What's on YOUR workdesk this Wednesday (# 117)

The weather is the big topic here. As of Tuesday, we have had 49 days of 100 degree F or hotter temperatures. Today (Wednesday) we will tie the record of 50 days, which started when we topped 100 F on May 8. As we gear up for the hottest summer on record (we only need today and tomorrow to break the all-time record set in 1936), I am taking my workspace



outside to my back patio. I actually shot this around 10 am my time Tuesday. I like how the sun spotlights the journal I am working on before the day gets too hot to appreciate being outside. I will let my blog readers know on Friday if we broke the record on Thursday. This in a year where many of our daily records were broken.


And for those of you who want a rocking horse or three, here are some from my office.

Now I know that Julia will be much cooler at Stamping Ground, because most of my British friends are enjoying the much cooler end of summer, so please hop on over and see her, her desk, and the rest of the links this week. BTW 105 F is 40.56 C.

Buttermilk tea

As the days grow shorter, I find it harder to get a decent photo, so this morning I am in my kitchen enjoying



a glass of buttermilk! I have been participating in Tea Tuesday for nearly two years and have never seen anyone drink buttermilk with Kimmie and the girls. It's not something I put on my shopping list, but when I was at the store, I decided to pick some up. Some is for drinking, and some for making Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing. It's been years since I've made my own dressing, using Hidden Valley's mix and fresh buttermilk. It's so easy to buy a bottle of Hidden Valley Ranch, I had forgotten how much I loved the fresh taste of the real thing. So, as soon as I finish my second glass of buttermilk (yes, I like it that much, I've had one glass already), I'm going to whip up some homemade Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing. Please don't let the title of the post fool you. I am not drinking tea today: just a couple of cool glasses of buttermilk for my Tuesday drink of choice.

Be sure to visit Kimmie for all the links (in the comments) to other Tea Tuesday gals. I'm sure they will appreciate your visit as much as I do.

Round robin pages for Cath in Cyprus

The person I sent round robin pages to in July was Cath who lives in Cyprus. In case you don't know where Cyprus is, it's an island in the Mediterranean. Even though it is so close to the danger in the area (Cyprus is west of Syria and north of Egypt), it is a popular tourist attraction. Cyprus is a long way away, and the package I sent took forever to arrive, but it is finally in Cath's hands, so I can show the pages I sent. I was truly unable to send all the lovely extra goodies that Cath sent me, so I tried to make up for it by sending an extra tip-in, along with some handmade paper. Cath's colors are yellow and black, and I loved the color combination. These were the colors of Wichita State University, so I knew I would enjoy working with them.

Cath's pages were small. I am not good at working with small, so these were a real challenge for me. For the first page, I used long strips of paint chips on the two outer sides and individual chips cut to 1 inch square each on the two inside lengths. BTW, the little black tag moves, so it won't be in the way when Cath punches her holes. To compliment the piece, I used as many black and yellow embellishments as I could find, since my charms and embellishments were still in storage at that time. And no, I didn't drink the wine or the hard lemonade (whatever that is).


For the back side, I used two more paint chips and sewed the pieces together. I used black and yellow thread on the pieces, black on the yellow paint chips and yellow on the black background.



For the next page, I started with a sheet of paper I painted yellow, then I added some black.



I thought it was terrible, so I tried to remove most of the black. It was a MESS, and I almost scrapped the page.



You may have read where I tried to use a stencil and a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser after reading about the technique on Marilyn Rock's blog.


All I got was another mess on top of that mess, because some of the paint not only went away, but so did the top portion of the paper. Still undeterred (even with the poor photo),



I decided to use it in my next set of pages. This is actually the back side, but I wanted to show the technique I used. I also painted two more birds in flight using the same stencil, then sewed the piece. You can see the stencil got some paint on the backside, and I was unable to correct the problem in the top bird's tail. I took Dianne's advice and drew an outline around the central bird. It helped a lot.


I was looking for something to use with the stencil when I found a children's connect-the-dots book. I thought the cat was a great image and I spent a great bit of time getting it positioned correctly under the stencil after I colored it. For the background, I used Quinacridone/Nickel Azo Gold that I mixed with a bit of Pineapple color acrylic paint. Believe it or not, this background and the other side are some of the black card stock I bought for this project. It looks green/black to me in the scan. I bet it would bleach greenish, too.


For the final piece, I started with yellow paper, then added


black acrylic to liquid starch. This is the combination I used for making my paste paper, along with the trowel in the background.


In the end, this is how it turned out. I added lace and an image to the paste paper background. I notice the scans are more greenish, but I swear that background and lace were both black.


This has been a horrible year for flowers. They have been nearly non-existent due to the drought and heat. So I had to use silk flowers on the final piece. This is



my "revised version" of Lynn's at Her Creative Spirit technique and the tutorial she shows on her blog. I use the technique quite often, but have never used silk flowers before.


I truly believe the actual page looks better than the scan. I used black thread and black ink to make the additional black bits in the piece. I backed the flowers with a piece of sheet music I painted yellow.



For Cath's tag, I used another sunflower as above, only this time I used yellow and black for the backing. I had a piece of multicolored trim I used at the bottom.



I even added a bit of black tape to the back of the tag to keep the black and yellow theme going. I had a lot of fun with this color combination. These were two colors I truly enjoyed working with. I only wish I had fibers (for the hole in the tag) that matched the lovely trim, but I had nothing the same colors, so went with the closest I could find.

Silent Sunday: Museum of World Treasures' American Pop Culture Gallery

What I've learned about fabric, alcohol, and Sharpies

This post is on a timer. I'm at a Neighborhood Clean-up, or if it's evening, I'm at a dinner with a large group of people. In between these two events, I hope to get a bit of sleep, since I was out all night with my friend Joseph from California and several other of my friends, including the groups Babylon Saints (see my right sidebar) and Afinke Machine. But until I am able to return to blogland, I wanted to go over the most important things I learned about painting on fabric with Sharpies and rubbing alcohol.


Before I created anything, I tore cotton sheets to the approximate size of my fabric scrappy journal covers. I laid out my supplies, being aware I am not sure you need 91% rubbing alcohol (you might be able to substitute 70% for this technique), but that is all I have.


I used lots of new pen colors on these two journal covers. You can see I folded these in half widthwise before creating the designs. The spine area is in the middle of each fabric swatch, designating one side from the other. One thing I learned as I added Sharpies and alcohol to fabric last week was not to start and stop adding more Sharpies or alcohol or both after you have started the design. Be sure the design is complete before you finalize it with the alcohol.



Expect some loss of color in your final designs. It's the nature of the beast (or Sharpie). Realize you will need to iron the finished pieces (cotton, muslin, or linen) after the alcohol has dried. Know that you are going to have a mess, with extra color bleeding all over the place onto your craft mat, so


it probably pays to place some plain fabric under the colored pieces you have already sprayed with alcohol. Realize that sometimes the clean-up fabric may be prettier than the fabric you dyed using Sharpies and rubbing alcohol. Remember to iron these pieces even though they may be overdyed further. And don't expect the sheer beauty you get with silk. Cotton, muslin, and linen won't give you that same shimmery and translucent effect.

Let's all take a few minutes and check on our friends on the east coast of the US today. It doesn't matter where on the east coast they are. No area is safe.

Inspiration Avenue: Sunflowers

I could have posted this challenge any day this week, but since Friday is the day I post my IA challenges, I stuck with the plan. When Shel offered this Sunflower challenge for Inspiration Avenue this week, I was thrilled since the theme resonates so prominently in my life. I decided to bring back a few round robin altered book pages I made last November for my friend Marlynn. Her theme was sunflowers and as Shel pointed out, they are the state flower of Kansas. If you want to revisit the entire post and all the pages I made for Marlynn, they are here. So enjoy this return to days gone by, as well as a couple of new photos, and hopefully most of these will be new to many of you.




I don't normally stamp, but dug out a rubber stamp for the pocket.


Here are the two postcards I included.


I "stole" "borrowed" the idea for this page from Lisa at Wright Stuff.


This is a technique I learned from Lynn at Her Creative Spirit.


If you think sunflowers are only for my art, here is a really dark photo of a couple of friends/neighbors at a restaurant where sunflowers take center stage.



And finally, a photo of a bouquet of flowers from the local flower shop that I used in two of my pages in Marlynn's round robin pages. I cut out the sunflowers and used them as image transfers. Now you can see sunflowers are definitely a part of my life. So hop on over to Inspiration Avenue to see what others are posting for this challenge.

A book in the making and a giveaway

All day long I've seen my friends' blogs showing the cover to Seth Apter's new book, The Pulse of Mixed Media. I guess it pays to check my e-mail because late this afternoon I did just that. I got as far as the message from Seth, where I've been selected as one of the artists featured in his awesome book. Keep watching Seth's blog for updates on the book, which is scheduled to be published in March, 2012. It is my honor to be among other artists who participated in this collaboration. Seth has done a phenomenal job of coordinating this project. I can barely wait to see this book in print.

If you can't wait to see some truly phenomenal art and want a bit of color in your life, please visit Terri at Pringle Hill Studio before next Wednesday (Aug 31). She having an awesome giveaway for reaching 500 followers. And in keeping with the only giveaways I tell my fellow bloggers about, all you have to do to enter is leave Terri a comment. No hoops, no additional work, just a (hopefully sweet) comment.

I'm not fond of rework, but sometimes it has to be done

As my dear blog friends on the east coast are suffering the effects and aftershocks of an earthquake that made history, I have reached what doesn't seem like a very important milestone in my own city. Yesterday our temperature was 107 F (which broke the previous record), and has made it the second hottest summer in my city's history. Just three more days of 100 F or higher temps, and it will be the hottest summer EVER!! The forecasters are predicting we will set the record by the end of the weekend.

So while my east coast friends put their books back on their shelves and my southern friends continue their long heat and drought, all I can offer are some photos of a bit of rework I performed last week.


I'm not a fan of rework, preferring to do it right the first time. but this shelving had to go. The overall length of the shelves was too long, didn't reach high enough, and the buckets holding the shelving in place took up too much room. In the background is one of my new shelving units. It is exactly the same as the others I have in my hall and the south wall of my studio. As for the trash, I was still collecting it, as you can see by the large box in the photo's foreground.


One nice thing about finally opening most of the boxes was I found most of the poles for my shelves. This is actually one complete and part of a second set of shelves that I had replaced. See here for new shelves I bought for the studio area. Remember, we are in the hallway.



I first got rid of the old shelves, but saved the buckets because they were full of assemblage goodies. Please don't ask how I thought I would get to the contents of these buckets when they were acting as shelf dividers. I think I was more concerned with getting some shelving up than I was in practicality. I have used my stairs and buckets as staging areas, which Bleubeard decided to decimate. Can you see him working his way down the stairs in the above photo?


The shelving was now gone and all the goodies were sitting on the stairs, as Bleubeard worked his way over the baskets and breakables, while I shrunk in chagrin hoping he wouldn't break anything. After he got to the base of the steps, he decided to clean himself. This was when my camera batteries died, even though I continued to work throughout the rest of the day.


This is what the shelves looked like the next day. Perhaps you can see (right back side of photo) the new shelving unit is still not assembled, but still in its original packaging. It was at that time that I went to the studio and did a bunch of rework there, also.


Fast forward to a week ago Wednesday and here is the little area with the shelf unit filled to the brim, the new shelf unit assembled, the rocker in place, and my new gray shelf (on the right side of the photo) assembled and filled. The glass ashtray in the cast iron holder is a drink holder. Only the fan is out of place in this photo and I can't find my other hanger for the second painting that used to hang on the wall (to the left of and above the rocking chair).


Turn around and you can see all three shelves on the south hall wall are now filled. I have brought my fabric down and placed it on the middle shelves for easy access. Most of what you see is old sheets in plastic bags. Sorry the lighting is so bad, but since this is a hallway, I don't need lots of lighting, only enough in case I want to find something special on the shelves. I don't normally need much light, so what I have (15 watt) is sufficient for the hall.


From the other direction, you can see it's still a bit of a mess and all that tissue paper which sits on the top shelf of the closest shelving unit, has taken on a life of its own. I ran out of room to store it standing upright, so added a bag and a plastic container full of it. I really must use it this fall or winter to make fabric paper.



Here is possibly a better view of the south and east sides of the hall. Note I still have a couple of boxes that I have yet to find spaces for.


Also on Wednesday, I brought my chairs to the basement from the kitchen that live on the north side of the hall. Then I placed my small carts back where they belong. I still can't find the hooks that go in my pegboard to hang my art I had placed there before, so I may need to replace those, too.


Here is most of the north and east sides of the hall. Note the box and pan that I still have not unloaded. The door between the shelves and rocking chair goes to my basement full bath. This is enough update today. I'll show more later in the week and I hope you caught yesterday's WOYWW post, too.

I hope everyone is having a good week. It's been fun showing what I've finally accomplished, and contemplating what still needs to be done.

WOYWW 116

I almost didn't join Julia at Stamping Ground tonight because I have not had time to visit my friends' blogs for well over a week. I've been busy with company and expect more on Thursday. However, I wanted to give you an update on my basement studio.



Where have all the boxes gone? They have gone to friends who wanted some pretty cool boxes.


They are gone from this side of the room, which is where most were stacked a few weeks ago.


They are even gone in this view. Lots of floor space, as I work my way around the room. Although the room is still not finished, I'm much further along than I was last Tuesday at this time.


For those of you who came just for the rocking horses, I see four in these photos, three of which I have never shown you, including this framed picture I received as a gift some years ago.

As for me, even my basement studio is hot. This is the 48th day of 100 degree F or higher (39 C and above) temps. Not an all time record, but it takes third place in our city's record book. Today (Wednesday) will be the same with a forecast of 105 F (>40 C).