Ispirato

This is one of my two latest dollhouse miniature projects. All seven members of the Tiny Tarts group here in Melbourne have made mini-classrooms for the upcoming VAME Dollhouse and Miniatures Show in Melbourne (Australia).

We all started with the same size roombox, kits to make four old-fashioned school desk, and a kit to build the bookshelf. One member made us all globes. We took it in turns to run short workshops when we met to make blackboards, books, satchels and backpacks, etc. I led a workshop where we all made desks for the teacher.

Though we all started with the same box and desks, each classroom has evolved so differently! Mine, shown here, is a 5th grade classroom in Indiana circa 1960. The other rooms might be older or newer than mine. One is set at Harry Potter’s school, Hogwarths!

There were no windows or doors cut into our boxes and I wanted to create the illusion of two windows along the back wall. So I made window frames and roller blinds to hide the fact that there is no scenery - just blank wall inside the frames.

VAME stands for “Victorian Association of Miniature Enthusiasts”. The annual show features many wonderful exhibitions of room boxes, and maybe even an entire dollhouse or two, created by VAME members. THere are traders there selling miniature wares, too.

The Show will be held 11 & 12 July 2009 at the Mt Waverley Community Centre, Millers Street, opposite Mt Waverley Railway Station. Ample free parking! Hours are 10.00 am to 4.00 pm both Saturday and Sunday. http://www.vame.org.au/

We had our June Paperific Expo in Melbourne. I was hoping to attract 25 exhibitors but we just fell short - there were 22. However, they were all great businesses and there was a good mix of papercrafting products for scrapbooking, stamping and cardmaking. And there were SEVEN make and take tables at the show. Plus the demos. It all adds up to a great day out.

Two thousand customers attended and they offered lots of compliments. The food was a winner this time, though the cafe was understaffed on Friday.

After just about every Paperific Expo I’ve put on (and I’ve put on 15!) customers send me emails with this plea: ‘Give the exhibitors more room so it is less crowded in their stands.’ What people don’t understand is that the exhibitors rent stand space. Each business owner chooses the stand size, how to set out the furnishings and how much stock to bring.

Art Stamps Australia had the most popular stand at the show last weekend. It was always packed! Marg and Louise came to me on Sunday to request a larger stand than they had originally booked for the next Expo in November so there will be more space inside for us fat-bottomed ladies!

Our building at the Melbourne Showgrounds does allow us to have nice spacious aisles. It was recently carpeted too, and the Showgrounds staff are very attentive.

November will be bigger - our Spring Show always attracts more exhibitors and around 3000 customers. We also run a wholesale trade event in association with the retail expo. It is set up in an adjascent space.

I believe we will have 20 of the 22 June exhibitors returning in November. And there will be 10 or 15 others on top of that.

I like being a show organiser. Paperific has been really rewarding on both personal and financial levels. I really love to see customers enjoying themselves there and I also love to hear how happy exhibitors are with the results they achieve. I get to talk to the exhibitors quite a lot during the show and I know, having exhibited at craft shows myself, how hard they work. The recession has hit many craft businesses hard. So it was a relief to know they did so well last weekend. I extend my thanks to both the customers and the exhbitors for coming along to the June Expo.

November Paperific is set to be successful, too. I actually hope to have handed over responsibility to a new owner before then. Yes, Paperific is for sale. I want to sell for health reasons - many of you know that I have cancer. For this reason I’d like to retire from event management and just relax, make art and focus on healing.

Here comes the sales pitch: If you would like to purchase an Australian business that offers flexible, part-time hours, and you have good organisational and people skills, consider Paperific.  Email my broker, Karli Dunham: karli@justbusinessbrokers.com.

Here it is: My new felt studio above Lumina Gallery in Malvern East (a suburb of Melbourne, Australia). It looks pretty tidy from this angle of the photo. On the mantle of the lovely old, non-functioning fireplace, I’ve place feminine images including felt works by me, my sister Vonnie and my friend Nonie. That vase of flowers near the corner - the vase is from Jane and the light-up plastic tulips are from Coralee. The pirate hat is a gift from my sister Trish and it is so comfy and becoming! Hanging beneath I have a basket of stuffed toys I like to think of as the studio mascots.

I’ve already made some felt pieces on my raised table and I love spending time here, working without interruption. I am trying to spend at least 10 hours a week in the studio initially while I’m getting the next Paperific expo organized. Then I’ll be able to increase my studio hours starting in July.

The next Paperific Expo - wowee! It is one week away! This one has come together so easily. There will be great vibes at the Melbourne Showgrounds on the 19th, 20th and 21st. Here’s where you can learn more about the June Paperific Expo for papercraft lovers: http://www.paperific.com.au/june.html

I had to renew my passport and that meant a new photo, of course. And it is a utilitarian photo - no smiles or head tilting and no multiple poses so you can choose the most becoming one.

The spare copies ended up on my computer desk. And I thought, “Ugh!” every time they caught my eye.

Next thing, I was scanning the photo into Photoshop to see if I could turn the image into something I liked better. Amongst the artistic filters were “poster edges” and “neon”. At left you see the result. I really like it. If it were a full body shot, I’d like to be wearing a silver space suit and sporting a blaster.

Through the ages, artists have painted self-portraits. Some painted themselves warts and all. Some did a little editing, eliminating wrinkles and spare chins (yup, I did this, along with applying the filters).

So who is this woman, staring ahead to the future? She follows the beat of her own drum, given her haircut and nose stud. She’s not shy. She looks optimistic and determined. Maybe a little amused. She is listening, intently … but I bet she will only hear what she wants to hear.

She fell into a vat of nuclear waste which caused her to glow. And aren’t the colors pretty? 

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Two months after chemo has finished, I decided to dye my super-short gray hair RED. Look closely in the upper left-hand corner and you’ll see my “before” shot. These aren’t my most becoming pictures and I feel very brave sharing them! But this is me, now. I am feeling well though not as energetic as I used to be. But I really enjoy relaxing and sleeping, so that is okay.

A year ago, after my cancer diagnosis, I promised myself a studio space - not just the bedroom here at home that I already use. Stuffed with papers, fabric and supplies, it is mostly a storage room with a desk where I can sometimes clear enough space to do stamping and papercrafts. That’s not a proper studio. The studio I imagine for myself gives me room to move. And also room to heal.

Today I signed a sub-lease for a room above Lumina Fibre Arts Gallery in Malvern. Hooray!

I intend to move my feltmaking gear into it initially. There is space for other arts and crafts I pursue, but for the next few months I’d like to focus on felt. The ground floor is occupied by the gallery and a couple of small teaching spaces. I already sell work through the gallery. And it would be good to run some workshops again. In fact, I have just booked-in to do SoulCollage facilitator training in late July with Karen Mann, and Lumina’s back workshop is a good space for running SoulCollage classes.

I get to move into my new private studio in early June. Now that’s something to look forward to.

Well, I’ve got my Paperific hat on again and it fits comfortably, I must say. There will be TWO expos in 2009:

19 - 21 June … and … 13 - 15 November

I’ve just updated the Paperific website with a list of the first exhibitors to confirm their involvement in the June show. Of course there are several others coming and I will add their business names as they formalise the commitment.

I already have customers asking about dates for 2010! Ai-yi - I should plan that far ahead, I know, but it makes my head spin.

I think this June will make the 14th papercraft expo I’ve organised.

If you are in Melbourne this week, you won’t want to miss the Stitches and Craft Show at the Melbourne Showgrounds, Ascot Vale. It has moved from Caulfield Racecourse to the Showgrounds so it can EXPAND in many directions. This will be Melbourne’s biggest ever craft event, I am sure. It is more than stands filled with exhibitors and the great classes you’ve come to expect from the Stitches Show. There are lots and lots of extras this time around.

The new owners of the event, Living Creatively, kindly agreed to allowing my business, Paperific Expos, to have a stand at their show this week. Their event is much bigger than mine, but we are still competitors, so this has been a great gesture of comradery. Come see me on stand 139 near the stage in the Exhibition Pavilion (Building 1) and I’ll give you a fridge magnet that you can present at Paperific in June or October for a $2 discount on entry.

Read more about the Stitches and Craft Show here.

Creativity can take many forms. Art and craft is one form. Performance is another.
I claim no relation to the person in this photo. But I will say she is an excellent actress.

Have a look at Episode One of the new, fortnightly show (each episode is around two and a half minutes long), “Professor Pazuzu“.

And subscribe, if you dare!

Here’s another recent card. I wanted to share an easy technique I like to do which I call “strip-piecing”. It involves making a quick patchwork paper background that can be cut into different shapes and sizes and used in your cards … or in your scrapbook pages, for that matter.

 I start with an A4 sheet of lightweight cardstock for a substrate. If you are in the US you use standard letter size cardstock or heavy paper.

 I then go through my stash of 12″ x 12″ scrapbooking papers and choose seven or eight of them that look good together. I cut each paper down one side so they are the same length as the longest dimension of the cardstock … that is, the cardstock A4 or letter-size page is laid down in a landscape position and the scrapbook papers are cut the same width. I think that is 296mm for A4 or 11 inches for letter, right?

Then I use a guillotine, or you could use a craft knife, mat and ruler, to cut the scrapbooking papers into strips of different sizes no bigger than an inch wide. I don’t measure. I just make sure the strips are uniform top to bottom. The width of the strips is varied to add interest.

Using a glue stick, I start at one end of the cardstock and glue the strips butted up against one another all along the page. Put each strip upside down on a scrap piece of paper so you can apply glue to the very edges. Alternatively, apply glue to about 1/3 of the background cardstock, making sure you have good coverage at all edges, then quickly piece strips to that area. Then work your way along till finished.

Finally you should have a beautifully decorated piece of cardstock. Don’t get too attached to it the way it is. You need to chop this up into smaller pieces. As you can see in my square card above, I just cut a rectangle and used it as a background to a sentiment stamped on coordinating scrapbook paper. Once you make one page of strip-pieced paper, you probably will want to repeat the exercise with another set of papers in a different colorway.

I find strip-piecing is a good thing to do when I enter the studio and am not sure where to start. It gets me active without too much cerebral effort and I enter the “creative zone” quite easily.

If you like to decorate your own papers rather than using printed scrapbook papers, this is a lovely technique for showing them off.

 My creative time in the last three weeks has been focused on making greeting cards. I bought lots of stamps last year: Pipe Dreamink, Stampin’ Up! and more, but hardly used them as it was such a hectic year. I was also recently gifted lots of wonderful stamps by a special friend moving interstate who wanted to downsize her collection. The result has been a big stamping revival in my studio. When I owned my own stamp company, Studio Astarte, I restricted myself to using my own stamp designs so cards and creations could be used as samples. After a break from stamping, it has been fun to come back to it again - and the new stamps have been great inspiration. Studio Astarte designs tended to be ‘old world’ and ‘arty’. Now I’m not abandoning that style, as you can see from the collaged dragonfly card below, but it felt good to make some greeting cards that were in a different style, like the one at left. I made a lot of happy cards.

I try not to deliberate too long over the design of a card. A quick card is a good card. When I find some papers and stamps that work together well in one card, I then usually make a couple of more along the same theme, but with a different layout to keep it interesting for me.

One of my areas of interest is the study of ancient goddesses and the cultures that worshipped them. I belong to a goddess study group that meets monthly. We discuss different topics at our meetings and we aren’t strictly into goddesses, but archetypes and myths in general. For example, we recently each chose a fairy tale (mine was Little Red Riding Hood) and told the story to the group then discussed how aspects of the tale metaphorically echoed aspects of our own lives. (Try that exercise for yourself!)

Last week, instead of meeting in somebody’s home, we met at Gaia’s Garden. This is a privately owned garden behind a home in East Kew, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia. We are experiencing a drought so the garden was dry but well-kept and beautifully decorated with lots of goddess statues in various sizes and styles. There is a labyrinth planned, and different areas to use for gatherings and events, including ceremonies and classes.

A friend of mine from the study group, Maureen, runs excellent classes about goddesses and mythology at The Augustine Centre and other Melbourne venues. She also is trained to conduct Caroline Myss archetypal readings and personal charts. I am happy to recommend her to anyone else interested in these things. Her business is called Wisdom of Sophia and her website is worth a look, too. Each page has an image and bit of interesting information about a different goddess.

 

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