The Bag Lady's Garden

Work on the plastic project continues.
Besides the flower petals, I also made leaves.
I've assembled about 100 flowers, using wire and buttons.
The dining room table has been transformed into a garden.
I think I need another couple of dozen flowers before I can finish.
Thanks to all who donated bags to enable my bag habit.

Weekend Playtime

Eagerly anticipating some weekend fun.
Hope to get down to more plastic forming.

On Being a Bag Lady

My latest project uses plastic shopping bags. My friends are collecting coloured plastic bags for me. I've become a "bag lady". My art room is a wild assortment of bags filled with bags.

I'm having fun experimenting with melting and fusing them into 3-dimensional shapes. I'm hoping to create a large wall sculpture with different colours of plastic shapes for the ReVision recyling show later in the year. It's a long process. I'm needing lots of bags.

Caged Birds

Back to playing. this time with a Sizzix die called Caged Bird.
Birds and cages were cut using thick book board.
Yellow bird painted with acrylic transparent ink, the blue bird uses a distressed stamp ink. Both birds stamped with permanent black ink.
The background are small collages

Weekend Button-making Demo

Spent the past few days preparing for and giving a demo on 1-inch button making at a local art store, RubyDog's Art House. It was a free demo, intended to get people interested in a future, longer workshop on button making. Buttons are basically mini-collages. Techniques used for regular collages can be used in button-making. The only restrictions are that they fit within a 1-inch circle and be relatively flat. Being more a digital collage person, I spent a few days making sample buttons without using a computer. On Saturday I brought boxes full of supplies and about 15 people, young and old, made buttons which they proudly displayed on their lapels.

Friday and the Start of a Weekend

Theme for these two tags is flowers, both quite different.
The flower in the tag on the left is a die cut which I coloured and then stamped. The center is a glob of crystal accents which created a clear dome.
The background in the tag on the right is an image transfer. The leaf is a coloured die cut.

Picasso Exhibition

One of the perks of working for yourself is that you can from time to time play hookey. Yesterday friends and I took a road trip to Seattle to see the Picasso exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum. Wow, 150 pieces of art from Paris all in one place. It was almost too much to see at one go. I loved seeing his assemblages, the brush strokes on his oil paintings, the detail of his etchings and the photographs of his studio.