Tattered Saints

The Times They Are A Changin'...

Lots going on here at the Five Acre Woods...hubby decided to exercise his right to retire from his long-time job and move on to other things.  The weekend was spent cleaning out his office and hauling all the stuff home.  Tomorrow we leave for Lynchburg Virginia for a job interview he has scheduled on Thursday.  Ch-ch-ch-changes are happening left, right and center.  As a result, I won't be posting anything for awhile on this old blog...not that my visitor stats show much activity anyway.  Oh well.

In other news, I received my fabric from Spoonflower!  It's lovely...I love the color, which came out a soft lilac shade.  Here's a quick and dirty picture straight out of the bag without washing or ironing it first:

My camera doesn't show how pretty the background color really is...anyway...I like it and hopefully by this weekend, I can work on making a pillow out of it.

Toodles for now and I'll be back one of these days...

Cool Stuff...

I've finally managed to find more blogs that are fun, interesting, informative, and did I mention interesting?  No more of this "ME, ME, ME, IT'S ALL ABOUT ME!!!!" bull-wash that I've been running across lately.  For example:  Who the Hell cares what your hair looked like back in the 80's and 90's??? It looked TERRIBLE...enough said.  Anyway...found this recently and I think it's the coolest thing...it's a site called Wordle...click here:  http://wordle.net/  and what is it, you ask?  Well, basically (to quote directly from the site) Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.  And hot damn, it's fun!  Here's one of mine, generated from this blog:

Fun stuff.  Interesting stuff.  Informative stuff.  I like it.  I can envision a print out of this used in a collage somehow...yeah. 

Fabric Explosion And Ports Of Call...

Whenever I use any fabric in my art, the studio always ends up looking like this:

All that was for this:

Fabric stretched over a canvas and a raven silhouette painted on top.  It looks a little Fall-ish or Halloween-ish, eh? 

The Mini Cooper is sitting at the port in Southampton awaiting passage on a ship.  My hubby said he hopes the car gets a room with a balcony.  Ha ha.  If all goes smoothly, we may have the little bugger by the middle of August!  Awesome. 

Even More Fun For The Feeble-Minded...

My Muse has been MIA for some time now, but I still managed to make a couple of things the last few days.  This was my very first attempt at a zipper.  It's a nice sized pouch to carry your what-have-yous in and it's lined...another feat of legerdemain I managed to pull off...amazing.  Is it perfect, you ask??  No, I answer.  But it's not bad, not bad at all for a first attempt.  My fabric selection is a little squicky but I was just trying to use what I had figuring that it may all end up in the trash bin...next time, I'll try to find some fabric that rocks.  Next time, you query?  Yes, I respond.  I think I could get into making these.  I do need to find a zipper foot, however.  I've heard that using a zipper foot while putting in a zipper makes it much easier and a more pleasant experience.  I thought I had one, but I sure couldn't find anything that looked like one in my sewing stuff.  I know my old Euro-Pro machine came with a bunch of different feet but my current Janome apparently did not.  Anyway...I also created this sort of pop-art version of Audrey Hepburn and had it printed and stretched on canvas.  I quite like it. 

Pouch:

Inside:

Pop-art Audrey:

And some of you may be wondering (or not) what ever happened to the fabric I designed and sent off to Spoonflower to have printed...I think it's supposed to be mailed out today.  I can't wait to get it...and who knows...I may make a zippered pouch with some of it!

OMG...

Need something to do?  Not for long...

Click here:

http://www.85qm.de/up/BigRedButton.swf     

OMG.

Finally Finished Book Cover...

Whoa Dude! That Was Fast...

Just found out my mini cooper has been built!  It's in the body shop in Oxford England with an estimated completion date of July 21st....Dude!!!  So excited...This is pretty close to what it will look like:

Image Transfers...

Cards made from inkjet image transfers. 

A Few Of My Favorite Things...

 

Tarnished silver...soft grays...cream and black...rusty things. 

In The Garden...

I decided to post a few pictures of the garden and some of the flowers around the house.  All the rain we've had seems to agree with the plants this year.  I have some flowers growing that I didn't even plant!  They just showed up, like uninvited guests.  They are of course, most welcome because they are so pretty and they demand so little...

There be pumpkins here:

As sure as God made little green...uh...tomatoes...

I'm off to try to find something constructive to do today.  My Muse must be on vacation because inspiration has completely abandoned me.  I may just end up sitting in the studio, staring at the chaos and wondering how it all began...