Can you believe that another month has just flown by and it's again time for the 10th? And you know what that means, right? Time for another Inspired By!
Inspired By is something sweet Marsha and me have been doing for years now. Until 2018 it was that we chose a subject to be inspired by and then did something inspired by that theme, a piece of art or a book. The inspiration could be anything but we both turned that into some kind of project and blogged the creation on the 10th. You can browse the past "Inspired By" posts from here (link).
Inspired By is something sweet Marsha and me have been doing for years now. Until 2018 it was that we chose a subject to be inspired by and then did something inspired by that theme, a piece of art or a book. The inspiration could be anything but we both turned that into some kind of project and blogged the creation on the 10th. You can browse the past "Inspired By" posts from here (link).
Inspired By is a playground, a concept we can use to explore, to play and to discover. We can do as much or as little we want and have time for. I guess it's not a surprise then that we both enjoy Inspired By very much but after doing it the same way so many years, we thought to change the things a bit.
This year, 2018, we both just post on the 10th with some source of inspiration we found that month. Or rather on a period from the 10th of previous month to 9th of the current month. It can be a series of photos, a book we read, an artwork we saw, just a pebble on the street or a new product we bought. We can make something using that source, but it's more about sharing just the inspiration. Consider it as a window to our creative minds!
Above I included a collage that partly shows the inspiration sources to this month's make. Yes, I again made something. I know that this year especially we have the freedom of NOT doing an actual project for the Inspired by, but still I feel that I want to do one each time. It's something I do for myself, when I can just play without any restrictions. No particular collection I have to use, I don't have to take step by step pictures nor video, so I can just DO stuff without thinking it through first. And that to me is vacation, relaxation and loading the batteries. Just creating for the sake of the fact that it makes me happy and makes me tick.
But back to the inspiration. We visited Fiskars (link) - the village, not the company - some weeks ago as there was a sound festival my husband was interested in there. The village itself, as you can read from the link, is an old industrial community and has given name to the Finnish factory maybe best known for the scissors, Fiskars. There's still a lot of the old buildings around the village and the sound festival was kept in an old foundry. While my husband and daughters were trying out different instruments, I took a stroll around the area with my phone and took some photos of the old machinery that was lying around the area.
As you can see from the collage, there's also something else than old buildings and machinery. We visited our cottage during the same weekend. Forest is a special place to me and I'm lucky that there's plenty of it around our cottage. There's something really soothing about that greenery and silence that's in the forest. As autumn is here, there were a lot of mushrooms around and it all started to form into a project when I saw some dried wood pieces on the ground...
I combined the machinery, the different textures found on forest floor and the color palette of rust and autumn and made a little "cabinet of curiosities" styled display. It's a toadstool with gears and cogs. The stem is made out of a piece of dry wood, painted lightly with white gesso. The cap is made with air drying clay and then painted with acrylics. The toadstool also has a ring that I made out of lace ruffled around the stem.
But back to the inspiration. We visited Fiskars (link) - the village, not the company - some weeks ago as there was a sound festival my husband was interested in there. The village itself, as you can read from the link, is an old industrial community and has given name to the Finnish factory maybe best known for the scissors, Fiskars. There's still a lot of the old buildings around the village and the sound festival was kept in an old foundry. While my husband and daughters were trying out different instruments, I took a stroll around the area with my phone and took some photos of the old machinery that was lying around the area.
As you can see from the collage, there's also something else than old buildings and machinery. We visited our cottage during the same weekend. Forest is a special place to me and I'm lucky that there's plenty of it around our cottage. There's something really soothing about that greenery and silence that's in the forest. As autumn is here, there were a lot of mushrooms around and it all started to form into a project when I saw some dried wood pieces on the ground...
I combined the machinery, the different textures found on forest floor and the color palette of rust and autumn and made a little "cabinet of curiosities" styled display. It's a toadstool with gears and cogs. The stem is made out of a piece of dry wood, painted lightly with white gesso. The cap is made with air drying clay and then painted with acrylics. The toadstool also has a ring that I made out of lace ruffled around the stem.
To make the little scenery complete, I added some Scandinavian type ferns (kallioimarre in Finnish, link) to the piece using a Sizzix die, an old book page and some ink. I made three plants and curled one of them like the young plants tend to be. They are green then, but the old ones, that turn to brown tend to curl, too, only in a different way. But let's say that I took some artistic liberties.
As you can see, there's a touch of green in the make, too. That's my take on the moss, the knights plume moss (link) to be exact. That really looks like a feather! So maybe not that of a surprise that I used feathers to make my moss.
To make the piece more fit for a cabinet of curiosities, I constructed my toadstool and surroundings into a glass dome display. Well, I say glass, but that's plastic to be fair. We got those at work for Christmas pieces and displays but I saw it in another light right away. Now that I've done one, I think I should buy a new one and do something different to it. I really like the shape of the dome!
But now that I've shared my project and what got me inspired this last month, it's time to see what Marsha has been up to! Here's a link to her post (link). I just love her posts, don't you?
Thank you for stopping by today! Thank you also if you managed to read the whole post! Inspired Bys are usually my longest posts as I write about the process more than usual. Maybe that these "IBs" are my playground, I usually think them differently than my regular DT work where there's a totally different angle on things.
Have a great day and creative autumn!
Materials: Sinelli, Prima Marketing, Sizzix, Ranger, Varalusikka
1 comment:
This is so pretty. I love that it is untraditional. And the idea with the dome just made it even more exciting. Thank you for sharing your art.
Hugs from Monica
Spain
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