Zentangles Make & Take Craft Party

Sunday we spent the afternoon Zentangling and having some wine & cheese! A perfect day if you ask me! Stacie Spencer has been doing Zentangles for a few years now and offerred to share it with The Muse at a Make & Take class! A Zentangle is a meditative doodle. Stacie showed us how to get started and some sample pattern ideas...
Here is a great start that two of the class takers were working on.

After we finished the tile, Stacie showed us how to put them on journal covers using embossing techniques.

Here are the finished results and the happy Zentanglers!

Neptune's Jewels Wine & Cheese Craft Party

Chrissy Gemmill helped us get in style Wednesday night by teaching us how to create a nautical inspired bracelet! She brought in tons of stones and beads in beachy colors. Also, you could choose from various nautical charms. We learned basic jewelry making techniques such as wire wrapping and jump ring manipulations.

Then we got to the fun part! Picking out our bracelet colors and creating our design.
The results were great!

Image Transfer Collage Wine & Cheese Craft Party

Wednesday night's craft party was fun! We took pictures and turned them into a photo transfer collage! Courtney Prahl taught us this easy technique using everyday household items.

Picking out pictures to use was the hardest part! Then we learned some basic design techniques about collage and chose our materials. Courtney encouraged us to look at trash and junk mail in a new way and incorporate them into our collage!

Everyone's collages turned out great! I love seeing how people end up turning their pictures and some scrap papers into works of art!

Printmaking: Oil of Wintergreen Mimosa Make & Take

Dorothea Barrick came back to teach Printmaking with Oil of Wintergreen for the second time. This class is always really fun! First we got started by learning about Dorothea and her art background. She showed us samples pieces she made using the wintergreen print
making technique.

We then tried the technique ourselves...

We had some great results!

Here are the finished pieces- ready to be framed or turned into cards or incorporated into collage!

Blueprinted Scarf Mimosa Make & Take

We were praying to the "sun gods" yesterday! With a weekend full of rain and forecasted rain, we were a little worried about our Blueprinted Scarf Mimosa Make & Take class that relies on the light of the sun! Luckily the rain held out for just the right amount of time! In our rush to beat the rain and the excitement of the class- I forgot to take any pictures until after the prints were done!

Using all sorts of found and natural objects, we created fabric patterns using the sun.


After they were rinsed out, it was a surprise to see how bright blue the fabric became and how wonderful our scarves looked!

Margaret Hluch, our instructor, showed us how to add a new color and patterning to our scarves using various folding and tying techniques. Here she is showing Judith a special way to create a systematic pattern.

The results after the tea bath...


They all turned out great!

Flower Power Pendants Wine & Cheese Craft Party

Another fun jewelry class with Chrissy Gemmill! Last night we made floral inspired pendants for spring!Chrissy first taught us the fundamental techniques of jewelry making.
After we felt comfortable with that, we designed our own necklace! There were so many choices of colors in pearls, stones, glass and unique charms!
They all turned out great!

Here is a fun picture of Chrissy cleaning up....she's a bit OCD about her bead organization! Love that about her!