Fibrearts Journal

You may know that Craft Land (Town Center Plaza, Jumerah, Dubai), is sponsoring my Art Journaling Courses. I 've made a very short list of select shops I would love to have as sponsors because of the wonderful people and products they offer. Craft Land have the best and most creative yarns here in Dubai. This place is just great eye candy: the colours of the yarns, threads and buttons, they have ribbons, kits, tools, and they offer courses, too. One of the wonderful ideas they have, is the sewing clinic! Which is where I went this morning and the wonderful Christie helped me use the very advanced sewing machine - these things are like you Mac computers. Amazing!
I've been collecting bits and pieces of fabrics, ribbons, threads, beads, you name it. Christie brought along her own stash of similar bits and pieces. I cut and doodled with fabrics, pinned them down, and then started to sew with metallic thread. We have a few issues because of the many layers I used, but I got so much help and support form very patient Christie!
My plan is to create a complete journal, with loads of pages, as many as possible made of fibrearts including crochet, knitting, embroidery, mixed media fibrearts .. and then to join them together as a journal. 
This was my first page! 
What do you think?
I'm hoping to work on this regularly (if you'll bear with me as a skip over to other projects in between - I can't seem to break that habit!).

Clever Dance

I found this dance amazing, inspirational, the choreography, the strength, the dancing (Valerie - I thought of you especially - I hope you like it).  


click here to watch and tell me what you think.

leaving our mark

Does it matter that we leave our mark in this life? Is it vain to think that we should leave a mark? Vain or narcissistic? Should this be a goal? What do you think?

Hate / love relationship

Sometimes I love facebook, sometimes I hate it. 


But I've met some wonderful people, whom I would not have met otherwise, on facebook. As I have done through this blog (and I still welcome art-exchange offers), I invited art and creativity exchanges. It's always amazing to see other people's work, their perspective. New, surprising, interesting, different, inspiring. So this friend and I each bought a journal and doodled in it for a while before each of us posted it to the other. This is one of the spreads I drew for in my friend's journal. It was sure a thrill to receive his drawings in the elegant black journal he chose for me. 


So when I have these moments of facebook hate, I remind myself that it's not facebook, it's the people - people are people in whatever "medium". Some you like, some you don't, and some don't like you. And some who become friends for life, real friends. It's life. 

untitled 4 - Nov 2011

My passion sways and is so fickle - I admit. One day I feel like doing illustrations, another it's abstract and then it's art journaling .. then I feel like writing my short stories. Sometimes that feels good, sometimes I feel lost and unfocused.

Untitled 3 - 28 Nov 2011

Art Journaling Course - Brenda's work

Brenda's artwork - pages and pages of artwork. I can't believe how much work we've done this session, and still the ladies complained that there was not enough time!

Thanks Brenda for coming and for your lovely artwork.

Art Journaling Course - Zeina's work

This time, my 'students' created many more pages of artwork than any of my previous sessions. We went on a creative binge! It was great. The only thing was that one of my students cold not come on the last day due to high blood pressure .. Amal, we missed you.

All these pieces are Zeina's work.