etc.

Today’s inspiration grid brings together colours, shapes, and designs that resonate with me. A lot of the images are of things in my surroundings that I looked twice at this past week. L-R, from top-left:

• blue squares on a shopping bag
• “Hiruzen”, Alexander Henry fabric (4 yards scored off eBay for so cheap it would make you blush!)
• scattered buttons — there’s something about the shape and design of a button that has always appealed to me.
• colander — some sort of marvel of modern design, plus it helps that this one has a reflective surface (I really don’t want to know what it says about me that I am helplessly drawn to reflective surfaces).
• collage — cover of a journal I made two years ago.
• branches — I caught myself staring at these branches outside our kitchen window three evenings in a row last week. This picture was taken around 8pm. I really liked how the sunset bounced off the horizon, illuminating the evening sky.
• croton plant leaf
• rice

When I read that this week’s Illustration Friday theme is “travel”, dragonflies sprang to mind. I doodled dragonflies all week and this one turned out to be my favourite. I couldn’t quite get that bluey/green iridescence that is typical of dragonflies’ wings, but I must admit that I didn’t try terribly hard. I was mostly just going for a happy little dragonfly with bags in his hands, and that’s what I’ve ended up with. What can I say, I’ve learned to set my sights low.

I realized, this week, why the concept of IF appeals to me on such a fundamental level: it gives me a whole new topic to focus my doodles around each week (and I doodle constantly) rather than reworking the same abstractions I have been scribbling, lo these many years! My illustration horizons have expanded.

Inspired by Keri’s Image Quilt, which collects images and textures she responds to, I pulled together what I’ve been calling an inspiration grid. To-day’s inspiration grid is devoted to fabric:

These are all bits of fabric I have collected over the past few weeks (mostly fat quarters), you will probably recognize a few from recent projects. Last night, in an attempt to organize the lot of it, I laid it all out on my work table and it struck me how well the diverse colours and patterns worked together, and how much I enjoyed looking at each of them play off one another. So, I took out my camera, shot some pictures, photoshopped the images together, and the inspiration grid was born. I think I might try for a new inspiration grid every week (probably not just fabric) to keep the senses stimulated and the creativity flowing.

And, in case you’re looking for some stimulation and inspiration yourself to-day, go have a look at the recently-mounted March Month of Softies gallery. It’s always fun to watch how a single theme is interpreted by different creative minds and processes!

Illustration Friday is sort of like Photo Friday, which I have been following for ages, but for illustration: on Friday of each week, the site posts a theme and you have a week to come up with your interpretation of that theme & enter your submission. This week’s Illustration Friday theme is “crowded”, and I’ve been thinking about it all week. Then yesterday, as I waited in a coffee shop drinking tea & knitting while my car was being repaired at the dealership, I doodled this & added some colour to it when I got home:

That was fun, I think I’ll do it again next week!

Feast day of Anastasius the Persian, patron saint of headaches. Also, Francis Bacon’s birthday.

There is at least an inch of fresh snow on the front walk, with more falling still, and I am inside with loose leaf Earl Grey tea steeping in a little brown ceramic pot that the mister brought home from China a few years ago. There is no better tea than that which is brewed in this particular pot.

All the crafting I had planned for the weekend was done before 1 pm yesterday. I stopped in at a craft store on my way home from work on Thursday, bulked up on various supplies, and when I got home I laid it all out on the dining table and planned the weekend’s projects. By the time Friday morning rolled in, it felt a little like Christmas morning — I knew what was waiting for me downstairs and I couldn’t wait to get started!

First, I made a set of wine-themed marble magnets for my sister’s birthday (which is in two days, and the only reason I feel it is safe to unveil them now is because she doesn’t come around here on the weekend, and by the time she does, it will be Monday, and she will already be in possession of her marble magnets & all the other little gifties I’m about to fill you in on). I used Megan’s marble magnet tutorial and was so very pleased with the results that I made a batch for our fridge too (the theme for these was unplanned, but emerged as Fashion Fabrics for 2005, since I got all the pictures from the January issue of a fashion magazine, and all those florals are actually dress fabrics. And the crying baby was just a silly graphic that I couldn’t pass on).

Also completed yesterday: a set of potato-stamped note cards. These were a bit more involved than the marble magnets (on account of the sharp instruments and precision carving), but still a lot of fun and quite rewarding. I photographed this exercise in a bit more detail, here’s the start-to-finish.

And finally: a scarf in Classic Elite’s La Gran Mohair, in Pumpkin (#6585), made using this pattern. I like the way this scarf looks now that it’s done, but knitting with mohair was an experience I am not looking forward to repeating. It wasn’t the knitting really, it was just the dry hairball I felt like coughing up after a few minutes of working with this yarn, and also the orange fuzz that adorned me, my couch, the rug, and quite often, one or both of the cats, if they happened to be within a two-foot radius of the offending yarn.

So with all that crafting out of the way, I have the rest of the weekend (which has only just begun!) to work on a bucket hat, read, and pack away our Christmas tree & decorations. Yes, it’s all still up. And yes, that might account for why every morning feels like Christmas morning (which is not such a very bad thing).