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My sweet little tea stained pillow was featured over at Indie Icing today. I love seeing her collection of other tea stained items - it's such a nice technique for adding a little bit of warmth to plain white fabrics and paper.

Thanks, Indie Icing - I always appreciate blog love!

Warm and fuzzy

I haven't had much to say in the blog world lately, which is OK I suppose. It comes and goes. But today is my birthday, and I wanted to share what was waiting for me at my desk this morning. Look at them, all cozy in their little felt blanket. Aww. My friend and coworker Joanna is oh so creative with the felt!

And shortly after, chef extraordinaire Sam surprised me with a phenomenal chocolate raspberry birthday tart. Hee hee. Birthday tart. We promptly consumed it for breakfast, with homemade whipped cream.

Thanks Joanna and Sam - it was a very, VERY good day!

Color, paste, photographs.

Thought I'd share the three small collages I made at my workshop in Sarah Ahearn's "Text and Image" class, which was truly, genuinely, wonderful. The ladies in my class were so kind, and I finally started to loosen up. It was the highlight of my trip.

Sarah warmed us up to the materials by forcing us out of our comfort zones. For our first collage, we were each given a small card labeled with an instruction: paint with your fingers; draw a shape; paint with a color you don't like; rip a page from a book, and collage with it. 16 instruction cards total, 2 minutes with each card, accompanied by a super iPod playlist that could have been lifted from my own music library. I felt like a kid again. It was ridiculously fun to be limited by time and it forced me not to think so hard, which is usually my downfall. Here's the weird (WTF, octopus?), yet satisfying result:

For the rest of the class, we could do whatever we liked. Sarah taught us a nifty photo transfer technique using contact paper. So I fiddled. I made this one for Dave:

My last collage has a little flap that lifts up. I wrote a secret note to myself underneath it. On the airplane, under the pressure of my filthy clothes, the flap adhered fast to the board and now it truly is a secret message.