Page 123 – Elliebelly Knit & Dye Works

Forgive Me Father…

Posted on September 27, 2007 by Joyce Makes Art

Forgive me father, for I have sinned. It has been ~~over a week~~ a very long time since I last engaged in a yarn binge. I fell off the wagon today.

You see, I’ve been having a bad week. Tired, playing catch up at work, laid low by seasonal allergies, all these things. And, I forgot to say, raising teenagers. I won’t bore you with the details, because I’m sure you get it.

I went to my local yarn store (it is so wonderful it is worth a trip to Birmingham, but you can see the website here) because Donna, the store owner, ~~realized I was a moron and I wasn’t going to be able to free-hand cut out a lining for my jacket and get it in there right~~ offered to cut out the lining and serge the edges for me.

The lining is really pretty. It looks like this.

It’s hard to get a picture of a partially knit jacket with the lining stuffed into it that looks like something you would ever be willing to claim as your own work, so I sort of pushed in the sleeves and mocked it up so you can see how cute it will be when it is finished.

I think Ellie is going to love it and I am praying she hasn’t outgrown it yet.

Which gets us back to praying, and me needing to ask for forgiveness. You see, it was sort of an out-of- control binge thing once I set foot in the door.

Last week, while I was at Knitch to hear the Yarn Harlot speak, I saw this Rowan pattern book and fell in love with the sweater on the cover. It’s called Anise. I knew it was meant for me the minute I saw it.

I’m sure I’ll look just like the model in it. Really. At least I hope so, because I bought the yarn for it and can’t wait to cast on.

It’s such a soft, pretty color. And I’ll have lots of airplane time next week.

At the counter I bumped into a woman who was knitting this cool Noni bag.

Very cool, no? I decided to go ahead and get yarn for it too. A girl can never have too many airplane projects. You have no way of knowing when you’ll be stranded on a runway for hours at a time. I would hate to run out of knitting. I don’t think I will now.

All in all, it was a pretty sinful lunch hour for me. I’ve got to go to bed early so I can get up early and start casting on!

Wednesday Stamper

Posted on September 26, 2007 by Joyce Makes Art

I woke up a little bit early this morning and decided to spend some time in the studio, working on a design for the Moo card swap I’m in. I played with a few different designs before coming upstairs. I sat down at the computer to check on email and see the new theme for the week at Wednesday Stamper. I was delighted to see that Belinda had listed Moo cards as the theme for the week and honored that she had linked to my blog for examples!

Here is the link to my original Moo card post.

And here are a few of the pieces I played around with this morning.

I like working in this small size and am playing with rich background textures, with layers of paint and rubber stamping, and also with layering transparencies on top of one another.

I can’t wait to see everyone else’s Moo cards!

More From Serenbe

Posted on September 24, 2007January 4, 2016 by Joyce Makes Art

I didn’t have an internet connection after the first night at Serenbe, so I’m just now getting around to showing you more pictures.

Part of the fun was sitting around Friday night looking at each other’s art. Kathy had brought along Susie LaFond’s Pock-et-ful round robin book. It is house-shaped and is a real treasure. I understand why several of the artists have had a hard time sending it on to the next person.

Andi and Lesley had a great time looking through it.

We all stayed up way too late and had lots of fun. We woke up to a beautiful walk through the grounds and the garden to get to breakfast in the main house.

Even the gates and fences had a beautiful patina of lichen on them.

We spent the morning doing Catherine’s Altered Book Class. She is a fantastic teacher and really does a great job of teaching you little techniques along the way. Most of all, I was impressed with her comfort with letting each artist follow their own vision — she isn’t at all wrapped up in having people make what she has set for the class and seemed to really enjoy the variations people came up with while using the same materials. These are the books we made, all lined up, so you can see the little differences in them.

I love my little book (it’s the top right hand corner) and had just enough time to do a quick little spread, using a bible verse Karen’s sister Lauren had brought along. It is from the book of Isiah and reads, "My kindness shall not depart from thee."

Our other class on this day was called "Silhouettes" and involving putting layers of paints and washes and glazes, along with texturized and stamped layers, on copies of vintage dresses, then embellishing them. I thought this was the class I was least likely to enjoy– but I was wrong about that! The class was perfect for my love of heavily layered backgrounds and Catherine uses some wonderful techniques. Here are my dresses, part way completed. I’m hoping to finish and frame them later this week.

Here is one of Robin’s dresses that I thought was beautiful.

We were all pretty exhausted after our long day, but I did manage a visit with the baby animals

and with this really cute little lizard.

I’ll upload the remainder of my pictures from Serenbe tomorrow. I’m still trying to recover from all the excitement and restore my house to normal.

The First Night At Serenbe

Posted on September 22, 2007 by Joyce Makes Art

We’re at Serenbe — it’s incredibly wonderful. The setting is beautiful and it is always so nice to be with good friends!

Before I tell you about it, I want to share a couple of pictures Elizabeth emailed this afternoon from our Yarn Harlot adventure.

This is the three of us, Karen, me, and Elizabeth, standing in front of some of the beautiful roving upstairs at Knitch before the speech.

Here we are, waiting in the auditorium. And that is me, holding up what appears to be a gargantuan sock, although in reality, it is sized for (I hope and pray) a nine year old girl.

I have never seen so many people knitting socks in one place before!

Shifting gears, we arrived at Serenbe, somewhere south of Atlanta and in the middle of nowhere, late in the afternoon. It’s a wide open stretch of farm land with cows and lots of other animals roaming around.

It is really beautiful. There are flowers everywhere.

There are beautiful roses all across the grounds, and the scent of roses, mingling with mint, which grows in abundance.

We have a series of rooms in the Lake House. The rooms are cozy and nice, but best of all, we have a large interior room and lots of screened porches to laze around in. Tonight, we did a quick project together, and then put together our memento books — the books I did the pages I pictured earlier this week for. The art in these books is incredible. I’ll try and post photos of as many of the pages as possible later this week. Here is a photo of me, Robin, and Karen after we got settled in.

We walked over to the main house, where the restaurant and our classroom are located. On the way, we discovered that there are lots of creatures, big and small, populating the grounds. I’ll leave you with two favorite pictures.

First, this beautiful butterfly, who was difficult to photograph — he led me on a merry chase into the sticky bushes.

And second, for Ellie, who wants a goat — an entire herd of them came running out to great us as we passed their enclosure.

It has been a long and lovely day. I’m going to sleep now, so I can get up bright and early for our first class tomorrow.

Yarn. Yarn for Sale.

Posted on September 21, 2007 by Joyce Makes Art

I’ve been a bad blogger this week, but it has been quite a week. I’ve been working away from home, which always gets me a little out of kilter. I did manage to hear the Yarn Harlot speak Wednesday night in Atlanta. I even got one of my books signed. I was at the tail-end of the autograph line (you can imagine how exhausted she was after speaking and signing books for 700 people), and although Stephanie was clearly showing signs of being a famous author on a multi-city trip, she was still nice and funny.

Pictures should be forthcoming shortly, since Elizabeth was smart enough to bring along her camera. The speech was great. The amazing thing was running into SO many people from Birmingham, including a whole crewe from my local yarn shop and a really great woman who lives around the corner (lunch date. she’s going to help me with spinning, too). It was a fun night in the middle of a hectic work week!

This weekend I’ll be off at the Serenbe art retreat. We’re leaving late afternoon. While I’m gone, please visit my shop and buy some yarn. It will give me no end of happiness to boss around the Judge, who is going to be shipping your yarn while I’m gone, so he can see just how much detail and attention is required to make a pretty package, do labels, and get the right yarn in the mail. (Hmmmm….on second thought, you may want to wait until I get home on Monday.)

Seriously, there are some nice skeins of silk and cashmere and some very pretty blue faced leicester over-dyes in the Elliebelly at Hyena Cart shoppe this week, with more on the main site. So please do drop by.

Getting Ready For Serenbe

Posted on September 18, 2007 by Joyce Makes Art

I’m slowly getting ready for the art retreat at Serenbe this weekend. My Memento Book pages are done, so I thought I would share a few of them. They are all originals, front and back, but with a consistent theme. I think they look a lot better in real life, since my new scanner and I are still not all that good of friends, but I’m happy with the pages.

Here they are in progress. After the background was painted on a large sheet of watercolor paper, I cut it up into 5.5" pages. I laid it out and started playing. I really had no ideas about where this was going.

While I was looking at the squares, the phrase "art is where my heart is" popped into my head. I decided I needed big hearts. I used some pages from an old ledger I have. The pages are funny — they have a sort of blue tint and don’t really look old although the handwriting is beautiful and spidery. I cut out free hand hearts and then doctored them with moonshadow inks and some splatters of white paint.

This is the difference between the original pages (the white/blue cast) and the more sepia tones after I tinted the hearts.

With the hearts in place, I pulled out the file with my favorite transparencies in it, some vintage images from Paper Whimsy. I cut a few out roughly and put them down to see how they worked.

They seemed to have the right feel, so I hunted through my transparency sheets to find an image for each of the 11 pages I was making. I decided to overstamp the backgrounds with white text, stamped randomly. I also added a stamped bee in the left hand-corner of the heart (for Serenbe).

A little lace went onto the bottom of each page and I added tags with my original thought, "art is where my heart is." I’m hoping the tag will peek out from the edge of the book just a bit.

Here are a few of the final pages, including the back.

Lazy Weekend

Posted on September 16, 2007 by Joyce Makes Art

It’s what passes for a lazy weekend in our house. We’ve been playing all weekend long.

I always play with yarn, but have been playing with it in somewhat different ways this weekend and doing things like this, which probably appeal to no one but me. But I’ve been amusing myself greatly with strange photography.

Ollie wanted to paint, which suited me just fine because I had some pages to work on.

He’s the only four year old I know who prefers Golden’s to store brand paint and likes to use pure pigment to watercolor with. Clearly, I’ve created a monster.

While he painted away, I worked on my pages for the Serenbe retreat with Catherine Moore that Shirley has put together for next weekend. I can’t wait ! I showed you the background paper I painted for my pages earlier last week, and here are the backs in progress.

We’re also still bathing in the warm afterglow of two birthdays. Proof that you can rock a teenagers world was the grin on our 17 year old’s face when we tossed him the keys to his first car. It’s a 1999 Jeep Cherokee, with 92,000 miles on it. The money he’s been saving towards a downpayment will have to go towards new tires. You would think we had given him the moon!

I survived Miss Ellie’s nine-year old sleepover party. Her friends are all angels and we had lots of fun together. The highlight for me was serving them tea, using my china and linens. The girls rose to the occasion. Everyone drank tea, tried the cucumber sandwiches, and then switched over to pretzels and chicken salad on croissants.

It seems to be very nice, being nine. Especially when you have new socks to look forward to!