Cowgurl's Blessing: Friday

In 2001 and 2004 I took an "Artist Way" class at our local Art Studio. The author, Julia Cameron, recommends two ongoing activities that will conquer blocks and self-destructive tendencies: morning pages and artist's dates. Morning pages are three pages of writing, performed daily, about anything at all. This exercise overcomes the writer's internal censor and makes writing habitual. The artist's date is a weekly block of two hours spent observing, experiencing, and sensing. I loved the class..and loved the activities, my favorite being the Artist Dates. I was faithful in planning my date each week during the twelve-week study, but have found, since that time, it's so easy to push it aside when they are not part of my weekly calendar.

Beginning this January I am involved again in a book study of an artist book called, "The Creative Call" by Janice Elsheimer. Ms Elsheimer's book comes from a position of God's design on my live. While Ms Cameron's book deals with artistic development as a spiritual issue, her book seemed to fall short for my own spiritual experience. While she encourages finding yourself through practicing your "art", I wanted to delve deeper and find expression in my art that would lead me to discover a deeper relationship with God. To offer my art as an act of worship to God.

The exercises in "The Creative Call" offer me the potential to transform myself as an artist and to understand more fully who God originally created me to be. Ms Elsheimer encourages writing...but instead of the mandatory 3 pages, I'm only writing for 20 minutes each day. (Doesn't feel so overwhelming when I have NOTHING to say!) Hopefully, it will also provide me the courage and discipline to actually produce work! I am looking forward to working through the material in the context of a group so we can encourage and challenge each other to be creative!

That being said...one of the things that I have introduced to my week again is the Artist Date...so on Friday's I will be "creating" something or going somewhere to be inspired to create! This Friday I sewed.

I have been saving this piece of drop cloth canvas leftover from another project. I had in my mind to create a pillow.

I thought of painting a design on the canvas, or maybe an iron...but that would have required an outing to the store and I wasn't feeling up to leaving the house...so I printed my postcard picture onto a piece of poplin.

A pretty piece of lace (a donation from by girlfriend's mother. I love when Oma cleans out her "junk"!) I also wanted to incorporate some furniture webbing into my project.

I stitched the webbing down the sides of the canvas, stitched the lace down,

then stitched the postcard piece on top using a blanket stitch on the machine.

Next step was to decide on a backing.

I went with a piece of chenille decorator fabric that I thought was pretty as an accent.

Once I completed my sewing I headed to Miss Janice's to raid her button collection. I knew I could find just the right buttons to finish off the project.