Happy Blogiversary To Me!!!

Yes, it’s Damselfly’s One Year Blogiversary today! Celebrate with me!!

Can’t believe I kept it up for a whole year! Handwritten journals or diaries never caught my attention like this. I’d usually run out of steam in less than a week. I have trouble writing on a blank piece of paper but not, for some reason, on a blank screen. Maybe writing with a pen uses a different part of my brain than typing? Or maybe because the pen is more permanent and much harder to edit? I’m afraid of making a mistake that I can’t fix? Dunno, but it’s much easier to type my thoughts than write them. Blogging makes me happy. Hope it makes my small (and sadly very quiet) group of readers happy too!

But then if anybody reads this blog they have to realize that this Damselfly flits all over the place: from knitting to spinning to beadwork to art dolls to sewing to fabric painting to kumihimo to dyeing to my garden and more. My Crafty ADD…er, Ergonomic Crosstraining could make a sane person dizzy! Sometimes it even makes me dizzy. Not often though. It’s my life and I’m livin’ it the best way I know how. I’m trying to avoid the Could’a/Should’a/Would’a Syndrome by making sure I’m enjoying myself as much as possible every day.

This is the book I got yesterday: Off-The-Shelf Fabric Painting by Sue Beevers. I knew about Sue back when she was a weaver and spinner and obviously like me she’s been branching out, shifting focus, and going in new directions. I’ve been doing fabric painting for several years now (on and off as always) but this book, subtitled 30 Simple Recipes For Gourmet Results explores a few techniques I hadn’t thought of. They are very simple but effective, especially when cut up and rearranged into an art quilt or wearable item. Of course I’ve tried monoprinting, stamping, and sun printing with fabric paints but I never thought of wiping your brush with your cloth or putting paint in a bottle with a fine nozzle and drizzling it over the cloth. Or how about painting your plastic-gloved hand and printing with that? She has a number of recipes for simple resist pastes that will crackle in interesting ways. Also some fold and dip techniques that easy to do. As a matter of fact, all the recipes are simple but it’s the layering of different techniques that makes her cloth so attractive to me. I usually stop too soon or go too far. This is a nice balance. I only read a few pages into the book before I realized that I could use Golden Fluid Acrylic paints on cloth. Because they weren’t specifically “fabric paints” I hadn’t thought to use them. They come in luscious colours (especially the iridescents and quinicridones) that thin out when diluted without the pigment particles separating out as the Pebeo Setacolor Transparent fabric paints can do. Golden’s GAC 900 can be used to dilute the fluid acrylics to increase washability. I can find the paints locally but not the GAC 900. Might have to resort to ordering it if I decide I need it.

More wildlife out in the back yard today: a huge gray rat. No it wasn’t a squirrel with mange. This is just getting a bit much when you’re seeing things in the broad daylight that usually sneak around in the dark, doncha think? It’s raining out today on and off so I’m not getting anything done outside. I should have spent more time out there yesterday, but I didn’t. Tough patooties! It can wait until the weather changes back again! (And the rats and skunks go away.) At least most of the stuff is in except the flowers. I’m always more concerned about veggies and herbs than flowers. Not that I don’t like pretty flowers but I can’t eat them — well, most of them. I do eat nasturtiums, borage flowers, some rose petals, the occasional viola…yum.