Artful Journey - Los Gatos CA - July 2010

I spent 4 days at The Artful Journey last week. This was held at The Presentation Center in the hills above Los Gatos, California. I took a 3 day class with DJ Pettitt which was Amazing! The location was Beautiful. It was quite rustic, yet very comfortable. The one thing I was tentative about was the bathrooms are down the hall, not in the rooms. It didn't take long to find that really didn't make a difference. It was dimly lit in the night & no problem getting there, back & right back to sleep. In the mornings, if I Did encounter anyone else having just crawled out of bed, sleepily brushing their teeth......it was actually fun to just say Hi & carry on. Felt kind of like a family in that way. There are no phones, tvs, etc. in the rooms. Although I did have my Ipad & laptop just in case. LOL But we tended to keep working on our projects into the night at times, or walk around the grounds (Bev & I saw a shooting star our first evening, sitting outside). We made & stripped our own beds which I found a nice thing. I have always felt it is such a waste to change bed linens in hotels every day as well as the towels. So this was good to me. And I found my bed very comfortable & slept well each night. :-) I can't Quite seem to concentrate even yet on work & home. I'm still living the memories of a wonderful 4 days.

This is Pueblo, the building many of us stayed in. There are also some cottages where some of our group also stayed.

This is a moss covered pond nearby with a trail going around it. Often there was a great blue heron on the water as well as a family of 4 deer wandering around the grounds.

These are views of our classroom from the back & the front. I'm sure the nuns have never seen quite such a Mess (although a Creative one!) in these rooms. LOL

I thought this was a beautiful cross. Very artistic.

This was a courtyard area where we had coffee in the morning, had the artists sale on Monday night and often just gathered there.

Bev (my roommate) and I did the Labyrinth one evening.

This was a cairn at the center of the labyrinth. I might toy around with using it as a background layer in Photoshop if I ever get back to catching up with my online class!

I am not Catholic, so I thought this picture was interesting! The thought of the nuns marrying just never occurred to me. It's a fun picture.

Here is Peggy, Melissa and Beth. Peggy & Beth are both in our local CaliforniaArtGirls yahoo group and Beth & I were table mates for the 3 days. I enjoyed working with you Beth! I had met Beth & Peggy before at Asilomar. Melissa was a wonderful surprise to see walking down the hall the first afternoon I got there! She and I shared a room at Art & Soul Virginia 4 years ago. We set it up on the online yahoo group, had never met each other & spent 6 or 7 nights & days as roommates. We have kept in touch every now & then, but what a Surprise to see her. And we were in the same class! We got along great in Virginia and I was thrilled to see her. We will most likely keep in touch more Often now. :-)

Here is DJ, binding MY Book. :-) Not the book I made in class. But a book I bought from her. :-) She used the cover to this book as a demo last October in Portland. I Loved it so much, I kept asking her if she would sell it. LOL She wouldn't just sell a cover, so we worked out what type of book and how involved I wanted and a price & she has been working on it. She had it Nearly done & brought it for me to see. It is trully Beautiful!!! I had to leave after class on Wednesday however to get back to work (which I really didn't quite do........I couldn't get motivated for work after 3 days of artistic creativity & being with friends!), and she didn't have it quite bound yet. So it is now on the road with DJ who is driving back the coast route & taking Spectacular pictures I'm sure along the way! It's kind of fun to be looking forward to receiving it when it comes. :-) She referred to it as "Margaret's Book" the whole time as she used it for demo. I loved that. :-)

These are just a few pix of demos and a great group of us students working hard on our wonderful books!

This is the final evening with show & tell, thank you's from Cindy and the teachers (who were DJ, Stephanie Lee, Richard Salley and Katie Kendrick who All were so very Available & Friendly......we really all were one big Happy Group!). The silent auction raised over $700 which was donated to the Center. I am sending off a donation to the center this week myself. They exist by donations only & it really was quite an impressive place. I did read the brochure and they are as I recall, nearly 100% green (or a Very high percentage) and one of the first places getting there. I noticed the first day I walked up, a rooftop garden over the huge building housing the dining hall, bookstore, etc. I didn't realize gardens like that attract different bird species, butterflies, etc.

And here is my book in progress. Many people did get theirs bound. I was having so much fun working on the covers & pages, I decided early on I would bind it later & just relax & enjoy creating the covers & signatures for it. I Do Hope I eventually finish it. But I also look forward to just working on it now & then. The first pictures is the Front (the bird which most of us used.......it was a picture DJ provided for us & for me, although I wanted to have pictures & make this my Own......working on the same picture & learning the layering, etc. was much easier I think than venturing out on my own.) By the time I got to the back cover (the tree & pole), I Did use a picture I took myself & had Much Fun trying to recreate layers like we did on the front. I ended up very happy with it!

And the rest of the pictures are pages I worked on in various stages of completeness. And I have several signatures I didn't even start on yet. I Thoroughly Loved this class and project! I plan to keep an eye on DJ's blog & take an online class in the future. Not that I didn't Learn in the class. But my creativeness seems to come either with a teacher & class or with other people. And this group in class was a Great Group! I hope to see everyone again at one retreat or another. Maybe even next February here again. :-)

Paperbag book swaps

In the past few months I have been in 2 paper bag book swaps. The first theme was "Nature". There were 12 people and we all did 2 sets of 12 pages. These are my pages for that swap. I haven't yet bound my book, but just recently bought a paper bag book from "Pages In Time" in Lincoln Nebraska. The owner, Karen has made several and they are beautiful. This gave me many ideas of how to bind the book and tidbits to add in pockets, in the bag opening itself. I hope to find time to get that bound soon!

The second book theme was "Da Vinci". There were 8 of us in this swap so we all did 2 sets of 8 pages. Mine is late. :-( But is now winging its way to the UK so all pages can be mailed out to the players. These are my pages for this swap.

I couldn't let go of the idea of using the Mona Lisa in a different way. I have recently been playing with a "Teleidescope" which is like a kaleidescope, but without wheels.....the images are in whatever direction you are looking, so they are real images, not patterns of whatever is in the scope. I bought a program that would do the same thing with pictures. I played & played with Mona Lisa images and these are the ones I used. It was lots of fun, although maybe now the Mona Lisa has been done More than Enough times. LOL


I transferred printed images onto muslin using Leslie Rileys transparency transfer technique and then sewed them onto cardstock & embellished.