fabric journals

I just realized that I forgot to post this here. It's one of two left-over 2010 BJP pieces.



This piece is about the year flying away. 2010 was not a fun year in general, and an outright disaster at many times and for many reasons. I'm very glad to see it go. I used a shell bird I'd had around for awhile, pressed glass stars, and size 10 and 11 beads, all sewn with Nymo B because that was the first thing I happened to lay hands on. It's 3 x 3 inches on off-white watered taffeta, which I have a lot of because of an amazing sale some years ago.

I still have September to do, but that will wait while I attempt to finish January 2011 before the month is over.

I proudly present to you January, my first Bead Journal Project piece.




It's 5" square, as all my pieces will be, and of course hasn't photographed terribly well, between my crappy photography skills (honestly, I can't even hold the camera still half the time) and the difficulty of photographing beads, especially the little mirrors at the centre of each circle. It may be helpful to say that I made a great deal of use of this grey bead mix. I started by drawing three circles onto paper, doing it again with the next size down circle templates (really useful, though beware that the edges aren't well cut and the lines are often askew), and then drawing branching curves in the gaps. I don't think I really thought properly about trees until I had the circles beaded and was filling in the lines, and then I realised what I'd made.

( Accidental Schubert )

I've written a longer version of this post at my quilting blog here, including some fairly boring technical notes. In case anyone is wondering, yes, this is still elettaria!

Robin Atkins, the bead artist who founded the Bead Journal Project, has very kindly put up a free PDF of an out-of-print book of hers here. I haven't yet finished reading it, but so far it looks excellent, and I'm very fond of another book of hers which I have. Even if you don't bead, the pictures are lovely to gaze at for inspiration.

So who's on board for 2011, and what are you plotting? Which medium are you thinking of using, and do you have any themes or other ideas in mind? As mentioned previously, I'm primarily a quilter and am going to be beading this year, probably all on batiks, and I'm hoping this will help me become more spontaneous in my work.

Hello everyone! jaodn very kindly added me to the maintainer list for this community, not that I can foresee its needing any moderating. We're not going to be sending the Quilt Police round to people who don't get their month's piece done in time, we're really just here to cheer each other on, give creative advice, and of course ogle the beautiful craft work. Though could I mention that as someone with a visual impairment, I'd hugely appreciate it if people could stick to unformatted standard size black font, and use LJ-cuts liberally.

I've signed up for the Bead Journal Project, and am slightly intimidated but very excited. I'm fairly new to beading, and I tend to get stuck creatively, so I'm hoping this will give me the required shove to just get on with it. The photos of everyone else's bead journals have been extraordinarily inspiring to me.

( Read more... )

By the way, would anyone mind if I changed the user icon for this community to something beady? I was eyeing up this lovely piece from lois2037, if she doesn't mind.

I just found out about the Bead Journal Project yesterday and would love to do it in 2011, but it looks like I've missed the deadline for joining on their site. I have a friend on quilting who's vaguely tempted by doing some sort of beading and/or quilting journal project, and I hope to pull in a few more people. Does anyone here want to take up a project for 2011, and if all else fails, do you mind if I swarm in with a few friends and get the community going again? And would you mind if it extended to arts in general? Most of my friends are textiley, but one works in paintings and woodcuts and interesting things like that.

Honestly forgot about this group and i apologize! (Any Calgarian/Canadian members yet???)

I've been doing a fair number of fabric journals and pages!







All of the above are for a Yahoo arch page exchange, one a month for a year.

Below is a Book/Bundle "Emergency Self Esteem Kit"--hot textile techniques, found objects, hot foil pen, bones, beads, burning, paper, textiles.







Below, rusted Lutrador with coffee stained and dyed pages, flower stitcher and hand embroidery



The Pam Sussman book is the one that started me on the Book Mobile :} more than a year ago. I have a lot of the other books mentioned in a previous entry here, but would also really recommend Beryl Taylor's Mixed Media Explorations, chockful of goodies and clear instructions.

Here's my latest (literally -- I'm 6 months behind!) Bead Journal page.



It reflects a time of great stress when we sold our house and found ourselves with 30 days to find and buy a new place (within our smaller budget, of course) and be all moved in. I often felt like everything was hitting us at once, but now we're settling in, slowly unpacking, and doing well in our new neighborhood, which we like way better than where we used to live.

Is there a certain stitch you use to get your seed beads so close together? 

I wanted to add some books I've acquired both recently and within the last year or so; these are either inspirational or helpful for doing textile journals.

Beading on Fabric - encyclopedia of bead stitch techniques by Larkin Jean Van Horn, Interweave Press. ISBN 1-59668-004-0 This is more about embellishing a surface with beads than anything else.

Fabric Art Journals - making, sewing, and embellishing journals from cloth and fibers by Pam Sussman, Quarry Books. ISBN 1-59253-196-2 (pbk) Covers basic construction of books and a few ideas for embellishment.

Stitched Texile Collage - innovative designs for textured surfaces by Lucille Toumi, A&C Black Publishers Ltd. ISBN-13 978-0-7136-8410-0 This is mostly about embellishing the textiles with a variety of methods, from water soluble stabilisers and machine stitching to quilting, beading, embroidery, etc.

Anyone else have book suggestions that relate to fabric journals?

Hi all, in an effort to get a little more activity here, I'd like to get some suggestions for tags for the community.

Thus far I have:

beads
quilting
paint
printing
embroidery
textile
goldwork
metallic

Any others to suggest? Thanks ^_^