Welcome to my new blog! I’m Kate, an artist and elementary school art teacher. Here you can watch my progress as I explore the traditional crafts of knitting, sewing, and jewelry making, as well as my progress as a grad student in Interdisciplinary Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University. You’ll see me reinvent my wardrobe as I try to break the habit of buying chain store fashion in favor of unique, handcrafted items. Enjoy!
I need some quick crafts to make for last minute Christmas presents, and I found this inspiration from patterns in Ravelry. There should be a rule not to start Christmas crafts after October, but it's been a ridiculously busy start to the school year. I hope to have a window of time when my grad classes end for the semester. I can probably make the knit ones pretty easily, but I need to learn how to crochet - some of the designs are too pretty to pass up!
My piece is done! After a stressful weekend of trying to deal with a burned hard drive on my computer, I was able to pull this piece together the morning of the show! It's been a tough week of many cups of coffee, and frustration with my computer and scanner, but 
it's up and over with. It's a combination of a watercolor painting that was digitally altered and a drawing. I usually scan my drawings in, but for this I had to draw on top of the print with a Sharpie in a pinch.
I created this video to introduce a particularly challenging lesson to my Computers in Art middle school students. In this lesson, the students are to create a self portrait with layers. One layer must be a watercolor painting, one layer is a drawing, and one lay
er is a photograph the students take of themselves. Here you will see examples of artwork by different students, and you will notice the wide variety of solutions and many different ways students decided to express their personalities.
This year at my school, the faculty was challenged to make a piece of artwork to be included in a faculty art show. 
The directions are very specific, to look at a piece of artwork by the local fiber artist Susan Feller of Ruckman Mill Farms Studio in West Virginia, and then recreate her work in the media of our choice.
The challenge makes me cringe, and I think that fellow artists can easily relate. Any time an artist is asked to copy the work of another artist completely takes the personal connection and meaning out of the art experience.
The best way I could handle an assignment like this is to try to convince myself that I'm simply creating my own fall landscape with trees. My plan is to paint several different watercolor papers with textures, then scan them in and collage them together digitally. After that, I will draw back over the image with a black pen drawing.
This semester I am taking a collage/mixed media course. I have had trouble finding direction in art at this point- and my first attempts at making collages this semester have left me feeling as though I'm lacking the level of sophistication that I desire in my work. I dread the idea of my work looking "scrapbooky" (which is somewhat hypocritical since I do scrapbook from time to time - I prefer to think of them as "visual books" instead!)
As a challenge from my professor, I was instructed to flip through various magazines (I chose mostly old National Geographic) and cut out 50 images that appealed to me. Most of the images I chose were portions of patterns in nature - swirls of clouds, ripples of water, close ups of leaves.
After selecting 50 images, I was instructed to eliminate 47 of them. They were grouped by theme, so I selected one atmospheric picture, one water picture, one man made image, one natural... until I had three images left. These are the three images. Natural? Definitely. And they are quite primitive, which surprised me. Over the next week or two I'm going to see what I can do with these images, and see where they take me.
This dress was so nice to make after that frustrating purple top! It's New Look 6748. It was also a knit, but with a whole lot less stretch. I bought this fabric online from Fabric.com. It was my first time buying fabric online, and my first order got messed up - I got 3 yards of blue linen with a sticker on it that said "Pink Baby Rib." Hmmm. At least customer service was good about it. The nice thing about this cloth is that it doesn't fray! Hurray! And such a nice quick sew. For once!
This top was probably one of the most deceptively tedious projects I've done in a long time. It was a very simple pattern 
(Simplicity 2409) that had me pulling my hair out. I think I could have made the top with no pattern at all and finished in half the time! The pattern was way too large, even though I made it a size smaller than the measurements on the envelope. I altered it like crazy, and I wasn't used to the knit fabric stretching all over the place. It took a lot of bias tape, lots of seam ripping, and a whole lot of coffee.
After making so many bags, I decided it was time to upgrade my own knitting bag from a crumpled paper shopping tote to a real bag. This one is made from a nice light grey corduroy, with the inside lined with a pale pink cotton print lining. This is the first time I’ve used a snap for closure, and it was such a piece of cake! Then of course I had to make a matching knitting needle holder. Now it’s just time to find all my needles that have rolled away under the bed.
Okay! Now Christmas is over and I can blog about all the gifts I made everybody! These three bags and needle holder were made for the lovely ladies in my family. Each have a contrasting print lining and inside pocket. This time, most were done before Christmas, with the exception of the knitting needle holder. Somehow I didn’t start that one until 11:00pm the night before I was going to gift it – not the best idea in the world. In theory it shouldn’t have taken too long to make, but I misplaced my rotary cutter and trying to cut a straight line with my scissors had me promising myself to never wait until the last minute again. (I have a funny feeling like I’ve made that promise before…)
