Tea and Ephemera and Heavy Metal at Road to CA
So what is ephemera? Well, here is the definition from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary EPHEMERA 1: something of no lasting significance 2: ephemera plural : paper items (as posters, broadsides, and tickets) that were originally meant to be discarded after use but have since become collectibles Tea & Ephemera is a class that’s all about expanding ones view of [...]
A Spot of Tea in Springfield, Missouri
I had a lovely time in Springfield with the Ozark Piecemakers at their annual guild show. My trip began with seeing a fabulous textile exhibit at the new Springfield Branson airport including the humorous work of Pam RuBert and beautiful organza work of Rosemary Claus-Gray, if you live in that part of the country I [...]
Charting a Course in Color
I teach color theory very much like you would learn it in art school, because I think the way to really understand color is by mixing paint and seeing what happens when you physically add one color to another. As an educator I believe experiential learning like this creates the deepest level of learning for most people. In the [...]
Tea bags revisited
My life is a in a bit of chaos right now and I havent been able to work on anything art related for a couple weeks, so I’m reposting a couple of older blog posts about using tea bags and paper on fabric to make mixed media art quilts. Drawing on a tea bag. 1. After [...]
Exploring Tea & Ephemera in Cincinnati
The first day of festival I taught Tea & Ephemera which is a class focused on learning a variety of mixed media techniques: drawing on tea bags and adhering them to fabric working with printed tea bags collaging a variety of art papers, napkins, book pages and foreign language newspapers additional color is applied with paint [...]
Wednesday: Tea, Preview Night and Dinner with Friends
On wednesday I taught Tea & Ephemera which is really a class about trying out lots of different techniques on one piece of colored fabric. It’s all very spontaneous, playing with various papers, printed paper imagery, drawing on tea bags, using printed abaca paper to emulate tea bags, stamping patterns and texture and using shiva [...]
A Spot of Tea in Long Beach
My last class in Long Beach was Tea & Ephemera, where everyone works with drawing and painting on tea bags, collaging; printed abaca paper, decorative art papers, napkins and old garment patterns, bits of text from books and foreign newspapers and iron on ink jet transfers made with TAP. Then another layer of visual texture [...]
Make Tea Stained Fabric
Over the last couple weeks, I have been preparing a lot of fabric for the workshops I’ll be teaching in the next several months. I have torn yards and yards of white fabric and handdyed a variety of light colors to use in the Tsukineko inks classes and also made tea colored painted fabric for [...]
Tea & Ephemera in Ann Arbor
We had a great day today drawing on teabags, then collaging printed teabags, decorative tissues and text, adding paint and colored pencils to teabags, incorporating colored images with TAPS transfers, rubber stamps and stenciling images with Shiva Paint stiks. So many beautiful collages ready to stitch. At the end of the day, I was [...]
Tea & Ephemera, round 2: Sunday morning
Sunday morning I think all of us were tired and happy, glad that we had such a wonderful opportunity to spend this time together making art and friends. Knowing that these were our last few hours were a little bittersweet. Preparing fabric for everyone to use before hand really helped the class be more relaxed [...]
Tea & Ephemera
In the evening I taught Tea & Ephemera, this was a new class for me, so there are always so many things I learn the first time through. I had originally proposed it as a 6 hour class but gave the option of a 3 hour class and that is what got picked. Well, there [...]
Tutorial Tsunami day 4 the wave hits shore
A tutorial for printing on tea bags I have a large bowl that sits on my counter that I toss my tea bags in after I use them. When it gets to the point where it is overflowing, kind of like now, I tear each one open and dump out the tea. Then I flatten [...]
Lark Quilt It Contest
So you remember a couple weeks ago I mentioned the Lark Books Quilt it contest? Entrants will create an original Quilt of any size that incorporates at least three of the following five required elements Bird/sMountainsSilver fabric, thread, itemRecycled/repurposed materialBeads I sent in my entry in and got the ok to post it, so here [...]
Playing with tea bags and more
The paper on the top left with letters is a kimwipe, the one on the right is a large black tea bag for making iced tea. The white paper below is a tea bag from hibiscus tea, the bottom two dark tea bags I left the tea dry in the bag for several days before [...]
The Artful Use of Tea Bags
This is my method for drawing on a tea bag. 1. After steeping your tea, set tea bag on the counter to dry and enjoy that fabulous warm cuppa tea with a dash of cream. 2. When tea bag is completely dry (not damp) carefully remove the staple, unfold top of bag and shake out [...]
Mixed Media Paper Quilt
I thought I would play around with making a mixed media paper quilt. I painted a piece of fabric to use as a base. The drawings were done on tea bags. I drink a lot of tea, and I love the patina that used tea bags get from the tanins as they dry. So I [...]
