Creative moments

As I told you in an earlier posting, hubby is in Europe (in the Netherlands right now), so I am a single parent at the moment. Thankfully the kids are all well again, but as it it the school holidays here it is quite a demanding job to keep them all entertained. So demanding that when the boys are in bed I am too exhausted to do anything creative. I had hoped to do a lot of quilting these weeks, but haven't done anything yet :-(.



However, today we were creative! I had bought sketchbooks and new pencils for the boys, and they all started drawing with gusto! Hugo and Robbie made one drawing each and then went off to do other things, but Ernst (5) kept on going and filled about ten pages of his new book!



And he made some really nice drawings - this one's my favourite:



The boat and car are also very nice:



I took my Sketchbook Project sketchbook and made these (not very good) drawings of Robbie and Ernst:



I also did some 'doodling' (something I never do!) and managed to fill five pages of my book!



Now I am going to crash on the couch and watch a dvd. Somewhere in the back of my mind a quilt called Exhaustion is starting to take shape...!

Sketchbook and giraffes

A while ago I signed up for The Sketchbook Project (after hearing about it on the Quiltart mailinglist). Last week I received my sketchbook and on Saturday I started drawing in it. The theme is Storybook, so I made a title page and wrote the beginning of a story. I used my Derwent Inktense pencils, but discovered that the pages are too thin to use wet pencils :-(. Oh well, it's all part of the artistic experience... I hope this will force me to practice some more drawing.



One of the things I drew was a giraffe. My Dutch friend Heleen alerted me to the One Million Giraffes website - set up by a Norwegian guy who has a bet with a friend that he can collect one million giraffes before January 1st, 2011. These giraffes need to be hand made, not on a computer or store bought. So far he has collected 855,315 giraffes, so he only needs 144,685 more!



Hugo, Ernst, hubby and I drew about ten giraffes and I also made a giraffe calligram. I've uploaded it to Spoonflower, it's not for sale yet but will be in a while:



Speaking about calligrams, here are the first eight for Robbie's quilt:



I'm thinking of making it a quilt-as-you-go quilt, like my selvedge quilt. Then the back could be an I Spy quilt, with lots of novelty fabrics...

I am looking forward to Friday, when I will visit the Textile Art Festival here in Brisbane. Can't wait to see my MAGnificence quilt exhibited, and the Textile Tantrum quilt, and my embellished bag! I will also be sure to attend one of the floor talks on the Twelve by Twelve exhibition and say hi to Brenda, who created my blog header.