Hope you had a great Halloween last night and are having an amazing Dia de Los Muertos today! Life has certainly been busy with my four kids this week!
In my art studio things have been busy too. I’ve been hard at work in a business plan, which has led me to work on prototypes for small pieces. These will be little one square pieces and small four square quilts. They will be small enough to buy in multiples and arrange however you want in your living space. Or you can just get one perfect one to have on it’s own. Either way I’m really excited about them!
The designs have been coming together easily. That’s the fun, easy part. The tricky part has been finding the right frames. It’s hard to find shadowbox frames that are the right color and deep enough, so I’m trying out making my own
I recently bought the equipment to make my own larger frames and am learning the ropes with making these small ones. It’s another tricky set of skills to learn! But between the web design, photography, mold making and framing I’ve learned a lot of other tricky skills to make these resin quilts come to life, so I reckon I can figure this out too.
The first thing to learn has been how to use a router and router table. This began with quite a few mishaps! However, after a few YouTube videos and a little trial and error, I think I’m well on my way to figuring it out. Next is cutting the pieces with the new gorgeous, lovely furniture grade blade I’ve gotten for my chopsaw. It cuts so beautifully! Now I’m getting to the nitty gritty of assembly, figuring out the best ways to systematically make the pieces so they are consistent and quick to make. I’m still in the middle of this so we’ll see how the final result turns out in the coming weeks.
I’m hoping this will become one of those calming, meditative tasks in which I can really enjoy the process as I make lots and lots of them. Fingers crossed!
I hope your experiments are going well too. Remember to always keep an open mind free of judgement while you’re experimenting. You’ve got to wait until the experiment is totally finished before you can form an opinion about it. After all, you never know what wisdom will come from it – it is often surprising! I’ve also found that if you try to judge too early you restrict the expansive right brained thinking that solves problems best. So if you want an effective use of time, lighten up while you experiment! There are no wrong answers or bad results, only knowledge to gain. It just might be different knowledge than you expected! But this is good, because it keeps your mind and spirit nimble and flexible. The answer really might be right around the corner, so stay positive and enjoy yourself!
Have a happy time messing around with something new! I’ll let you know how it goes with making these frames – fingers crossed!
PS. If you’re wondering why I’ve gone down to one blog post a month, it’s because I’m now making insider videos about my studio practice just for people who are on my mailing list. If you want to see me talking about my work, showing you the latest things I’m excited about, sign up here! You’ll get one email every two weeks and you can always unsubscribe. I won’t be offended 😉
