Five years.

I certainly didn’t mean to be away from blogging that long. And I’ve almost come back a couple times in the last year or so. The problem has always been a lack of time. And the daily choice of making time for art first. The bad news is that it took me this long to get back to a point where I am creating much closer to daily. The good news is that I am now creating much more consistently and much more regularly. Enough that I feel fairly confident that I can both create art and find some time leftover to blog about it and the process.

My last post was in 2012. Sometime in 2013 I made my first art journal. It took me lots of fits and starts, but sometime late last year I roughly finished it. Meaning outside of a page or two and some touches I would like to add to the cover, it is done. And I have started a number of other art journals or altered books, generally in different styles or formats and sporadically work in all of them. These art journal pages sometimes lead to a canvas or finished piece outside of a journal format. But art journaling has taken up most of my creative time and space in the last couple years.



Journey

This particular page is from an altered book I am slowly working on - an old Time book about birds. Slow because these pages generally require more prep time and gesso, while most of my other journals have a combo of blank pages and ones that already have a layer or two of paint to start from.

 

Stretching Time

 

And this is one from my current journal - a Moleskin watercolor album (8.5 x 12" landscape).

I picked these pages to jump back in with because they both touch on time as a theme and they pretty much sum up the art journaling process for me: a mish-mash of images, memories, paint, and words thrown together in layers. My pages are rarely planned out ahead of time and these are no exception.

I still knit and sew. Part of the impetus for the return to blogging is that on Friday, my little Husquavarna Viking 100 gave out for good after 12 years, lots of blogger entries, and somewhere north of 50 quilts. But never fear! I promptly got to work finding her replacement.

A Janome Memory Craft 6300 Professional arrives on Wednesday and I’ve already got a couple projects lined up and waiting to break her in.

In the meantime, excuse my dust while I refresh the blog, remind myself how to do all that coding for buttons and stuff, and get back into the swing of posting. Expect a mix of current and old projects, a bit about process, and hopefully a little inspiration here and there.