Something About Nothing

I went to Florida to see the grandchildren and we ended up getting Covid together.  At least half of the family did. Thankfully because of vaccines it wasn't bad. A lot like a bad head cold. My husband tested negative so he flew home as we originally intended. I ended up staying another ten days because I was still coughing and testing positive after five days. I thought I might be able to get a lot of stitching done, or some drawing at least, but feeling sick doesn't always lend itself to anything but sleep and TV. I did spend a little time in my sketchbook.

It's been a week of Mandala drawing. Love the color on this Sepia one. Something new for me.  I find making these mindless and relaxing. The only problem is I'm getting sucked in and not doing anything else. Maybe I just needed a break. 

One of my favorite mindless drawings is to fill shapes with doodles.   I felt like this was a great way to practice drawing on the iPad.

 I have an idea for a quilt in mind that involves cows, so I drew one on the iPad Pro. No idea when this idea will make it to the top of the pile.

 Working on getting this digital drawing down.

My friend, Anneliese , created this lovely drawing and  allowed me to use her drawings as inspiration for a few stamps.  I thought it would be fun to create a repeating pattern from one part of the drawing.  A lovely flower and star. A design I wouldn't have come up with without Anneliese's inspiration.

I rarely make or receive real phone calls anymore, but the other day I found myself on the phone with a pencil in hand.  Of course, that meant I started to doodle.  My usual doodles are cartoon faces, or stars, but for some reason I was feeling very tulip-y. I decided to play with the design a bit more and create a stamp. I'm going to play with this image more! I think I might be getting a bit of spring fever.

Before all the fun of Quilt Market started we had a play day.  Judi pulled out her pfd fabrics, I mixed the dyes and Judy taught us how to dye using quart canning jars.  Something I will be doing again and again! The fabrics were beautiful! Just a few of the dyed fabrics after washing and drying. In between Market and Festival we had a play day making Cyanotype fabrics.   No one in the group had tried this before so we were excited to give it all a try.  It was very simple as we started with fabric that was already pre-treated with the chemicals needed to create these sun-prints. Awaiting instruction in Judi's beautiful studio. Some of the ladies printed out images on transparency sheets, while others drew doodles. I got carried away with the doodles.  The very top doodle that isn't fully in the photo is a collaboration between Judy Gula and I. My doodles. ...

I'm excited to share these newest stencils from Artistcellar with you:   Sacred Geometry 2 . I love me a good stencil and these are four great stencils. I had fun playing with the stencils in lots of different ways. I could break this post down into three blog posts, but I'll share it all here.  I hope you are ready! I wanted to see if I could create a repeat pattern so I pulled out the notebook and traced: I really liked the way the stencil design looked without all of the spaces traced.   I filled in the shapes with zentangly doodles. This was so relaxing. Next, I had to see if I could make a stamp from on the images.   I have been a little obsessed with stamp making lately.   The image was transferred on to the rubber by patting an ink pad over the stencil: I didn't want to waste the corner so I added another part of the stencil there.   No one said the stamp had to be exactly lik...