Day Eighteen

My Lovely came over for dinner today (it's so weird to say that I had my husband over for dinner) and it was so nice to see him! A lot of couples are apart all the time, but I'm not used to it: we got married and then lived in different states for two months which was totally bizarre, but in the year since then we haven't been apart for more than a day or two. After tonight I won't see him for another week or so and while it will suck for that week, after I'm done watching my cousins and he comes home from his ski trip we'll be so glad to see each other that it just might be worth it!

Anyway. I only worked on my rug a little bit today, but since hubby was here, I got a better picture of it- hooray! It's almost a 18 inches in diameter by my estimation.
Again, the great tutorial I followed can be found here.


I also made a bunch of beads made from sculpey. I haven't baked them yet - I'm kind of scared of ruining them. I've never baked sculpey before.
EDIT - I baked them, and they're fine! They look exactly the same though, so I won't post another picture.

You can tell that I'm not in my own house from the gorgeous counter tops and the real hardwood floors.... but it's fine because I love my little house and I know that I'm blessed to have it!

Day Seventeen (and Sixteen?)

This morning I just about had a heart attack when I realized I didn't do any art yesterday. I spent the first half of yesterday packing for my five days living with my cousins while their parents are out of town, and the last half of yesterday receiving mountains of instructions for keeping them alive. I completely spaced (and had zero time even if I'd remembered) doing something creative. I did however pack a bunch of supplies for art-making while I'm here. It's a TOTAL cop-out, but I'm going to count it. And even if I did fail yesterday, I'm not going to let that stop me from continuing like nothing happened. (If I let myself think I failed even one day, I'm a lot more likely to give up on the whole thing. It's happened to me many times).

Today I started something I'm pretty excited about: a rug! For my dining room/kitchen!
I found this great tutorial for cute little coiled baskets [click here], and just adapted it by never coiling upward to make it into a rug. You could also make hot pad/trivet things with this method.

I gathered all the damaged or never worn clothing I could find in my house and brought it here (my aunt and uncle's house) with me. My aunt has five huge trash bags full of yarn that she gave me permission to use - hooray! As soon as the kids were off to school this morning I got to cutting and coiling and looping yarn.

It's only about a foot in diameter after a looong time working on it today. This is something that will take me awhile. Hopefully I can also get a couple small projects in while I work on this so that you don't have to see a slowly progressing project five+ days in a row like you did with the shoe drawing.

And last but not least, please forgive the horrendous photo. Usually I take my pictures with my husband's iPhone, which is not ideal, but still preferable to this... my computer's webcam. AWFUL! Next time I see the hubs (he may come visit me tomorrow or the day after) I will take a better photo.
EDIT: A much better photo can be seen on Day Eighteen

I tried standing on it to get a glimpse of what it will be like in my house, and I love it! It's surprisingly soft. I'm excited!

Day Eight

I finally finished the project I started on day four! (I showed you my mess from this project, but it hadn't dried yet so I made a melodramatic drawing instead).

I can never decide if stuff like this can really be called art, or if it's more just crafts... personally I want to call it crafts. On a larger, more sculptural scale I would call it art. This is could turn into a huge debate centered on the definition of the word "art," but for now I'm just going to say that it's a craft but it's still creative, so I will include things like this in my art a day quest.

My other problem with this project is that it's unoriginal - I saw it on pinterest. Really, very few of the artsy things I do are original at this point. I found a video that taught me how to make the plastic fabric stuff, I saw poetry done on book pages on deviantart a long time ago, and I drew a picture straight from a TV show. I don't know, I'm just having real issues coming up with any ideas of my own. I'm hoping that this blog will help me to be more original along the way, and that researcing other artists will help me to see what I like, and turn that into my own style. I'm reading this great book called How to Steal Like an Artist, by Austin Kleon, that gives great advice on finding inspiration and gradually building your voice as an artist. I'll write a blog post about the book one of these days. I really recommend it.

ANYWAY. My lovely, unoriginal craft for today:

These bowls are made from paper mache using both magazine and dictionary pages, one kind on each side of each of the bowls to create contrast. I put plastic wrap inside bowls I already had and used them as molds for the paper mache. The bowls were completely dry today and I just finished them by cleaning them up a little then applying a coat of mod podge to give them shine!