Crocheting with Tricot

Crocheting hands
I have t-shirt yarn. Balls of cut and rolled fabric. But the thing I enjoy most is crocheting with it, not cutting it up and making it. So when I found these huge spools of already made tricot “yarn” I bought three and started crocheting in the round.

Crochet and fruit break

My previous crocheted rag rugs (one orange and later one blue) have been made with cotton strips that are a bit harder on the hands. This is heavy to work with, but super fun and smoother. Love how fast it is growing too.

Love the black, magenta pink and polka dot stripes.

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Book Review: Creative Lettering – Techniques & Tips from Top Artists

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.
/Graham Greene

Creative Lettering by Jenny Doh (book cover)

If you enjoy pretty letters (the art of writing beautiful words by hand) in your art journal, this book is for you. It’s something between an inspiration book and a how-to one, collected by Jenny Doh who also made the similar Journal It!, that I recently reviewed. Both consist of samples of art journals and notebooks supplied by creative bloggers. You are introduced to their favorite way to draw letters, a handwritten alphabet and a short tutorial on how to “copy” and use their style in your own journal.

Personally I love the look of hand lettering, and I occasionally enjoy doing it. But most of the time it is not part of my artistic expression to handwrite a quote or a saying. Partly because I forget it when I am doing collage or drawing, and partly because it’s just tedious and too time consuming for me, at least when I often feel unhappy about the result in the end. I like to fill a page quickly and intuitively. Taking a break to find someone else’s quote doesn’t work for me. And forming perfect letters is a sloooow art form. If I remember to write anything it’s by journaling using my own messy handwriting. I’ve been told it looks beautiful though of course I don’t usually see that…

From the book Creative Lettering

I think the book Creative Lettering is a fun read, mostly because you’ll meet creative bloggers, including favorite artist Aimee Dolich. I greatly admire her artful writings and poetic words. Just today I bought her new and yellow doodled washi tape, from her Artsyville Etsy Shop. Yum!

Her way of writing is to go back into longer text and “thicken up” the thin lines of all her letters until she is happy with how they look. It creates her own unique font that many of us adore.

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Birds on a Picnic

iHanna's Gotland Bird

When visiting Gotland I hand felted and sculptured a little bird. Then I embellished him like crazy, adding sequins to the chest, curly and coloured wool to the bum and yellow wings for him to fly with:
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Art Journal Peek: The last pages of Vol 2

Smart Journal #1 Breath in

The last pages of Smart Journal volume 2 are as full of summer and brightness as the previous pages of this journal. It’s about time I start with a new summer journal, though I still have a few pages left in my hand bound journal. There’s still some blank pages for painting, drawing and sketching left in that one. Continue reading

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365 Collages | Week 20

Collage: Hand over the Scissors
Hand over the Scissors

Another seven collages finished and all I can say is: I still love project 365 Collages!

Right now I’m creating 4-5 collages in one sitting. I get into a creative flow that makes it hard to stop working. With each new creation I get more ideas that I want to try. I am looking through different boxes and folders for fun papers, and when I’m in the right mood they all seem to fit perfectly together!

Collage: Smile With Me
Smile With Me

I would love to know which of my collages you like best – and why. Let me know in the comments! Continue reading

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Art Journal Idea: Create a Sub Page

Smart Journal #2

A sub page is a extra page attached in some way to fold out of your journal and extend it even further. I haven’t done this much before, but in the square smart journal (with the rather small pages) it was a natural progression. On the spread above the right page has a sub page, a postcard I got from Hope. It’s attached to the page on just one side, with transparent tape, to fold out like this:

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Cut & Paste with Kids

Cut and paste with kids

Everyone loves cut and paste – if they get the chance to try it out. You get to choose images from a magazine, images that you really like. You get to use a scissor. You get to glue them together in a nice composition – and you get to keep them for ever. A friend of mine recently brought over her sister and her sister’s daughter Tindra. We had a great craft time together cutting and pasting in little books.

This is Tindra’s accordion folded book: Continue reading

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Eye Candy: Blue and White Anemone

Blåsippor överallt

The most beautiful sign of spring is the forest spring flowers. In the brown, bare woods tiny white flowers rise their heads in spring. At places, if you’re lucky, they cover the entire ground and makes you think snow has come back… In Gotland this is also true for the Blue Anemone, which is rare around here. I wanted to take a photo of each new flower I saw, but there were way to many to capture them all, although I did try! Continue reading

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Art Journal Style: Cuteness Overload

Smart Journal #1 Smiling kitty

I like a lot of different styles of art journaling; wild and free, artsy, painted, colourful collage, doodle, total messiness etcetera etcetera. And on top of all those experiments I also have a thing for cuteness…

I don’t know how, but toy shop wrapping paper always appeal to me a lot more than somber grown up stuff. And I can’t help to still love die cut images, cute smiling kittens, children’s book illustrations and baby owls… And you know what I have to say about that?
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The Pink Fabric Bead Workshop

Cutting fabric

Green nail polish and super quick, that is my friend Madde. It’s her swift hands you see on the photos above. I don’t know anybody who crafts with such fury! Today she wrote a post about the pink workshop I held when we were in Gotland last week.. I think the word is spreading all over the globe that I like pink! Because I was asked to do something fun, anything, as long as it would involve the colour pink. Yay! Continue reading

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