What's keeping me busy.

I  decided to steal myself away from the sewing machine for a while to prevent curvature of the spine setting in! I thought it would be good to escape for a giant latte and a little blogging time.

Lately I have been doing a fair amount of quilt planning. A lot of cutting up children's clothes into neat little squares. Turning children's drawings into quilt blocks and some new character sketches that I am desperately trying to find time to make real.
I have also squeezed in a little painting time and I must say I'm really enjoying this. I need to carve out more time to paint.

Well my giant latte needs drinking and it has arrived accompanied by the most delicious blackberry tart,  which I hadn't ordered but have been treated to..... diet can start tomorrow! I shall now give it the attention it deserves.

Bye for now folks.

Susan
P.s. if the pics don't show up I will edit later.  X

Art residency Cubist portrait

Today I had the privilege of working with four  year 6 students to make a piece of literacy inspired art.

The subject was a book that was studied as a class earlier in the year. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne is centered around two main characters, Bruno and Schmuel. Set against the backdrop of a concentration camp their is a certain bleakness. I felt it would be a good contrast to use Picassos cubist portrait as the inspiration for the portrait.
Wow, what a great choice! We started off,  after looking at Picassos work, by waking up the right side of our brains with some sketching of cubist body parts. We then cut out elements they everyone liked and started to place them onto the board. This is where the portrait started to come alive. As they began to add colour it was a joy to hear the children discussing how they were using colour - the emotions associated with certain colours- and how they could explore using colour freely once they realised that hair didn't have to be brown.
Here is their wonderful cubist portrait of Bruno and Schmuel.

January Blues

Bless me followers, it has been 6 weeks since my last blog post. But you see there was this whole Christmas thing going on that makes people rush around like fools. At the peak of that busyness I typed MADNESS into my laptop when prompted for my password! A sign of what was to come....actually, all that came was a sack full of horrid cold germs on Christmas morning :-( Me and the kids had bad colds, hubby had flu...of course.
But now it is a fresh shiny New Year. I tend to hibernate in January and February. It help me get through this these cold grey months without being completely miserable and horrid to live with. But this year is different. I eased back into to work slowly with a spot of self indulgent painting. Very therapeutic creative play.

I have already had two birthday parties in the studio (one was my daughters). How can you have the January blues when surrounded by a group of giggling girls all excited about using a singer sewing machine. It is the gateway drug into a lifelong addiction to sewing.....;-)

The lovely dolls they made.  (zombie style for some reason)

Her is my baby showing them how it's done.

I made some heart bunting....just because.

Every Thursday I get to work with some wonderful kids on my Art Residency. There enthusiasm is infectious. Here are the quilt blocks they have been working on.

This is how it started way back in September with year 1 and 2.

A term later and Year 6 are adding their layer.

I will take some more photos this week and write a more detailed post on  the process. It is almost ready to put together and hang.

Next week I start a 6 week course with a few students as part of the schools Children's University. We are making work inspired by the Austrian artist, ecologist, architect and visionary Hundertwasser.

I think it is fair to say that I am more excited about this than the kids at the moment!!!!! 

With so many fabulous creative things to do, the January Blues have been kicked out the window and my rose tinted specs put back on. My sunny disposition has returned much earlier than usual.

Get creative people and beat those blues over the head with a big fat paint brush or point them in the eye with a pointy knitting needle. Surround yourself with positive people....kids are good for that... preferably not your own ;-) Stop thinking and start doing.........with no game plan or envisaged end result. Just enjoy the process. It might just help a little.

Happy New Year lovely people.

xxxxxxx

Nativity Printable

Okay, here we go. I have been trying to figure out how to add a free printable to the blog....some people make this interweb look so easy! After much googling and some failed attempts I am trying this way.

Below may be a link to my Free Printable colour and cut out Nativity scene or it may be a whole load of indecipherable HTML gobbledygook. I will take some photos of said Nativity when I can get organised enough to have the camera in the right place.

Nativity Cut out scene

Happy Christmas crafting folks. 

More festive fun from Fat Hen And Flo

Special edition festive Stan

Make your own Gnometastic bunting

I don't get it

I am not one for watching numbers. I don't feverishly watch my Facebook page likes (although I did notice today that it is a nice round number - you can win your very own Stan if you comment here). I don't like all those 'Hike Your Likes' type pages. I want people to find  my page and genuinely want to see me in their newsfeed. Most hated comment.....'new like from blah blah, return the like'.....errr NO!!! I won't 'like' a page unless I actually want to see more from that page. I will take the time to visit your page, leave comments and interact with you. If I like your page it means I actually do...well okay there are a couple of exceptions where I ;

A: feel obliged to like you for some reason

B: need to for 'networking' purposes...boring but necessary

C: need to keep tabs on people...... 

Don't act so surprised, everyone has a fb 'friend' that fits in to these boxes. 

Anyway, I've gone off on a tangent. Numbers is where I was. Occasionally I have a look to see how many people read my blog posts. What is more popular? What do you guys want to read about? For example, more of you wanted to read about Vintage Books than Meet Betty.

That's good, I can work with that. BUT when it comes to good ol' Facebook...well......what can I say....

An average post reaches maybe a third, sometimes more, of my fans/likes. A post like this for example-

or even this - two thirds saw this.

 But nearly FOUR times as many people viewed this!!! That's way more than my total fans/likes!!

CAT FOOD

REALLY? Is this what you guys want to see?

Might need to rethink my creative business.

Good night folks

*all my hard work and they love adult chunks in jelly*