Journaling 2021 with Valerie Sjodin

I bought a 2021 calendar this week.  Now I'm wondering why.  What will I put on it?  The two in-person workshops I have booked in January may yet get cancelled.   The one I was planning to do in mid-November has been cancelled!  But this is life currently, so we just have to make the best of it.

My friend Valerie keeps a journal each year which focuses on a particular word.  As you know I choose a wrod of the year also.  Although it's still only October Valerie has started to think about what she will be doing in 2021.  I thoroughly recommend you looking at her latest blog posts about this.

How to plan and organize a Word of the Year Bullet Journal

and

Choosing a Word of the Year

Next week I'll update you on my 2020 journal so far.  And show my answers to Valerie's questions.

 Thanks for joining me today
Bernice

The Colours of Covid-19, 2020

I wrote this for a writers group I belong to.  It's my take on colour and may not match the purist's psychology of colours.

What colour is Covid-19? Is it red because there is danger in contracting it? Red as a warning to stay socially distant?

Red is a passionate colour. We think of hearts and Valentines. But too much red around us will make us irritable and angry. Too much Covid does that too!

What would you choose as the colour of lockdown? I think it’s grey. Any number of shades of grey (not just 50!) For some it will be dark grey leaning towards black as they drift into depression. For others life will be another shade of grey. 

Grey fog, brain fog, life that feels like a dank, dark, late November afternoon. 

The Spring and Summer have passed in glorious technicolour but in the main our lives have stayed grey.

But there’s always hope!

Hope is vibrant. Hope is yellow. The sun. A light. A candle flickering in the darkness. The pulse of the beam from a lighthouse in the night.

Yellow is optimistic and cheerful, uplifting and enthusiastic. We all need a bit of yellow. We all need hope. Hope for the future.

And when this is all over there will be blue. Not the Blues – beautiful songs as they are. But the freedom of blue.

The ocean. The sky. Freedom to meet. Freedom to travel. Freedom to hug!

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice

Text, Texture, Textiles 2

This week saw our second Art Textiles Group day.  Much of the day was spent using fabric rather than sketchbook work.  Although we did end the day in our sketchbooks.   If you missed it, my post on our first day is here.

At a studio day I had dyed some fabrics, written on the fabric with dye and used a thermofax screen.  I had washed the fabrics so I was able to continue at this week's session working on top of these dyed fabrics.

I used Formusol which is a type of bleach to write onto the fabric.  You can begin to see the bleach working on this.

 When it was dry I ironed it and you can see how it took the colour out.

It didn't work so well on this piece because there wasn't a solid block of colour

In the afternoon we played at using different tools to apply dye to fabric.  We first put masking tape across to make different areas.  We removed the masking tape and left it to dry.  This is it washed and ironed.

I also overdyed some previously breakdown printed fabric

I painted a couple of pages in my sketchbook with dye and wrote on them with the Formusol.

I have no idea where all this going but it's fun playing.

Thanks for joining me today
Bernice