MMS Continues

...And I'm lovin' it! Just picked up some more MistyFuse at my LQS; I found it on the roll there, at $5.95 per metre, so I bought 1 m. in black, and 2 in white. My box for Lesson 2 will need the white, but I thought it might be fun to have some black around for projects using dark paper/fabric.

Here are a few photos from the balance of Lesson 1:

This is the cover of my torn paper/fabric book. Materials used: muslin base; MistyFuse; torn pages from an old book; cheesecloth; diluted turquoise dye, painted on with a 1 1/2-inch flat brush; hot-fix angelina fibre; cut up hand-dyed cord; medium grey tulle; grommets.

This is the inside of the book. You can see that I've lined it with fabric. On the right side is a sample from my tissue paper piece, earlier in this same lesson. I've done a bit of free-motion machine embroidery on the right-hand side of the sample, which you can see if you click on the photo to enlarge it.

On the SAQA front, last night I attended my first mentoring group, in the form of a conference call; the speaker/mentor was none other than Caryl Bryer Fallert! It was an interesting 90 minutes or so, moderated by Lisa Chipetine out of NYC. Callers had signed up from all over North America, and most of us had submitted questions for Caryl to think about in advance. She went through them thoroughly, and took auxiliary questions as well. There's enough for me to think about to fill two more blog postings, at least...so stay tuned.

One of the key bits of advice she gave, though, I'll tell you right up front: if you want to make your art to share outside your family milieu, you need to:

- Make it your focus;
- Make a plan to develop a body of work so you can...
- Exhibit, exhibit, exhibit!

For Caryl, who has always been an artist (paint was her first medium), it's been a case of "Do what you love; the money will follow". I think that's the ideal way to go about it. Do it because you love it; share it with the world and the money (i.e. sales of your work) will follow. Certainly, for me, it's worth a try!