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I am so sorry. I have no idea what happened, which is what  happens when you take time off and don’t check in. I had a post to go up at midnight on the 1st, but it never posted. I just love technology, as long as I don’t get complacent. Here is the post you …

Happy New Year, faithful Beat readers. Hoping it’s a happy and healthy one for all. 2015 was a challenging year for many of us with many changes blowing through the world of comics, but, in the words of Omega the Unknown, “to resist change is to embrace despair.” Of course none of this would have […]

From my heart to yours… May your year be glorious and may you find where you belong May your steps all have a spring and may your lips be laced with song May you always see the good and may your days be filled with grace May your love be overflowing… as you seek the…

I'm thinking and planning and fretting right now exactly like I did a year ago. I remember last years worries so vividly; a new son and too much work.

Career wise the last 2 years have been rocky and full of ups and downs.This past year in particular; I had a son, the economy looked very grim and we had a big move halfway across the country.Being who I am its the failures Iremember clearest. The thing that tripped me up most was panic.I took on too much, worked really hard, missed out on valuable family time and it didn't feel worth it. So the lesson to me is don't take on too much and choose the things you really want to do, not what I feel I should do.

Next year looks incredibly promising.

I have some really exciting work lined up and a plan. I plan to keep the big projects to a minimum. Two, maybe three projects over the year and find an art rep to handle my commercial work. I'll figure out how to make a living at this yet. This year, I hope!

Today we got messy with our dots. Messy - but simple. This was a really fun one.
Draw a circle on a piece of paper (we used card stock for the extra heft). Squeeze out some glue along that line. Cut a long strip of yarn and glue it down to make a circle. Keep adding glue and spiraling in with the yarn - butting it up as close as possible to the previous circle. Change colors whenever you feel like it. And here they are.Jo has recently started adding a smiley face to the O in her signature. Today the smiley became a person and the person became a family. The hearts are to show they love each other. Jo was very careful to point out that slash under the heart next to her (she's the one in the middle) is just her arm - it doesn't mean she doesn't love us.And here's mine. Jo thinks it looks like an Easter egg and maybe we should make egg-shaped ones for Easter.

Now it's my turn to be home alone, so no dots today. Instead I'm posting a picture of the Dot Gallery so far.Don't they look fun all hanging together? I'm going to start cross-posting to a very cool new blog created by artist Holli Conger. It's called Big and Little Art and it features art created together by kids and grown-ups. Thanks to Elizabeth Dulemba for telling me about it!
And here are the results of what I was so busy with last weekend.
These are items inspired by the book The Year of the Perfect Christmas Tree. Gloria Houston, the author, gave the rights to her book to Mitchell County Development Foundation and named Spruce Pine, NC "the Home of the Perfect Christmas Tree." Now there's a website, catalog, and retail store selling craft items made my local artists, with the proceeds funding scholarships for local high-schoolers. Cool, no? So the jury deadline for items for this year's catalog was on Monday and this is what I turned in. I wanted to make something inspired by the fabulous Barbara Cooney illustrations, but that still looked like my work. Thanks, Mom, for helping me come up with this idea. One is a wall-hanging, one is a pillow, and one is a quilt stretched on a wooden frame. The pillow is my favorite. I love that picture of the cabin and I think it looks great "framed" by my brown quilt. Speaking of brown quilts, I finished my quilt for Grovewood Gallery. I just need to de-lint it, take some pictures, and turn it in. Yay!

One more dot for the Vashti Project before Jo hits the road again. I have sales conference for work tomorrow, so a million things to do, but this time I wanted to spend a little extra quality time on the project. Time to bring out the needles and embroidery thread!
Jo loved handsewing. When she started at the Montessori school in Atlanta, one of her first favorite "lessons" was sewing. She didn't actually sew pieces of fabric together. Instead, the teacher drew a simple shape on a square of fabric and Jo would trace it with a running stitch. It was amazing watching her stitches get smaller and more even. We haven't been doing much sewing lately (except on the machine) so I wondered if she would be out of practice, but she pretty much jumped right back into it. And using the running stitch for applique was completely new for her. I safety-pinned the pieces together from the back so her thread would be less likely to get hung up on the pin - in case you were wondering.
So here are the results of a bit of time spent on the couch sewing, chatting, and watching Everyday Italian. Jo thought these cheese crackers looked really tasty. That kid will eat anything with cheese on it or in it!

Jo and I were away from home all last week and we just got back into the Vashti Project. Unfortunately, we only have one more day together and then she's off again. Such a busy life for a four-year-old! It's nice living close to both sets of grandparents. Anyway, I had a busy day today putting together some prototypes for a shop submission that's due tomorrow, so today's dot needed to be easy and not too messy. We talked about a lot of possibilities, but ended up making dots out of dots using our handy-dandy dot stampers. Here they are. . .Jo was a little annoyed that her purple dots weren't close enough together and I love that she decided to fill in the spaces with other colors.

The Vashti Project continues. We had a busy day yesterday - meeting with our builder, taking Jo for a playdate at the lake with all of her friends from school, and (oh yeah) work - so our materials were non-messy, no-drying-time markers and crayons. I've been in to drawing patterns lately and Jo has been doing some too, so we decided to do patterned dots. Here they are. . .

This time we tried tracing around a plastic lid for the dot. Jo was a little frustrated that the lines for her stripes weren't perfectly straight so I showed her how to use a straight edge. I especially love how Jo's repeat alternated shades of blue/green with shades of red/purple. She tested out the combination on a piece of scrap paper before committing to it.

I went for all cool colors, through there's a bit of a yellow cast to the green crayon. I'm in love lately with this wavy checkerboard pattern.

I also got the machine sewing done on the sleeve and binding for my new quilt. We're going to DC this weekend (Alan is hitting the ALA conference and Jo and I will be hitting the Smithsonian museums) and I hope to get a lot of the hand-finishing done in our hotel at night after Jo crashes.
Thanks so much for the nice comments on the quilt binding tutorial. I took pictures of the steps to make a hanging sleeve so there will be a new tutorial soon.

This time Jo got to select the medium we'd be working in for our dots. She opted for glitter glue. Jo ALWAYS opts for glitter glue. If she wants to do art and I ask her what she wants to work with, she'll stand in front of her art supplies, carefully considering everything, and then pick the glitter glue. So here you have it - two more pieces in the Vashti Project.

Jo made a couple of dots with glitter glue in squeeze bottles and then she went for the jar of glitter and snowflakes swimming in glue that you spread on with a brush. She used it to fill in one of her dots and to make a new dot, and then she discovered that she could make "duck feet" by mashing the brush down on the paper. So there are lots of duck prints moving all around the dots.
My dots were all straight from the tube. Jo wanted me to fill in the whole page with dots, but I liked doing a more random cluster.

I've been on the road for work, so no dots for a few days. But now we're back. For several months now Jo has been collecting random wrappers and scraps of paper in a "collage box." She's never used any of them until now - and she was pretty excited at the thought of bringing them out.
This one was simple. Draw a big circle on a piece of paper and fill it up with stuff from the collage box. Here are the results.

I used only candy wrappers and I wanted to fill every bit of space in my dot, including covering up the circle outline. Jo didn't want to put any limits on her materials, and she was much more interested in doing the dot within a dot within a dot composition in the middle of her dot. When she found the square glass gem in her box that was pretty much the highlight of her project. And really, to a four year old, what's better than finding a surprise glass gem? You can see it now in the very center of her dot.

I think day one of the Vashti Project must have been successful - the first thing Jo said to me the next morning was, "What kind of dots are we going to make today?" So for day two we did a fun thing with melted crayons.

We covered our electric pancake griddle with aluminum foil and set it on the lowest setting. While that warmed up we cut circles out of plain white paper. Then we pulled out our container of crayon stubs (now I know why we never threw those away!) and removed any paper wraps that still remained. We drew shapes and swirls with the crayons on the aluminum foil, letting the colors melt together. When we liked the look of things we made prints by dropping the paper circles on the melted wax, lifting them up, and letting them cool.
After we had printed all of our dots we pulled out a bunch of construction paper and played around, deciding which dots looked better on which colors. Then we glued them down and signed them. Here are our favorites.

So I've been casting around for an idea for something to do with Jo this summer. Some ongoing project that could be broken down into smaller projects - like every day identifying a tree in our new yard, but less her-looking-over-my-shoulder-while-I-look-things-up. On Saturday we spent all day visiting studios for the Toe River Arts Council Studio Tours and also down in Asheville for the open studio day in the River District. I decided to cap off the day by reading a few of our favorite books about creativity with Jo. We started with Milli, Jack, and the Dancing Cat. I love that one. Then we moved on to The Dot by Peter Reynolds (featuring the very best art teacher in the history of the world) and it hit me. We could spend the summer making dots!
In the book, Vashti won't even try in art class because she thinks she can't draw. Her teacher encourages her to make a mark and Vashti (who is clearly feeling pissy) just jabs a random dot on the page and shoves it at her teacher. Her teacher, undaunted, picks it up, looks at it thoughtfully, then hands it back and asks Vashti to sign it. The next time Vashti comes to class she finds HER little dot, hanging over the teacher's desk in a swirly gold frame! Wow! She decides she can make a better dot than that and she's off on an artistic bender. It's awesome.
So I mentioned the idea to Jo and she loved it. I told her we would start the next day and we would use paint. As soon as she woke up she asked when we were going to make dots.

So here is round one. It's always fun to get out the paints and mix colors. Jo and I each made a few and these are her favorites - one favorite from me and one from her.