Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Getting Ready to Play

First things first!!! Thank you so much, from the bottom of my heart, for all your wonderful comments on my last post. Your presence has been an amazing boost to my relief.

I've been in the studio this week with a renewed and energetic creative attitude. I worked on and completely finished a quilt I had in the works. I will be able to share a photo of that with you at a later date.

This week was the start of an online course I'm enrolled in, Module 1 of the Art and Business of Surface Pattern Design with Rachael Taylor. This week we are focusing on inspiration. Yesterday's exercise was to choose a simple shape and photograph things that resembled that shape. The photographed items should be a source of design inspiration. Since I stayed at home yesterday and it was very very wind outside, I mostly took some photos in the garden shed and in hubby's shop. The photo below is the top/lid of one of my bird feeders. I like the pattern that is on it. I started a Pinterest board with my inspiration photos and I will plan to add to it and create others as time goes by. You are welcome to see my inspiration photos, visit this link: http://pinterest.com/terristegmiller/patterndesign-inspiration-round/


Over the weekend I received this DVD in the mail. I watched it and can tell you I'm so excited to try some soy wax techniques. I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I've had a package of soy wax flakes in my cupboard for a long time. I had the intention of trying it out and never got around to it. I don't remember exactly how long ago I bought the soy wax, but it was more than a year ago and less than five years ago. Ha!


Because the DVD inspired me so much....I went through my cupboards and started pulling out all my dyeing supplies and taking a sort of inventory to see if I had all on hand to get started with some of the techniques from the DVD.  I'm happy to report that I have everything I need. YAY!  So today I'm getting everything ready/prepared.  I'm mixing up dye concentrate, chemical solutions and organizing my tools and workspace.  I hope to dive right in tomorrow and play play play!


HEADS UP:  Susan Purney Mark sent me an extra copy of the Soy Wax Inspirations DVD and I'm going to be giving that away. Very, very soon! Stay tuned. And in the meantime, you can have another chance to win a copy of this DVD over on Lynn Krawczyk's blog. Click here.

Check out all the Thermofax screens I've made! This was all I got made before running out of the screen product. But fear not...more is on the way. I will be starting to play with these as well, over the next few days. I do plan to offer some Thermofax screens for sale and will announce when that happens. Let me know if you have any design ideas that interest you.


And here's a recent photo of my sweet granddaughter, Rylee. She is now starting to crawl and move around quite a bit and I heard she has a couple of teeth that have broke through. She is just going on eight months old.