To all of you folks who’ve come by from Blogging it Forward, welcome! Fiona from Cafe Cartolina has handed over the torch to me, and I’d love to show you a bit about what inspires me. Actually, I do this quite a lot! I’m finding that the more I am able to talk about what I find inspiring, the more I learn about my artistic process, which is making it easier to get past a block, or to figure out what’s working in a piece.

As a quilter I “draw” with my electric needle – my sewing machine. When learning free motion quilting, I spent several years trying to perfect the size of my stitches, the smoothness of my line, the spacing between my lines… At some point I realized that “really good” free motion quilting is so perfect that it could (and is) programmed by a computer. This really had me stymied for awhile, until I realized that this machine quality was what was bothering me, and I came up with a way to use my machine and still keep that fact that the lines were made by my hands evident, I call it free motion machine sketching.

Anyway, as a prolific reader of blogs, I scroll through lots of eye candy every day! There are certain things that make me gasp, and I’ve noticed that one of the themes that run through what is gasp-worthy is work where the fact that something was made by the hands of a living, breathing individual is still apparent! The 1st example of this is a new fabric design of Jan DiCintio, a.k.a. Daisy Janie:

She posted the other day about how she took a sketch from doodle to design. That design is amazing to be because of the delicious unevenness of her lines – this is most evident in the corner marked by the red 3. She starts with a hand drawn sketch and manipulates it with the computer – but that hand drawn quality never disappears, and that is what takes a geometrical design to something special! Bravo Jan!

Daisy Janie || Shop || Blog

I had another gasp this week when I saw the rustic silver jewelry of  Madison Reece. I love the texture she gets in her silver – look you can see her fingerprint in the upper part of that flower necklace! How cool is that?

Madison Reece Designs || Shop || Blog

Now let me show you some woodblock prints I just bought from Sean “Deacon” Neprud. He carves,  inks & prints each piece by hand. I’ve enlarged one so you really see the layers of color and texture he gets – I love those layers! he’s got a crazy promotion on right now where he has just finished carving and printing 101 different pieces and is selling them crazy cheap, check out his shop link below to sign up and get in on the fun.

BadDeacon Design ||  Shop ||  Blog

Finally, the stupendous work of Diana Fayt. Look at that perfectly intricate flower…the marks on that bowl…those pears! I really can’t even describe how incredibly awesome her work is to me, but I DO know that part of why I love it is it is completely evident to me that each perfect piece is made by hand, and what makes it perfect is the fact that it isn’t, the little wobbles & wiggles shout out to me “Someone made me!”

Diana Fayt || Shop || Blog

It’s been a long, difficult week, it sure was nice to talk about some inspiration! Next up on Monday…Carla Kay White! Have a great weekend y’all!

Blog it forward has officially started! Today 10 folks are going to blog about what inspires them, the next day 10 more…until 300 bloggers have talked about what inspires them. I’m really looking forward to reading some new blogs, I LOVE reading about what inspires someone. I’m up in just over 2 weeks, so I’ve got some time to ruminate. if you wish you could have been part of the mashup, don’t let that stop you! If you do write about what inspires you, come back and leave a link in the comments and I’ll be sure to stop by and take a look!

Next up, Julie loves her messenger bag I made for her. This is not the best picture, (she was sitting at a table with an umbrella pole stuck through the middle of it. But you can see her notetaker and going green tote are in the same palette – which of course matches her clothes! Apparently her whole house is in this color palette – so next up, Julie, you need some art for your walls! As I’ve said before, I’m so lucky to occasionally have someone who just clicks with my artwork – Julie is one of those folks. She loves making jewelry and I’m trying to encourage her, and give her some “tricks of the trade” about our local scene.

The swim team at my university doubled their fundraising for Haiti goal and swam 1400 miles! Woot!

I was wrong when I showed you my last rose of winter! I’ve got another one!

This really is it though, because hubby’s cutting them all back (he’s got until Valentine’s day, the traditional deadline)

Here’s a picture of the rose garden half pruned:

Thanks to the 65 folks who took my survey last week! It was really interesting! I love that I get input from my readers, it truly is true; blogging is about building a community. Suzanne Cabrera from the blog “an open [sketch]book” wrote about this Monday and came up with a genius graphic that describes a way to use a blog to build community:

You should definitely go see what she had to say in her post, as well as the comments – there are several excellent ones!

I was thinking about building a community when I designed that short survey for folks to take last week. Now that I’ve got a bunch of answers (65) I thought I’d share my results from the survey with you:

Lots and lots of you are quilters and sewists! That’s what I thought, but I wanted to make sure The neat thing is that so many of you clicked “other” and elaborated on what you make. More than a few of you are knitters, fabric surface designers and jewelry designers (doh! Of course – I don’t know why I didn’t include those in the choices), but there were a couple of cool others: stained glass, weaver, pattern writer, industrial designer, kumihimoist (Japanese braider) – Japanese Braiding? How interesting! I’ve never heard of that term before!

I see I’ve got a nice mix of readers – some who’ve been with me for a long time, and some who haven’t. It’s nice to see that I’m gaining more readers, and it also is a nice reminder for me that sometimes, someone is reading a particular post and it’s the 1st time they’ve dropped by. Which means I may start adding a sentence or two to re-confirm some basics of my work in a post that may seem like old hat you long time readers, but may be helpful for the newbies.

For example: Every time I post a new bag I get a question in the comments about what fabric I’m using. The answer: Cotton Duck (a type of canvas) that I’ve dyed!

Good to know. I subscribe to my blog in Google Reader so I can see how the posts format in a reader. Some kinds of formatting don’t come through in a reader, which can make for confusing reading. You may have noticed that I’ve started posting pictures in a larger collage -> although it’s one larger file to download, it allows me to have pictures included the way I want them to in the reader. I’ll continue to dink around with this so that posts look good both on the site and in a reader!

Yay! The things most people like to see are my art and my process! Since that is one of my main missions here, I’m glad to see that it’s what you’d like to see. And big surprise, most people want to see more tutorials. I was pretty sure you would, but again, nice to know. I also got some nice comments, like:

I enjoy looking at and reading about an artist’s creative endeavors. I also enjoy little tidbits about one’s personal lives. It’s nice to know that we can all relate with family, life, etc. as well as art and creating.

I love seeing the finished products in, on, or with their new “home”. It really shows off your work!

Your photos are gorgeous.

Your incredibly positive attitude and energy

i like everything! your blog is so well rounded that it’s always interesting to read

Also, a few of you wrote something very similar:

it’s your blog to put whatever you want on it – please don’t let anyone stop you from keeping it “you”

Again, thank you for that! You are right – this space is ultimately mine, I can do what I want with it. One of my goals is to give back to the blog-o-sphere, and help others learn about things that I do, just like I learned from other folks. Right now I’m struggling to find enough time to get everything I want to do done (who isn’t?). Any post takes time to write, and some of the posts I write are more for you than for me, so I needed to make sure they were wanted! But, for the most part, I learn just as much (or MORE) about myself and my process as you do, which is an amazing side effect of blogging.

So, if you‘ve stuck with me to the end of this post, I’ll just close by saying THANKS! Thanks for being here, answering my questions, sending me some awesome comments, and in general making me love my art all the more.

Okay, I’m ready to post this and I see that I haven’t labeled the axes in the graphs! ARGH! I’m gonna let it go, cause I’m thinking you’ll get the drift, but for those people who will notice this I apologize! If this were a lab report I were grading, I’d take 4 points off!