“Creativity is contagious, pass it on” – Albert Einstein

I'm pretty much a meat and potatoes person when it comes to clothing. My favorite outfits consist of jeans and a blue,long sleeved shirt. I roll up the sleeves and put on the most comfortable shoes I can find, be they Berkie's, boots or Keens, and I'm good to go.
But, I appreciate folks who have the imagination and the fortitude to wear "OUTRAGEOUS"  and do it well.
At *Art is You* I saw so many people who seem to be able to pull off really amazing outfits. Some were really wild and some... just looked great in an interesting and artful way.

This was Lorri-Marie Jenkins. 

She is an artist and lives in Benicia, CA. She decided to have her hair done in dreadlocks a few years ago. When this wasn't enough, she started wrapping her dreads in bright wool fleece which, after many washings, have become one with her hair (felted). Amazing! I love it!

This was our master of ceremonies... Rice Freeman-Zachery
She is one of the most inspirational artist that I have listened to. She always makes me feel good about finding the "artist" inside.

I didn't get a clear photo of her this year so I appropriated one from Google images. Even this one is not really clear. It's probably because she never stops moving. But, look at that red hair, the tattoos and the red tutu.

OH, yes... tutu's. Which brings me to another dynamo... Carrie Clayden.
This is her with my sister.

And this is the bottom half of her with one of her signature TUTUs on.

Carrie owns Hip Chick Designs in Benicia, CA.
She was even selling tutus at the Trunk show and sale on Saturday night.

She taught the Pet Portrait workshop that my sister took. She always wears wonderful handmade outfits that have "ARTIST" written all over them.

Then we saw this amazing shirt... in the lobby one day.
This woman was one of the attendees that looked great in a very subdued and creative way. She said that her top was a creation of VonksArt on Itsy and a "adornment" artist named Vainca Bauman.  Here's the link.
There was even a class at *Art is You* that was taught by Lorri Scott on re- purposing clothing and an impromptu fashion show of what people made in her class. I just couldn't take all the classes that I wanted to. This is one I missed. Maybe next year. I took a Nuno Felting class from her two years ago. She's a great teacher.

 

 This woman, above, was more the style statement that I like. More subdued... but creative and eye catching.

I'm sure that I missed a lot of artist and creative outfits.... they were everywhere.

My point to all of this is that you don't have to hide your wild clothing... that beautiful scarf or crazy pair of shoes... in your closet.

Wear what makes you feel good. Sew it, paint it, decoupage it and glue things to it. Make it say something about you.

Dye your hair orange if you want to. Get that tattoo.

Life is short. Be brave and wear your adornments proudly. 

Go ahead and draw with markers on an old pair of jeans.

Rice can't leave her husband alone . She paints everything. These are his famous jeans. He is our resident ~Art is You~ photographer.

So... what are you going to redo, this week?
What can you create that says something about yourself?

“Think left and think right
 and think low and think high.
 Oh, the things you can think up
 if only you try” – Dr. Seuss

 

Wild Things

Oh, the fun I had at ~ART IS YOU~ in Petaluma, CA. My sister and I arrived at the Sheration Sonoma Hotel on Tuesday afternoon so we would be ready for our first class on Wednesday morning.
Sis and I only took one class together so we shared a room, but went our separate ways during the day.
My first class was Clarissa Callesen's class called Steampunk Sally... where we recycled an already constructed doll.
This is one of Clarissa's dolls. A wonderful example of the "Steampunk" concept.

Remember the dolls that I took with me?

See the little doll with the blue striped outfit, white lace apron and dark hair? When striped down to the basics, she ended up looking like this... after the gesso, some butane fire and walnut ink, acrylic paint and body tats. The parts can't be plastic for this technique or they will melt during the burning. They have to be resistant to heat, like porcelain.

 But she just didn't look like a "steampunk" personality. She looked more like a Santos doll.
Also, this doll (and I now believe that they all do) has a distinctive personality. She is not a happy one. She's Joan of Ark, she's Hester Prynne after the fall from grace.
Something is not right with her. If I were giving her a "story", I would say that she is physically not well. She has a hump on her back and her spine is crooked.  She can only stand and finds sitting difficult. She is a complicated woman, but one that is resigned to her fate.
So, I will not be making her into a "steampunk" doll. She may stay the way she is... but I think that I will give her some clothing and let her live out her life, somewhere quiet and safe, in some corner of my home.
I will work on another doll with the leather, wires and goggles of the steampunk genre.

This doll has had quite enough.
(I do know one thing. I now understand why I didn't want dolls when I was a child. Stuffed bears and other fuzzy creatures were fine but not dolls. They always scared me a little and I think they might have tiny minds of there own.)

*******************

On Thursday, my sister joined me for a second class with Clarissa Callesen. This one was called "Wild Things". We had a fun and wonderful time .
This was one of Clarissa's examples.

There is no end to what you can do with a doll and a stuffed animal. It's fun and creative. You get to play with body parts like Henry Frankenstein... in the classic movie. Remember?... " Look! It's moving. It's alive. It's alive... It's alive, it's moving, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive, IT'S ALIVE"
I'm sure that line was running around in our heads as we created these amazing creatures. I heard it!
 I took the stuffed gray mouse, cut out the nose, eyes and paws.

And added some doll parts .Clarissa calls it "creative surgery" and "transplantation". Sounds like Dr. Frankenstein, doesn't it? Then we repainted the faces. We had already Gessoed the heads, arms and legs, carefully wrapping the cloth parts in foil because we burned the gesso with a butane torch to make it bubble and darken. We also used Walnut ink to age the burnt gesso even more.

Then we learned to paint faces. This was a real learning curve for me but very satisfying.The face below was not completed when I took the picture. This is a process that requires time and careful attention to detail.

 Clarissa showed us all the techniques of face painting right down to putting a sparkle in their eyes and a blush in their cheeks.

Here she is... Miss Marsha Minnie Mouse, named after my Mom's sister who was a very pretty lady and, although I never knew her, because she died when she was 18 years old, I loved the name.

I need to do some finishing touches on her arms and add some embellishments but she is basically done. I love her sweet expression.

My sister started with this doll.

And created this unique piece of art.

Sis wants to work on attaching the fur to the shoulders. This doll shows too much frontal exposure. Can't keep her dress on. Maybe she was Gypsy Rose Lee in a former life. But look at this face...

I love this face.
This was a cuddly, creepilicious class that created some amazing art dolls.You can see more of what Clarissa Callesen does here... and here.

Tomorrow we go into Petaluma for lunch. It's a charming little town on the Petaluma River that has a lot of history with chickens.

Taste of the Arts

Saturday I spent the day helping the Art Council with their yearly "Taste of the Arts" workshops. This is my third year being a part of this creative day.

We always have a good time but it's a lot of work for our fearless leader Christie.  She is the "teacher" and Mary Jane (who is a gourd artist and who I pick blackberries with in the summer) and I are her humble assistants.This year we taught three classes with 15 adults and high school students in each class.

We started with a lot of clean dry gourds.

The students pick one that they like. Christie introduces us and  talks about where gourds come from, how they grow and what we will do with them.
Then the fun begins...

They take a look at the finished gourds we bring (our own) to show what can be done with practice and many different kinds of techniques.

We show them the paint, glue, scissors, beads, feathers, glue guns, and all the embellishments that they will have available to decorate the gourd.
Then we let them be as creative as they want to be. It's so fun to see what they do. I'm convinced that everyone has a creative streak in them.
Some begin cautiously, start slowly and then get into it.

And some jump right into it.

Eventually we find that each person creates their own unique piece of art.
We guide, answer questions, help with the glue guns or hold a gourd steady while they glue something in place. It's so interesting to see how amazingly creative all of these folks can be.

These are some of the finished gourds.

 The beautiful gift from the sea.

 The charming beaded bird house.

This gourd basket, bought at a thrift store, was brought to the class to be "repurposed" and decorated for this lady's collection of crystals and stones.

One person wanted to make a gourd instrument or facsimile with a long gourd, shells and string. It was beautiful when she finished.

We set out some rabbit skins... which were more popular than we had imagined. By the final class, the supply was almost depleted and it looked like a bear attack on the sink..

This man, who came with his whole family, created a wonderful creature using the fur for its hair and a white mustache as well. He and his son had a great time working together on these gourd heads. The fur was flying.

This gourd was my personal favorite. I love a more natural look using nature's embellishments.  It also happen to be a gourd that I had in my living room for a long time. I had a personal attachment to it. The artist did it proud. I was so happy to see what the gourd finally decided to "become." In all the time that it sat in my house, it never told me what it wanted to be but, obviously, it told this lady everything.

There is an old adage in gourd art. It says that the gourd will tell you what it wants to be. This one waited, found the right person and look what happen.

 I'm a little sad that it didn't do this for me, but this woman was so happy with what she created that I felt it was meant to be for her... and the fulfilled gourd.
I think I better start listening more closely to some of the gourds that I have laying around the house.


We thought that all of the gourds were creative and wonderful, but this was our Best of Show...

It went, in our opinion, to a 16 year old with a flair for the Gothic, lord of the darkside ... "with a twist".  He said that the birds were for balance within the split personality. After he was finished, he decided this small gourd "being" needed a hat so he created "Le chapeau" out of two shells. He had a vision and wasn't afraid to express it.
When do we loose this ability to express ourselves so uniquely? When do we lose the ability to be unchecked and free with ideas and creativity? Society and our upbringing tend to put constraints on liberal, (I'm talking about being creative in thought here, not politics.) and original inventiveness. What an injustice we do to creative youngsters. Maybe children (and the resulting adult) would be happier if they were allowed more freedom of observation and creative expression and less of being given established, "safe" choices. Enough Farmlady?
 This young man was so happy about his "creation". Others might not understand his concept, but he did. It was his expression of his ideas.
Someone gave this boy a gift from the start. A gift of being creativity without   "a reason" or "a purpose"... or an in depth explanation of its value. I admire that kind of parenting in some ways. It's a fine line between giving a child some freedom of thought and expression and still maintaining some boundaries.
His gourd art is different... creative... inventive and his own.The ears are buttons. The fur is dyed  rabbit. We thought that this was the most creative gourd art for the day. This young man was really pleased with his work.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954)

We had a very creative time.

Wordless Wednesday: Creative "Beans" (my Grandchildren)

Shades of Magnolia Pearl

I took this class with the highest of hopes. I waited all weekend, with anticipation, for this all day Nuno Felting class at the Art Is...You Retreat and I was not disappointed.
I think we all came into this room with the desire to learn something about this amazing form of felting.

To create a beautiful scarf out of pieces of fabric and wool fleece.

This is Lorri Scott. She was our instructor. She is a self-taught fiber artist. She transforms silk, fabrics, yarns and ribbon into wearable art creations. She lives in Santa Cruz, CA. With the assistance of her sister, she  guided all of us into the world of Nuno felting and by the end of the day we all had a beautiful scarf that we would proudly wear out into the real world.
The process of Nuno felting is long, rather complicated and physically demanding. First you lay bubble wrap on a towel. Then you lay out the pieces of fabric that you want to piece together. They can be odd shapes or long strips.
When you get the design you want, you "glue" them together with small amounts of wool fleece which will eventually adhere all the pieces together with the wool backing that you layer on top of the fabric. This is a very simplistic way of telling you how the process goes but there are plenty of online videos that explain this in detail. Just google Nuno felting and marvel at the amazing process.
Lorri first had us do a small piece (about 6x8 inches after felting) that taught us the process of Nuno (which means cloth in Japanese) felting.

When we were comfortable with this we started laying out the pieces for our scarfs.
I was so busy I didn't take any photos of the process... beginning to end. Darn! I'm sorry I didn't. It would have been the best way to show you what each part entailed.
When the scarf was laid out and everything was in place, we wet the whole thing with soapy water, rolled it up and started the felting process... to MUSIC. Lorri had some good music to roll with.  FELT AND ROLL... FELT AND ROLL..
You do this for at least two songs before you stop, unroll it and check it to see if the wool is sticking to the fabric. If not, then you roll it back up and FELT AND ROLL SOME MORE.  It takes about six to eight songs  before you're done.... if you're lucky. You can use a timer or count to 1000 or some other creative way of passing the time, but good music would be my choice. If you have ITunes... Perfect.
You'll have good strong arm muscles if you do many of these scarfs.
When you get tired of rolling with you hands and arms, you can put the roll down on the floor, sit in a chair and roll with your feet.
I think this art is the answer for people who don't like to exercise other ways. This exercise also gives you a sense of accomplishment and produces something besides sweat. Well, you may sweat a little. You are going to have sore muscles but you'll have a lovely scarf in the end.
After the rolling.. there is the hot water in a bag and slapping the fabric around on  the table or floor. It's good for ridding yourself of pent up anger and  ugly feelings.
Then you rinse and towel dry.
Then you scrunch and roll until the fabric is all drawn together.
It's fun to watch what happens.
When your arms are ready to fall off, you're probably done.
Lorri had us throw the scarfs in the hotel dryer so they would be dry in time for dinner and knock every one's socks off.
Here are some  closeups of samples that Lorri brought... to inspire us.

Talk about Gypsy colors...

And using lots of lace.

I will have to try a scarf with lines of fabric like this on (on the left). I like the look.

Then we had to show off our finished scarves. These were done by the students in the class.
They are so varied and beautiful...

What a way to use up your scraps of fabric. If the fabric is silk, nylon, muslin or any fabric that you think is loose and open enough to felt through... it's usable.

I love this one. The student used lots of pieces of fabric and almost drew a picture with the pieces. She must be a painter.

And finally my completed scarf. Again, I didn't take a picture in the class so when I got home I staged my own photo shoot.

 Yes... Shades of Magnolia Pearl.
The ends of the scarf are lace curtains. Lorri recommended leaving them on the end and only felting them where they attached to the scarf. I really like this idea.
It's all lacy and open and... well... like Magnolia Pearl would make it.
Lorri modeled the scarf in the classroom and almost didn't give it back. I took this as a compliment.
What do you think? Pretty?

This is a close up of the main part so you can see how the felting shrinks but the fabric doesn't. When this happens the fabric gets pulled together and makes this new, interesting, textural  construction.

I asked my grandson to model the scarf when I stopped by on my way home.
He wanted to keep it. Somehow it didn't quite go with his tie dyed tea shirt. So...

I brought it home to the farm. Maybe I'll use it over a window. Can't you just see how beautiful it would be with the sun shining through it.
And maybe I'll wear it for the holidays.

*****************************

Art Is... You Retreat  was a wonderful adventure and widen my artistic awareness.

I'm never going back to being passive and unmoved by life. It's just too much fun to get my hands dirty... to be excited about things.
Life is too short to stand at the edge of the pool. I finally want to learn how to swim... in the deep end.
What ever you do... do it with passion.
The word is PASSION...
and the color is any color you want.