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:

I wanted to share with y’all a cool sounding “mash-up” San Francisco Girl by the Bay is putting together, called Blog it Forward.

The idea is to share a connected stream of blogger posts on “what inspires us the most” on our individual blogs, but link back & forward to the other blogs participating, a bit like a chain letter (but, as Victoria says, hopefully a lot less annoying!).  Click on the image or the link above to learn more about it.

As you may know, I find inspiration endlessly fascinating, so I’m in! She’s had 300 bloggers sign up and had to close it there. I can’t wait to see how this progresses. There are so many blogs out there, I’ll never have time to see them all, but this is a great way to take a look at some new blogs! I’ll keep you updated as it goes live next Wednesday.

Interesting note: Twitter is forever! I had a little glitch on my website this week (resulting in this post on Blog it Forward being deleted very soon after I published it, so you RSS readers may wonder why I’m re-publishing this – it’s because it was gone). ANYWAY, I was having a private “direct message” conversation on Twitter about said problem, and she said something that so surprised me that I typed a phrase containing an expletive I try not to use in public, FORGETTING to add the “d” that makes it a private message. Within 10 seconds I’d had a reply from someone else about said phrase, and I’d deleted the tweet 10 seconds later. “Phew” I thought, that was close! hah! Not so much! There are little bots that troll twitter just waiting to retweet certain phrases (there’s a cute one that tweets you back whenever you tweet “note to self”). This other bot I do NOT think is cute, but what’re you gonna do? Twittter is a stream, the expletive soon disappeared, and I’m pretty sure that everyone on twitter has heard said expletive before (it was the dreaded F-dash-dash-dash)

Oh – and my little mishap was only  a little mishap because I had just backed up my website database! Do this often!