Rosie Kelly Book Workshop in Memphis

What a weekend! I picked up a new friend, Shirley Sawyer, at her home in Louisville and drove to Memphis to meet other friends for a fantastic weekend workshop presented by the Memphis Calligraphy Guild. Rosie Kelly of Chicago was the instructor. It was the second or third workshop I've enjoyed with Rosie over the years, the other(s) being paste paper workshops). Paste paper, another subject entirely, is a great page maker for these wonderful handmade artist books.

This photo is of the books I made in class plus the two collage pages we made early in day one of the workshop. More can be seen on my Letterlady's Letters blog at: http://letterladysletters.blogspot.com/ and my website at: www.picturetrail.com/letterlady in my handmade books album.

Shirley, Deb Warnat and her daughter Cassie, Donna Hacker and I stayed at Donna's daughter's lovely condo in a very nice Memphis suburb. It couldn't have been a better situation for fun, camaraderie and art. Some good eating came in to play too, including daily breakfast yogurt yumminess Donna made for each of us from a bed and breakfast recipe. Here's a photo of my morning treat.

Near Emily's, we spotted this sign. We loved it and hope it did the trick.

Where else would a group of people attend a calligraphy guild sanctioned workshop and be visited by a Canine police unit? This workshop was held at a police station community room, and the police officers were curious about our activity. (Maybe they were curious about our frequent mentioning of our 'stashes' - which in our case was pretty innocuous - our beautiful paper scraps that we were using for the collage elements in our books.) When we let them look around at our book projects we asked to see the beautiful dog this officer managed. No touching allowed, but Dobro (?) was a beautiful animal and enjoyed his visit. Had the officer given the word, those powerful jaws could have done unthinkable damage. (That's Rosie seated at her desk in the background.)

See other photos on my Letterlady's Letters blog and on my website.

2010 Art Projects - so far

I've been involved in three art workshops this year already, and a few calligraphy jobs. Above is a photo of the book I made in Bonnie Stahlecker's workshop at the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis in January, which jump-started my busy art year.

Below are some photos from the Jacqueline Sullivan "Wet N Wild" watercolor workshop, on various background techniques. The first is my finished piece from the workshop. Jacqueline talked me into tearing it into two pieces. I tore it along an organic shape and will mount the left side piece slightly above the right hand side in a collage frame. The second is a group of student papers drying. Today I have been practicing lettering with a pencil. I'll post more art pictures in the next few days and some other photos I've been taking.





Here are practice pages I've been working on. I HAVE to buy a new camera...all those splotches are on my lens. : /






Here are some of the escort cards and envelopes that filled my studio.


Here is a very long menu, which was part of a very large job (An earlier post has pictures from that event.)



Here is a hand-lettered invitation for a small dinner party and one of the envelopes...(address obliterated for privacy.)



Here is my Jace the face, whom I kept for 4 days while his parents made a trip to Texas. What a great bonding time we had!





Here is Jace watching TV with his Pappy.



And I'll end with my Sleepy Jace.