Vegan Paper

I just saw this blog post by Jonathan Beaton. I am totally going to try making veggie paper. However, I think I’m going to use leftover pulp from my VitaMix when I’m done juicing. I don’t use a separate juicer, I just put my pulp through a mesh nut milk bag. I’ve been enjoying the juice and have either been composting the pulp or feeding it to my dogs, but it sometimes ends up with the consistency of homemade paper clay and I wonder about its potential as an art material! Has anyone experimented with this? I would probably add a little bit of soap flakes or something to inhibit mold growth, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work. I can also see a potential use as a clay for making beads.

Tasty RAW Art

I last posted to this blog very early on Saturday morning, and now I am writing fairly late at night after the Ravenswood Art Walk is over. I am exhausted and happy. All I can say is, it was a wonderful event and I definitely want to do this one again next year. There was a great crowd, amazing artists, music and yummy food. I was able to take a good look at the other vendors in the big main tent. I do wish I’d had a chance to walk through some of the artists’ studios in the neighborhood. There are some wonderful artists’ work spaces nearby and I want to see more of them.  Over the next several posts I’ll be showcasing some of the different artists I met including pictures of their work, but I’m way too beat to delve into that tonight! I will, however, leave you with a bunch of photos in my flickr stream so you can get a peek at the visual feast from this weekend. If you are in the Chicago area, plan on visiting RAW next year, it is well worth it to take an afternoon stroll through the art spaces of Ravenswood.

This the booth I shared with Rose Bachi from 13 Moons Designs

RAW big tent

Time Flies When You’re Having Fun.

You may wonder why I haven’t been keeping up with my blog in these past few weeks. Well, time just slipped away from me! It seems like yesterday that I hauled several month’s worth of hard work over to What’s Blooming and tried my hand at the art fair thing. Several plastic tubs are still sitting in my office, waiting to be unpacked. The handmade paper artwork has made it safely into my flat files for storage, but my office is a disaster! Life gets busy, my garden needed weeding and planting, laundry and dishes and bills must be paid, relationships tended to, work is work, and before I know it another week has gone by!

Yet the next wave of artwork is bubbling under the surface of my brain, a heady brew of ideas simmering. Rose and I have decided to do another fair in the fall and we are already signed up for the Ravenswood Art Walk on September 29 & 30th. I’ve got ideas for how to better display my artwork and jewelry; I like the idea of making some free-standing partitions for the handmade paper art, drawings and paintings, and I’ve been on the lookout for fabric to dress up the tables.

I’ve also bought some new beads on Etsy, my new favorite place to buy art supplies! I can’t wait to work with the gorgeous beads I bought. Included in the bunch are frosty, green and blue sea glass beads, these sweet Steampunk Lampwork Beads, gorgeous beads made from seeds and bone, as well as more paperbark and cow horn beads from Mzuribeads.While kayaking in Wisconsin found birch bark that I’m going to use in paper making and bead making. Just today I walked by a couple of Kentucky Coffee Bean trees and collected a bunch of seeds…I thought I’d have to wait until the fall to collect more seeds but the tree was full of pods and already dropping them. They make awesome beads! I also just read that if you bake them for 3 hours and grind them up, they can be used as a coffee substitute (they are poisonous prior to baking I guess).

In my overgrown, unruly garden I see many long, thin branches I’d like to weave into my art projects (or at least make my own twig trellises for the garden). In addition to my edible summer veggies I’ve also planted my scarlet runner beans and my canna lilies, both of which will provide seeds I can use in my projects.

But underneath it all I need to build a bit of structure…this next wave of creativity will be a bit better organized with a couple of spreadsheets and maybe a binder.

Now I’m just rambling though. You get the picture. Go check out the links to the Etsy stores though, seriously! There’s some pretty stuff.