Bags and Butterflies

That kinda sounds like the sequel to Bedknobs and Broomsticks...

Yesterday was sketchbook work, lots and lots of pages like this:

And today has been quite productive too, I managed to get 3 bag designs designed and coloured this afternoon if you'd like to see:

(front then back)

Then, when I was painting them, I decided that the butterflies needed to be done in silk and they'd be sad if I didn't use silk so I ran to College and back so the butterflies would be happy and spent the rest of the evening making them. I love them, I've been bouncing around so excited about them. Want to see?

They look so much more beautiful in real life, the top 2 are just guttering and silk paints painted normally but the bottom left is orange and yellow dripped onto the silk and the bottom right is yellow paint with table salt sprinkled on.
SO cant wait to start making my bag! Any preferences on my designs or things you'd want me to include? (This doesn't count as cheating, it's market research)

Bags

As this part of the project is an embellished bag today we made some prototypes! I was rather over excited about mine as they actually worked and it gave me a bit of a break from drawing flowers - there are quite a few in my sketchbook so I'll put one or two of the best ones up here for you to see.

First we made a tote bag, complete with lining and handles...

 Then we made a drawstring bag, complete with ribbon...

These were just to get us used to making bags, ours can be different shapes and sizes but with this same basic style. Think I'm going to do a tote bag but then I get all confused with how much I could do to it, I spent about half an hour thinking about lining it - I could do it in silk with some painted bits on to look like flowers, or just a plain coloured silk, but what if it rips, maybe I should use a cotton... and so on and so forth all night :)

Paris

Bonjour, bonjour mes petits!

Je suis revenu du beau Paris ce matin et c’était fantastique!

We were very tourist-y, saw La Tour Eiffel, Notre Dame (but no Quasimodo), L'arc de Triomphe, Montmartre and Amélie's cafe - I need to see my french teachers and tell them about it! 

We were also student-y and went to The Louvre, The Museum of Decorative Arts and Indigo trade show where our college was selling work and *drumroll* one of my pieces sold! (this one...)

C'est incroyable! Je ne pourrais pas croire mes oreilles!

(Croissants for everyone who didn't have to use a translation website for my french)

Paris prelude...

Ok, I've decided Feb is even more awesome than I thought - Just found out today that 2 of my embroideries are going to the Indigo Trade Show in Paris!

These are the 2 they chose to take which suprised me a little - if I'd had to pick any I'd have chosen my silk leaf prints but now I get to keep them for myself :)

So je suis très excited for Paris now - it's only a few days away, wooh! :) Got to start practicing ma français 

Feb

I know it's only the 5th but I've decided I like February.

Partly because we get to start our new project which sounds fab and cos I got to look for sketchbooks and see all the really nice paper (but then I was sad cos I couldn't afford it) and partly cos I get to see my dance show, and actually be in it a little bit! Partly (a big part) cos I get to go to Paris for Indigo and partly cos it snowed yesterday and it even made Halifax look pretty...

The only way I could be more excited about this month was if my toes didn't want to fall off whenever I went outside :)

Design week

Just to warn you, this one is a bit wordy... There are some pics at the end as a reward though :)

Since it's interim and all our projects are getting marked, we cant really use our studio to do any work (and we're not supposed to have our new brief shhhh!) so CCAD has organised Design Week - loads of artisty types are coming in and giving lectures and workshops and we had to sign up to all the ones we wanted. Today was my first one, it was a lecture and a workshop by Dr Manny Ling, Calligrapher (we like him, he smells books too). The lecture was quite interesting - he was talking about his work and what inspired him - but I loved the workshop. I think it helps that I'm a very practical person and I like the 'doing' and playing bit best.

He taught us how to make a calligraphy pen out of a coke can (I think I was the only person who managed to stab myself in the knuckle though! No, mum, there wasn't really any blood... :) ) and he made us have a play with them drawing squiggley lines (he actually said his looked a bit like an ECG!) and 101011010110111011001101 a lot cos basically all letters are made up of the 1 and 0 shape to varying degrees. Then we got to try actual letters and writing our name just normally before he had us doing it in a more graphicy way (that confused me cos my N's looked like Z's at times) and something that looked like flowers but I wasn't too keen on my flower ones, I blame it on the fact my name has a J in it :) 

So, this is what I spent most of the afternoon doing..... 

They were the sensible ones but I wanted to do one with some really nice words on it, since I have a slight obsession with nice words, and these were the first ones that popped into my head. (Unfortunately, I didn't come up with them, if I had that would've been awesome...)

Vin Garbutt makes me :)

Hand in

Just handed the printed and embellished project in! I can get reaquainted with this thing called sleep I've kinda forgotten about.
We also got our brief for our next project - us in the FdA group are making a bag based on florals and a cushion and tea towel based on an art period. Quite exciting!