2/14/11 Happy Valentines Day

Artchix Studio also has great swaps and collage supplies.  In honor of Valentine's Day here are a couple of the ATC's just finished for this swap:

Well it was like a heat wave in Chicago today - in the 40's.  Above zero.
So my husband and I and some of my sisters, nieces and nephews went downtown to see the Hearts A Bluhm exhibit.  These 100 hearts were designed by Columbia College Chicago staff, faculty, students and alumni and are lining North Michigan Avenue for the month of February.  They were installed on February 1st and the blizzard came on the 2nd.

2/13/11 Feather Your Nest Book Swap

Alphastamps  always has really good swaps and challenges and I just finished the Feather Your Nest Book Swap.  The chipboard book is shaped like a house and they have loads of wonderful collage sheets and other supplies searchable by themes which makes it really easy.  Here's two of the pages:

2/13/11 Creative Swaps with Lenna Andrews

I've mailed my Vintage Note Cards to Lenna Andrews / Creative Swaps - look at her blog to see all the great work she gets for her swaps.
                                      

I've also signed up for her newest challenge - 

ARTFUL PAGES

4 Artists 4 Ways

This is a four week online class with Lenna and three other book artists giving us four different ways to approach art journaling, fabric pages, altered books and vintage glue books.  (Hope Wallace Karney, Lisa Mcllvain and Mary Green are the other teachers)

There will be three lessons each week, and a different artist each week.  Twelve lessons in all!

The course begins on February 20, 2011. Registration is open now, so click on the Artful Pages link above and sign up!

2/1/11 Monthly Sketchbook

I participated in the Art House Co-op / Sketchbook Project 2011.    28838 artists from 94 countries submitted sketchbooks that will go "on tour" to 8 cities starting this month.  The sketchbooks will enter into the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Art Library for public viewing.
They also sponsor a Monthly Sketchbook project - you sign up for 3, 6 or 12 months and receive a blank sketchbook every month with a theme assigned to it.  For January the theme was Time Traveller and I decided to only do collage so I went through stacks of magazines and other images I had -  I looked for images of people from different time periods, backgrounds, watch/time machine images.  Then when I started working I stopped thinking and just kind of reacted to what I was grabbing and putting together.
These are some of the page layouts from that book:

2/1/11 One More Heart

The last heart I designed was sponsored by Walgreens.  They're already up on Michigan Avenue in Chicago and will stay on display for the month of February.

1/16/11 Hearts

I work at Columbia College Chicago and the college has partnered with Northwestern Memorial Hospital's Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute for an exhibit to be held on Michigan Avenue in February - National Heart Month.  Students, staff, faculty and alumni were asked to submit designs to be painted on three dimensional five foot high hearts to bring awareness to consumers about the prevention and treatment of heart disease.
Three of my designs were chosen - two focus on healthy food choices and one called the Faces of Heart Disease which tries to show that any and everyone can be affected.
Images from finalists can be seen on Columbia's website (type Hearts A Bluhm in Search box) or The Hearts a Bluhm website.

Front / "Heart Healthy Eating"

Back / "Heart Healthy Eating"

Front / Back "Faces of Heart Disease"

I've started the third design and hope to show it by the end of the week.  I'm really excited to be part of this campaign and I think this is a really creative way to raise awareness to these issues.  

1/13/11 Two More Swaps Done!

There's a lot going on that I'm trying to finish in the next week or so.  Committing to do things is easy - it's the actual follow through......but I'm getting there.

I just finished the Artchix swap - Steampunk ATC's.  The background was from some scrapbook paper I had and the men are digital collage images from Artchix.  Metal gears are from Tim Holtz.

Lenna Andrews / Creative Swaps has a Vintage Notecard Swap.  I used images she provided (two of which I colored with pencil) along with some tapes and stickers
I had.  I added an inner sheet of paper because the cover paper was printed on both sides and then did a quick three hole binding with linen thread.