pillows

Here's a couple of little projects I did recently. I know, this is supposed to be my art blog but sometimes I need a little mindless crafting.

The geometric pillow is made of Pendleton wool - I fell in love with this fabric and decided to buy a yard of it. So nice that I can buy it by the yard! I got two pillows and a rectangle that I just hung on the wall by itself out of the piece I bought and I think I still can make a bag out of what's left.

The crochet pillow was a sort of "what can I do on a plane" project. I saw a photo of a cute granny square pillow somewhere in blog land around the same time I was going to be on a plane and I thought granny squares would be the perfect project for flying. No pattern to follow, really, and they're so small. I had finished most of the squares months ago and finally got them all assembled and onto a pillow form. It's also wool...Cascade 220 yarn in the closest matching colors to the Pendleton fabric that I could find, plus white because I like white. :)

So the last picture is what happens to these wooly objects with cats around: they're getting kind of squashed and I'm a little worried about the life expectancy on that crochet pillow. It snags pretty easy with all the little holes between the stitches.

last of this batch

4x4" watercolor, gouache, graphite, and image transfers on watercolor paper.

Here's the last two of the stack. I'm really happy with how these image transfers are working - they're sort of translucent (as long as I only print things that aren't super dark). It totally feels like I'm doing some Photoshop layering but in real life - so fun. I miss having an "undo" sometimes though.

more squares

Slightly bigger this time - 6x6" watercolor, graphite, gouache, and image transfers on cold press watercolor paper.

This is some paper I picked up on sale - I'm usually too cheap to buy 300lb. paper so I ended up with cold press this time. It's relatively smooth for cold press so I think I like it well enough for the price :)

tiny little squares

4x4" graphite, watercolor, gouache, image transfers on 300lb. cold press watercolor paper.

I started a whole pile of these several days ago - I cut a bunch of squares, then I did all the pencil doodling, then all the watercolor and let them dry, then the gouache, and then some iron-on transfers on top. I decided to skip the acrylic layer that I was messing around with before because it didn't seem like it was adding that much to the pieces. So that made the image transfers infinitely easier - all I had to do was plunk the iron down and wait until the transfer stopped making a little hissing sound and then peel off the backing paper. SO much easier than applying them to the acrylic.

There's something very satisfying about going straight in and drawing crooked wonky lines and circles with no ruler! I'm sure I will still use my rulers and circle templates and things on some pieces but working on these tiny squares is so fun :)

drawing on Creature Comforts!

Ez over at Creature Comforts has a post up today which includes one of my drawings. If you're not familiar with this blog you should be! It's just gorgeous.

Happy weekend!

film: roll 2!

I had family visiting so the scanning project got slowed down a bit but here's some more film. This is the roll out of the Yashica (44A if you're interested) and I really like it! The fourth photo is a double exposure but it's hard to tell that it is. So here's a few shots and the rest are here.

Oh, and this is from the negatives...finally worked out the problems I was having with the scanner.

film: roll 1!

I got my rolls of film back today...woo!

I'm still scanning everything but here's the first roll. Yes, I scanned the prints but I don't want to hear about it. My scanner which came with a negative and slide scanning accessory is apparently terrible at scanning negatives. They looked awful. I suppose I might be doing something wrong but I got impatient so I scanned the prints.

For some reason the prints were sort of sepia toned so I killed that off in photoshop so you can see how they are supposed to look. I think, anyway...the box said black and white so I don't know why they were so brown.

I tried to get a variety of light conditions but I'm not sure I can even tell so I think at least for this black and white film I'll just go for it if I see something I like. Everything came out pretty darn good and this is the camera with no focusing, no shutter speed adjustment, just a button and a winder. I think I'm in love! :)

Sadly the roll of film that was sitting for decades in the Pentax was completely blank. Not vague or hard to see, just blank as far as I can tell. I was really hoping there would be something interesting on it.