art shanties

Another reason to love Minnesota:  The Art Shanties Project on Medicine Lake.  From the Art Shanties Project Website:

Art Shanty Projects is a four-week exhibition that is part sculpture park, part artist residency and part social experiment, inspired by traditional ice fishing houses that dot the state's lakes in winter. It is an artist driven temporary community exploring the ways in which the relatively unregulated public space of the frozen lake can be used as a new and challenging artistic environment to expand notions of what art can be. 

The reflection shanty (first three pictures) was simply stunning.  You must go if you are in the Minneapolis area!  

in process

I've never been big on talking about process.  It's not that I'm secretive or anything, it's just that I'm kind of all about the finished product.  For me the early stages (and sometimes the middle and later ones too) are filled with awkward moments, doubt, and often times struggle and it feels messy and kind of private.  This studio project has been going on for quite some time now and well...it's not done yet.  Of course I'd love to do a big dramatic reveal! and show you my beautifully finished work space with everything in it's place and all the work I'm producing in it.  I'm just not there yet and I don't know when I will be.  Lots of progress has been made (thanks Dad, Benji and Adam!) but there is still floor finishing, priming, painting and furniture to figure out.  It's a small space and I'm asking a lot of it:  I need a dedicated drawing space, a sewing area and lots of storage space.  I have a plan and I think it can be done.

I'd like to say that the studio project is the reason I haven't been posting much here on the blog but that's not really true.  I have plenty of things I'd like to be sharing here but I'm feeling an aversion to it all for some reason.  I know I'll be back at it soon enough but I guess in just in one of those kind of messy, kind of private process times and that brings out my natural hermit-like tendencies.

spun cotton

Boy oh boy have I been scarce around here lately.  The holidays seem to have sent me into temporary hermit mode at least as far as this blog goes but I did want to share some projects and highlights from the holidays with you.  We made a lot of our presents again this year.  My husband's homemade bitters totally stole the show but these worked out pretty well too:

This year I wanted to find something new and fun and having nothing to do with sewing.  I tried my hand at spun cotton ornaments using two video tutorials I found on Martha Stewart This one for spun cotton Easter bunny decorations and this one for spun cotton mushroom clip ornaments.  I found both the tutorials to be easy to follow and I had a lot of fun trying a new medium.  I found the animals to be a little trickier than the mushrooms which were relatively simple.  I can tell spun cotton is something that definitely takes some time and practice to get good at but even though mine were kind of wonky, I liked how they turned out.  I usually tend to gravitate towards work that is really detail oriented so these were refreshing in that I was forced to embrace a looser less "perfect" result.

I did a few things differently than the way they were done in the tutorials.  For the mushrooms I opted for hanging them instead of using clips as I'm not a big fan of clip ornaments (they always seem to flop over if they have any weight or bulk at all) and instead of using glitter I used some beautiful vintage mica flakes found here for a slightly more subtle sparkly effect.  I also added little vintage glass beads and paper flags.