycled.  There was another big box of clothes hiding under the desk.  I apparently packed up clothes to donate and then didn't get around to taking them.  Well they are gone now.
 This is along the wall to the right of the desk.  There's a bench under there that I emptied and then promptly covered in games from the shelves above...
 Wasn't up to sorting through them to see what's donate-able and what's trash so I turned to the other side of the room.  This is one corner:
 Lots of bedding, including a pallet I made out of a comforter, a foam eggcrate mattress pad and a couple of sleeping bags.  I opened the seam, rescued the sleeping bags and tossed the rest.  Otherwise it was mostly old toys and stuffed animals.  Donated what I could and tossed the rest.  These chairs were under it all.  I'm keeping them for the time being. 
 And this was the most discouraging corner:
 where I found what would be the low point of this endeavor so far:
 That's an unopened bottle of Zesty Italian found in a box of totally un-food-related random stuff.  The expiration date was mid 90's.  On a more positive note the basket is stuffed with plastic shopping bags that we can use for trash.  As of January 1 stores have started charging a 5 cent tax on plastic and paper bags and these along with another stash found in the laundry room means we won't have to buy the small trash can liners for peobably another year!
 And here's a bonus handy dandy hint!  A plastic birthday candle holder apparently makes an excellent stopper for a bottle of glue...even after years of storage.
And then there was the weirdest find so far, a lunchbox filled with tissues (unused thank goodness).  Nothing else, just tissues. 

But the corner got cleared out.  I saved a box of printer paper and some other things that have craft potential.  I found a place that takes donations of vcr tapes and floppy discs and such and makes them available to artists who use them in different projects.
One wall left.     
Actually the cupboard was sitting out in the floor as a room divider.  I couldn't believe all that stuff in the floor came off the bookcase and out of the cupboard.  The bookcase was all kids' books and many, many coloring books and sticker books.  Many were in good shape and are waiting to be donated to the library booksale.  Others were recycled.
Darling Boy and his Darling Girlfriend came for their visit and yes I was happy the basement was cleared out so they could sleep there.  Upstairs (living, dining, kitchen) are presentable for the first time in years.  We just kept the bedroom doors closed.  The price paid is the laundry room is full again with stuff taken out of the dining and living rooms and there's a lot of Darling Boy's stuff waiting to be sorted and stored under the stairs...so basically I'm starting over and trying to remember that real progress has been made.