RED tip-in swap

RED tip-in swap
Originally uploaded by ethelbertina.

Here's one my recent swap items for a swap through http://www.swap-bot.com/

It was "red" themed, and I thought about these pin up girls that I got from a clearance calendar a while back. I started out painting the cardstock black, then stenciled on clear acrylic medium, and then went over it all with red paint. Ended up giving me the look of flocked wallpaper which I think works really nicely with the image. A few stickers, and some buttons and bows, and I was pretty happy with these.

BLUE tip-in swap

BLUE tip-in swap
Originally uploaded by ethelbertina.

Am sending off today some swaps I participated in through http://www.swap-bot.com/.

This is the one I did for the "blue" themed swap. It's painted sheet music ("The Land of the Sky Blue Water") which has been stenciled, sanded, and glazed with glitter and highlighted with silver pen. The photo is one of a local state park I took one afternoon during a hike.

Hopefully my swap parters will like it.

Yard Sales and Thrift Stores are Great Places

I don't usually stop at yard sales... too much guilt and pressure if I don't find anything to buy -- but while we were out and about Saturday my friends and I checked out a sale and I ended up netting two great bargains! A plastic lidded shoebox filled with craft stuff -- mostly paint, but some glitter, brushes, and a box of beads and buttons ... all for $1.50. Plus I found a little curio display unit with little sections for 50 cents. Who could pass that up?? Now, as you can see, I just need to DUST it!!

Great Loot eh? We though about sticking around as the kids were up in the second story of the house lowering more stuff down with a rope. You never know what more might have come out of that window, right? But we were off to the movies so JB could sleep through "The DaVinci Code."



Plus, earlier in the day I scored some cute "vintage" shoes, a blank book with black paper, a book, and some red and white trim at the local thrift store

June Spread - Altered Calender Round Robin

So this June page was a bit of a challenge. The "assignment" was to take works by Robert Rauschenberg and alter them to create a whole new work of art inspired by the original work of art. First off was to do a little reading on this artist that I didn't know much about.

http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/rauschenberg_robert.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Rauschenberg

I wish I had thought to snap the orginal, but alas... I'm bad with that kind of thing. I can't find a picture on mr. internet right now, but it was basically an aspirin tablet and the words 'fast pain relief' ... and since I get a lot of headaches, it seemed the logical project to tackle.

I had a hard time deciding how to begin, so eventually I just had to plunge in. I grabbed a magazine, and just started ripping out anything that I thought remotely harkened back to the original artwork. Then I started cutting and pasting. Eventually, I had this:

Hiatus

So here I am back to making a blog entry. Been away trying to integrate a second job into my life, which takes up a lot of time!! But recently I've been making more of an effort to make myself get "crafty" or "arty" or just plain "creative." To that end I've found myself signing up for a lot of swaps on the various Yahoo Groups that I belong to, and eventually I woke up and realized that it was my way of making myself get into the studio and do STUFF.

So despite the long evening and weekend hours at the "Big Store" getting cashiers elbow and the days in front of a desk wishing it was my crafting or sewing table... here's what I've been churning out/thinking about/working on...

(In no particular order)

altered calendar - february pages

Here are some pictures of the february spread I did in the altered calendar RR I'm in. I didn't really know where I was going with the art when I started. I found the red background fabric remnant which I'd picked up at a yard sale. It's hard to see in the picture, but it has a nice fan shaped ripple pattern that lent itself to this piece. Then I found a scrap of lace that was almost in the shape of a heart. So I ripped it in half to start out with a broken heart, but as I worked on the piece it ended up being more like a mended heart. The lace has been embellised with glitter, paint, sequins and beads. I seem to be working more with fabric lately. Also, I didn't really want to put quite so many danglies on the page... but it made me :0) I like the ambiguity of it quite a lot. Is it damaged, is it mended, is it whole? What does it say to you?

The calendar grid page is just some daily doodles and scraps to tell about my days.

a few more pictures from a friend of a friend

Bush House Retrospective

excerpt of an article which was published July 18 in the Centre Daily Times, part of the "Looking Back" series. It is an account of Daniel G. Bush and the building of the Bush House, a historic Bellefonte structure that was destroyed by fire this morning.

...Linn, in his monumental "History of Centre and Clinton Counties, Pennsylvania," published in 1883, described the hotel.

"The building has a front of one hundred and forty-five feet on High Street, with wings of one hundred and twenty feet each. It is built of brick, four stories high, and contains one hundred and twenty-five sleeping apartments, with ample accommodations for three hundred guests. The house is supplied with all modern conveniences and is thoroughly ventilated. Halls twenty feet wide extend the entire length of the building. Every floor (is) supplied with cold spring water and hot and cold baths."

The first floor, according to Thomen' account, housed a drugstore, a grocery store, a newspaper office, a bookstore, a plumbing establishment, a tobacconist, a barber shop and a restaurant.

The Bush House was one of what Linn called "three prominent hotels of Bellefonte," the others being the Brockerhoff House and the Garman House.
The Bush House cost, by Linn's estimate, $60,000 to build and was "one of the most perfectly appointed, as well as one of the most commodious, hotels in Central Pennsylvania."

**Just as a note -- the other two hotels are still around. The Brockerhoff House is now low income senior housing, and the Garman House is now a local bar and apartments.

Landmark Loss

Here's today's tragedy in our little town...

Calendar RR Pages

Along with my sketching I've been getting an altered calendar ready to go off on a 12 month voyage across the land. Had a lot of fun getting these pages ready, and am looking forward to seeing the other 11 calendars as they come to me to be worked in.

Jan 8

Saw parts of an odd movie combo... "Legally Blonde" and "The Shawshank Redemption"

The sketch of "Red" is sorta lousy -- proportion wise at least -- but I still think it captured something of Morgan Freeman's character.

Jan 7

From another movie about teens and dancing... "Save the Last Dance"

Jan 6

Day 5

reading, eating salsa and chips, and watching the Daily Show... typical!

Day 4

Couldn't draw fast enough to get more of the costumes from "Center Stage"... but I did get the one ballet outfit from the recital (or part of it). Plus the ever present Daniel hunched up in the corner of the sofa. Folds of fabric are still a bit beyond me (he's laying on a quilt).

Day 3

my kitty in the bathroom sink... and my toothbrush and toothpaste. The glass is like ones we used to get jelly in at the grocery store.

Day 2

Sketching from the TV is a good exercise for me I think as it forces me to get to it. The images don't stay around for too long, so get that pen onto the paper. Trying not to judge any of these sketches too harshly -- too much judgement is no good!

but of course my kitty creeps into the sketches as well!

New Year's Resolution

So here it is 2006, and thanks to all the encouragement of the Everyday Matters group, I am going to try and sketch something everyday... so I bought a pad of newsprint and am keeping it near the TV so that I have ready subjects.

So here is day one --

new journal - back to the land of composition books

I always like starting a new journal. Just like starting a trip somewhere, it is full of possibilities. In an attempt to use up what I've got before purchasing new stuff, I'm back to a composition book. I've always liked working in them. They are super sturdy, lay flat (I hate to fight with a book while I'm working on it), and they don't seem to mind getting all fat and gluey.

I've been trying over the past few months to concentrate on the visual rather than the verbal. For me, I was just getting tired of pages and pages of whining... so I told myself I had to express whatever I wanted to express visually, and if I could work words into the page with the images, OK.

So far there's not alot in the new book except for some pages created in response to the December gluebooks prompts... but I do have two "journal" type pages in response to my discovering a squirrel in my house last Saturday, and a trip to the local coffee shop the other night.

Squirrel NutkIN MY HOUSE...



Let's have coffee and talk (caw-fee and tawlk :0)