That time that I won a Provincial art Award...

Well, okay, so I was 4 months getting to my next post… It’s better than 2 years, right?

Anyway, thought I’d share my Arts and Letters experience from back in April!

Here is a pic of me with my wood-block relief print "Self Portrait as a Garden" at The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery in St. John’s, Newfoundland! I was one of 10 winners in the Senior Visual Arts category in the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts and Letters Awards. The piece was on display at the rooms with the other winners and honorable mentions for 2 weeks. It was really cool to have my work hanging in a real live art gallery! :D

So I sent the piece out in November last year for judging, but they don’t get back to you until February! I was sitting at the Harlow bake-sale table in the crossroads at Grenfell with 2 people from the VA program when I got the call telling me I had won the award, I was so excited! I’ve never won ANYTHING before in my life! The bad thing about it was that they tell you you can’t let it become public knowledge until after the Arts and Letters awards are announced publicly in APRIL! Oh No! 2 months!? But I was allowed to tell my mom and dad and they were so proud! I was bursting with excitement.

So in April we drove out to St. John’s, me, mom, dad and Caleb. It was a really fun trip! We went out from Thursday until Sunday. Mom and I did a tonne of shopping, and I got to hang out with a few friends and we went for lunch with my cousin Maria.

On that Saturday evening we went to the Rooms for the award ceremony. It was really interesting! Some winners in the writing categories performed their works, winners in the music category played their songs, and the second floor gallery was covered in art! The really funny thing was that there were pieces there by some of my friends and acquaintances, but I didn’t even know before seeing them because no one was supposed to tell anyone! Doug Gough won in the Senior Poetry category, and Connor Curtis won in the Junior Musical Composition category. Ruha Thurairatnam and Rene Baldwin got honourable mentions in the Senior Art category and their work was hanging on the walls too! Hooray for knowing such talented and awesome people!

Here is the link to all the 2011 Winners: http://www.tcr.gov.nl.ca/tcr/artsculture/artsandletters/2011/winners_2011.html

And just for fun, here’s a pic of Caleb and my Dad lookin’ all spiffy in front of the big Window in the Rooms that overlooks St. John’s harbour:

:)

Time to resurrect the blog!

I don't know why I ever let this blog fall by the wayside! I've been more artsy/craftsy over the past 2 years than ever before in my life, but then again, I've also been more busy too. Hmmm, let's seen what's happened since my last post in 2009!?!?!

Well first of all, I started The Visual Arts Program at Memorial University: Grenfell Campus. I will be going in to third year this September! I'm already half way through! Eeep!

I've come to love print-making. I took courses in relief print, screen print and lithography this year and I love it.

Through my love of print making I won an art award! Woot Woot!

I've been working at school at the Art Gallery which is excellent experience for my art career.

I've picked up a tonne more craft hobbies, I continue to knit, struggle to sew, and I'm always making something.

So its almost summer time here in Newfoundland. I am taking an intersession course in ceramics. It's really awesome. I didn't know what I would think of a sculpture class, but I really enjoy it! My favorite thing is the pottery wheel, but I really need to work to get better at it because right now, I sorta suck.

So I will be updating this blog regularly from now on. I have lots of things to write and post about, so expect an abundance of posts over the next week days as I update about everything that's been going on in my little art/craft world!

Baby shower stuff OR How I made a sweater, and did intarsia all in one week!

My friends Brooke and Pat recently had a baby boy! The baby shower is today so when I got the invite last Tuesday I thought I’d take the opportunity to knit something small and baby-y!

I know when I had my son, Caleb, 8 years ago, that I quickly got sick of all the pastel blue and cutesy-wootsy Winnie-the-Pooh coated baby items I received. Brooke and Pat are a really cool couple, so I want to make something cool for their little one, so I went on the search for patterns.

I found two hat patterns that I thought were pretty neat-o, and I really wanted to try them both, so I decided on two hats, two pairs of matching booties and a hoodie! I made the two hats using the hoodie colour as the contrast colour, so everything is matchy-match and the hats and booties can switch up the look of the hoodie. I chose to knit everything in acrylics, because they’re easier to care for. I remember when my son was a baby, if I couldn’t throw it in the washer, I didn’t want it, plus, lil' baby won't be allergic to acrylics, and they won't make him itchy.

The hoodie pattern can be found at this site: http://fibredaze.blogspot.com/2008/03/baby-hoodie.html

Its the first sweater that I’ve ever completed, so I’m pretty happy with it!

I found a few things in the pattern a little weird, so I changed it ever so slightly to better suit what I wanted, such as adding ribbing to the edges of the hood so that it didn’t roll. I also left out the pocket, cause babies don’t need pockets, holding stuff is what a momma is for!

I didn’t like all the hand-sewing and end-weaving-in that I had to do. In the future I’ll be knitting sweaters in the round, thank-you very much.

By the looks of the finished product I’d say it’s a size 3-6 months, which should be a good size, cause it’s currently COLD here in Newfoundland, and will be until at least June.

Here it is being modeled by Caleb's Cabbage Patch kid.

I used this pattern for the baby booties: http://ooobabyknits.typepad.com/ooo_baby_knits/2005/02/mi...

I highly recommend it! They knit up super fast, and even a beginner shouldn’t have any problem with them.

I used this pattern for the skull and cross-bones hat: http://pippi-ob.livejournal.com/6735.html
It was my first time doing intarsia, and I’m pretty psyched about how it turned out!!!

This is the second hat from this site: http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/skater-baby-brim-hat

I loooooooved knitting this hat! It turned out so well! I’m actually thinking of modifying the design a little to make a bigger version for Caleb, cause it is seriously so cool!

More Arts by Me!!!

So I had these little square canvases that I bought at Wal Mart like 2 years ago and never used. I'm a big fan of squares. Don't know why...

Anyway, they're like 10x10, 8x8 and 6x6 I think? I had 2 of each, except for the biggest one, and I was trying to figure out something to paint for my living room. My living room is a pretty boring cream colour, except for the lower half of the walls under the ledge, which is a vibrant light green. I love bright colours! So going with my love of bright colours, I picked out the brightest ones I had to paint backgrounds on the little canvases. Green, orange, pink, yellow and purple. Then i painted swirly things with white and matching colours, to give the backgrounds some depth. At this point I still had NO idea what i would be painting.

I decided to go with some nature stuff. I like outdoorsy things, I have tree branches hung on the walls in my room, just 'cause I really like trees, so I decided the biggest square would be a tree. Then I go tthe idea, what about silhouettes of stuff? so i thought up some stuff and got to painting. You wouldn't think these would have taken much time, but they actually did, especially the tree, that took me about 2 or 3 hours to complete. The others didn't take too long. I finished them all in about 6 hours.

Here they are, closer up:

Creepy tree...

Crows (I love crows, yeah I'm weird like that...)

Dandelion parachutes! (When I was a little kid, I used to pretend dandelion seeds were my pets. Dandelions are one of my favorite flowers. What'd I tell you? I'm weird.)
More Trees! (this reminds me of the title sequence of "North of 60" haha...)
Cattails (mew!)

I painted them intending on putting them in my living room, but I was trying to figure out a way to arrange them and they ended up in my bedroom. And I sorta like them where they are. They make my room seem more complete... Oh well, guess I'll have to paint something else for my living room.

Haille's Magic Unicorn Hat!!!

Last Saturday my friend Angie and I decided to take our kiddo's out in the snow to go sliding. We went to the park and had a blast sliding down the hill on tubes and plastic slides. There were a bunch of people there with their kids, and what a great hill! kids were flying down there taking spills into snowbanks!

While we were there, Haille, Angie's 5 year old daughter was admiring Caleb's Mohawk hat. When she found out that I had knit it myself, she asked if I could make her a hat too. I asked her what kind of hat she would like, and leave it to a 5 year old to give you a challenge, she replied "A unicorn hat!!!"

Well that was right up my alley because I've been looking for something fun and experimental to knit. I looked online for patterns, searched through my knitting books, but I couldn't find anything like what I was thinking of, so I set to improvising a pattern.

I'm a big fan of earflap hats. They're just so darn cute, so the basis of the hat was an earflap hat, knit in the round on size 9 circs. I used worsted weight Bernat Wool Blends Natural Blends yarn in Rich Violet. It's 80% acrylic and 20% wool, so I figure it won't be itchy, will only felt very slightly, yet still be nice and warm.

for the ears I picked up and knit18 stitches on each side of the hat making the proper increases and decreases. The horn was knit separately out of Briggs and Little Heritage Bleached White wool on size 3 DPN's. I then stuffed it with poly-fibre fill and sewed it on.

The mane and tassle's on the ties is the Bernat yarn and Briggs and Little Wool, with some Paton's Classic Merino in That's Pink.

I'm still undecided on whether or not I'm going to lightly felt the hat, but I think I may, just to shrink it a little, because it needs to fit the head of a 5 year old.

This was a super fun hat to make, and I had a chance to use up some of my yarn stash. I'm in the process of writing up the pattern and will post it when I'm done.

PS: This hat got featured on Craftster on the knitting boards! :D <3

My adorable boy : The Multi-purpose Elf Hat

For Halloween my son, Caleb, wanted to be Link from "Legend of Zelda". I thought this was a great idea because it would cause me to improvise a costume, which in turn, I could make sure was warm enough for our often bitterly cold Newfoundland Halloween. I don't really sew, so I usually work with what I can find. His costume consisted of a belted green men's T-shirt with the sleeves cut off over a white turtle neck and light coloured pants and winter boots. I assure you, this is necessary because it's cold and wet and generally miserable here nearly every Halloween.

In my opinion, the one shining element of the costume was the green elf hat that I knit. I found a skein of green yarn that I liked in a clearance bin at Zellers, it didn't even have a label, so I have no idea what it is, just that it's some sort of acrylic. Mystery yarn! ooOOOoooOOooooooo.... The yarn is really bulky and I knit the hat using fairly small needles, so the fabric is sort of stiff, though the yarn is very soft. It can stand up straight if you want it to, or you can fold it over for a floppy looking elf hat.

Anyway, fast forward to this month, Caleb comes to me one morning before school and tells me that he needs a Santa hat for school that day (I love how much time he gives me to get things together.) I know that somewhere in this house I have a ton of Santa hats, but damn if I could find them. Instead I said "How about your elf hat? It's green..." To which he said "It needs a poofy ball on it!!!" So I dug out some red scrap yarn and made a quick pom-pom and attached it just before he ran out the door.

From Hyrulian Elf to North Pole Elf in a matter of minutes!

Now he's wearing his Elf hat just about everywhere, and it's pretty darn cute. It doesn't match his snowsuit whatsoever, but that pom-pom sure makes him easy to spot in a crowd... :D

Art for my room!

So last year when I painted my room I wanted to make art and stuff to put on the walls, but I never really got around to it. I managed to hang some tree branches on my wall decorated with beads, and a felted picture that Caleb made for me, (His school has a program called "Learning through the Arts" which is totally awesome, he gets to learn all kinds of craftwork) but I never did get around to making my art.

So last week when I was cleaning up I came across a bunch of old canvases that I had started painting, then gave up on. they were just backgrounds, painted blue and purple and stuff. I didn't want to shut them up in a cupboard, so I decided to paint them!

I wanted to have some art that was cool, with bright colours and not just boring girly stuff, cause I'm not into that. I wanted something kinda edgy, that fit with my style of art (I love bright colours and thick black lines) so i decided tattoo flash would be great! I Googled tattoo flash of things that I thought would be cool and found some great images. I drew them on the canvases in pencil, traced over them with Sharpie, colored them in with acrylic paint, then went over them once more with Sharpie. So here they are:

Skull and Roses 12x24 from this url: http://www.flickr.com/photos/joe_13/498563273/ Check out this guy's other line drawings, they're awesome.

tattoo heart 5x7

Cherry Blossoms 12x24

Koi fish 18x24 This one didn't match my room (Which is a light purpl-y pink colour) or the other paintings, so i gave it to my brother, who really likes it. He said it was "Primo"...

Anyway, i'm really happy with how they turned out, and now my room matches me. :D