Ispirato

Have you seen the new website? Sam at Netfusion made me a bee-a-uuu-ti-ful site and I have been working like a dickens to get it to launch stage.

I spent all day today creating the sales pages and hooking up forms and autoresponders. What’s an autoresponder? Hey, I didn’t have a clue what an autoresponder was until three months ago.
It’s the email that gets sent automatically when you fill out a form on a website. Very important.
Here’s another term I just learned: POPULATING. Sam kept telling me that I’d be populating the site. And I thought I’d just be adding words and pictures. Which sounds more fun to you - adding words and pictures, or populating?

Well let me tell you, I’ve been pop, pop, POP-u-lating into the wee hours of the morning for the last week or so.

Sounds kinda dirty, don’t it?

And tomorrow being February 1st - our first issue of Astarte’s Mega-Zine becomes available. It is really special, if I do say so myself.

This weekend I am looking forward to the following:

• going to bed before midnight (maybe before 10pm!)
• sleeping late
• NOT working on the computer
• catching up with my family
• reading
• cooking a meal or two

and oh yes - finally making time to take down the Christmas tree. In February. Ha!

As I prepare to launch a new business (with a new website and a new MEGA-zine) and am probably the busiest I’ve been in a long, long time (and it can get pretty darn busy leading up to the expos I run, let me tell you) yet this month I have had to pause TWICE to finish artwork for two group exhibitions I registered for months ago.

The first exhibition, Down in the South, you will have read about in my posts a week or two ago.

The other exhibition is better known in Melbourne: The Linden Gallery Postcard Show. This is an amazing exhibition crammed with work in a variety of mediums and genres. The artists have to keep their work small so the gallery can fit-in as many pieces as possible. It isn’t juried, so any artist can enter - professional or not - if they are prepared to pay the fee.

I sold both my works entered into last year’s exhibition. This year I elected to give them three pieces and one of those is shown left.
(There is more where this came from … )

It’s my birthday today. Roby came around with a present and this handmade card. The photo (of me) was taken at her backyard New Year’s Eve party. We had fun that balmy Melbourne night, singing along with the karaoke machine.

Roby makes happy, funky papercrafts. She doesn’t consider herself a papercrafter and she doesn’t look at the magazines or go to stamp club meetings or anything like that, so her work isn’t influenced by the trends pursued by other “real” papercrafters.

I love the vintage collage look - what I used to refer to as “Somerset Style”. And yes, I like altered photos of old-fashioned girls with butterfly wings collaged behind them, or turn of the century men with party hats collaged onto their heads. I use the sepia tones and the earthy colours in my own art.

But still, there is something to be said for bright colours and keeping it simple. Especially for a birthday card, don’t you think?

This is a fantastic group of gals. All work for me at Paperific and I claim them as friends, too.

I didn’t get organised to have a staff party after the Melbourne Paperific Expo late October, but I had this brilliant idea for a January party, to get all my guests to create a Vision Collage. This process involves cutting out photos and headlines from magazines (or wherever) that represent your dream life. So I told everyone to do this before they came and to bring along all their bits and pieces. At the party each person assembled her own collage. Most worked on big pieces of paper. Coralee brought a stretched canvas and Lizzie made a shrine. Talk about inspiration! Now they can hang their collages somewhere to remind them of all they want to achieve.

This wasn’t art and craft project so much as it was a goal-setting project. Don’t just think, speak or write about your goals, create visual images and look at them. Imagine yourself achieving them. Imagine the great feelings associated with that achievement. There is lots of proof around that you are far more likely to achieve your dreams if you put all these efforts behind them.
Visioning is a process refined by Lucia Capacchione who is on the Panel of Experts for my new business. I’ll give you the link in about a week - our website isn’t quite finished! There will be an article about making vision collages in Issue 2 of Astarte’s Mega-Zine.

It’s the “Out in the South” launch at Kingston Gallery. I was very intimidated when I delivered my work and saw how magnificent everyone else’s was. Most works were paint on canvas (of course) and all the artists did great work. Mine was very different - much smaller by comparison to most of the pieces, and I was the only artist to take jewellery.

Actually, I think it was a good move from a marketing point of view! The jewellery was the least expensive of all the displayed work. I hope it all finds its way to new homes!

There were favourable comments about my work from a couple of people I spoke with at the opening. Why do I feel so insecure? I guess because the work was quite different. I always worry that my mixed-media work will be categorised as “craft” not “art”. That old craft versus art thing. Gee, but I’d like to get over my concern for that.
The exhibition runs till the 5th of February at 979 Nepean Highway, Moorabbin (Melbourne, Australia). M-F 9am to 5.30pm and Saturday 12-30pm to 5.30pm.

What in the heck?!

If I’d taken a becoming photo of tutor Glynis Mann, I’d show you her face. As it is, she’ll appreciate that this image is just of her hands!

Glynis is demonstrating the use of dissolvable plastic. She’s sandwiched fabric scraps between the plastic sheets before putting them in an embroidery hoop and stitching on the sewing machine.

When the sandwich is removed from the hoop it is immersed in hot water. The plastic melts away and a lacy fabric remains.

We learned an assortment of embroidery tricks in Glynis’ weekend class at the Embroiderers Guild Victoria. I created two “cabaret bags” in the class. The second one is not quite complete or else I’d post photos today. Maybe later!

This is the other product I’ve been working on for the upcoming exhibition. It is a polymer clay brooch with a magnetic finding instead of a pin finding. Each of the seven brooches I made comes with its own display stand.

The idea is that you have a piece of free standing art to look at when you aren’t wearing the brooch. Dual purpose art!

I made the spirit doll brooch by stamping into clay and attaching a molded face. After baking there is some painting and distressing involved.

The display stand is a matboard frame on top of a purchased plastic frame - you know those strips of plastic bent into a free-standing shape? You get ‘em really cheap at the supermarket. Instead of a photo I inserted a piece of paper into the plastic frame. The quote was printed off and I decorated the page and the matboard with rubber stamping and sponged ink.

(There is more where this came from … )

I’m getting ready for a group exhibition called “Out in the South” at Kingston Arts Centre (Melbourne) 19 January to 5 February.

I am focusing on polymer clay for this exhibition. It was juried, meaning I had to submit photos of my work to be accepted. I already had four framed clay relief pictures and my Exemplar 1 wall hanging featured in my blog last June. I wanted to make jewellery for the exhibition, so I made some mermaid and spirit doll brooches I’ll put in my blog entry tomorrow.

There are commercially made glass beads in these bracelets made on memory wire, but also lots of handmade polymer clay beads. The smooth gold ones were made using bead rollers and the face beads are done using molds. Man, I love little face molds! And I think they make such unusual beads.

It is a production line process, which I grow weary of, I must admit. I did a lot of this work in the last few evenings while watching tv.

Correction, I was listening to the tv.

A new year and a new style blog!
This is going to be great year. Worth turning cartwheels for.

Welcome to a new look Ispirato! I’m using Word Press blogging software - there are several advantages - you can read posts according to categories I assign, you can subscribe via RSS feeds (which I’ll explain later).

I hope you like the switch