Inspired By... Deko 10/2015

It's again the 10th of the month and time for the "Inspired by" creation! But what is Inspired by? Every month awesome Marsha and I choose a subject to be inspired by. It can be a movie (link), an item (link), a designer (link), a painting (link) or a piece of music (link). Then we make something inspired by that theme or a piece of art and share it with you and each other on the 10th of the month.

 

This time we went with a magazine. The challenge was decided during the summer and it read "a Finnish magazine". So I headed to the magazine section in local store and started first looking at the covers and the browsing through the different varieties available. It was quite soon that I chose to go with an interior decoration magazine as they had the best photos. With a little browsing I chose to go with Deko magazine (link) even though the cover wasn't the most inspiring one.

Source: Deko 10/2015

But I found the pictures inside inspiring and that was the most important thing. So I bought two magazines, headed to the post office with the other and mailed a copy to Marsha. Then I headed home and went through the magazine with a cup of tea. 

I immediately had two things that caught my eye. The picture collage above is made of those things. The other one was the rugs, more importantly rag rug styled rugs there was on the magazine and the other one was the interesting way to photograph the dishes from directly above.

Ever since I saw Tina Walker's amazing weaves I wanted to try that out. Here's a link to one of her posts (link). When I was a kid I had this mini, tiny loom with which I could make rugs for doll houses for example. I also helped my grandmother to make rugs in the big looms she had and we even had a school project in which everyone in the class weaved a portion of a huge rug. But since then I haven't really thought about that. So oh boy was it fun to make a tiny weaving! 

I used just a piece of cardboard as my "loom" - draw vertical lines across the sheet and cut little triangles out of each end of the line. Then I just wrapped a twine around the thing and started weaving! 

As I'm into mixed media and this was inspired by after all that meant playtime! So I didn't end up using just narrow strips of cloth and yarns in my work but instead of experimented with different materials. 

First up I cut a paper napkin into this long, narrow strip. Then it was a plastic bag's turn and then last I went rummaging to my fabric stash. As the paper napkin I had cut to be used in the weaving was yellow I also went with yellow fabrics - basic cotton one and then cotton jersey. The last was actually the best material for this which actually isn't that surprising. It's soft and molds easily. The next best was actually the plastic bag and by far worst the paper napkin as it kept breaking. But I managed to weave with it anyway.

I knew that I was going mixed media with the thing in the end adding paints on top so there wasn't any point to weave any direct pattern to the piece. So I just did stripes of different materials.

On top of the weaving I then added some pieces of papers and resist canvas inspired by the dishes - the circles they created. I adhered them to the base using gel medium and then used acrylic paints, mists and Oil Pastels to color the designs.

When I had the circles there the piece wasn't coming together as a whole. There was the base and then the circles but something connecting was missing. So I added some stitches in and the weaving became immediately better! I used white thick thread for the stitches and just did some crosses here and there.

As the final element I added the letters and then the piece of branch on top. The branch is inspired by the composition underneath the editorial text (you can see it in my picture collage on top of the post). 

The text on the other hand is Finnish verb "kuuluu" divided into two places. The word itself can be translated in many ways. It's "be heard" or "be audible" but the word is also used in sentence "How are you" - "Mitä kuuluu". This sentence is actually the source as in page 57 of the magazine there's a door sign stating "mitä kuuluu" instead of the name. I first thought to add the whole thing to the piece but when I had the "luu" added to the bottom of the weaving it became obvious that there simply wasn't enough space. I actually now feel that it's better like this - being even more ambiguous than the sentence. Which by the way can also be of course translated "What can you hear" instead of "How are you". Finnish is a fun language! 

So that's the story of my project for this Inspired By! Now let's go and see what Marsha has made (link)! Might it also have some circles or connected to home decor? Can't wait to see!

Materials: 7 Dots Studio, Prima Marketing, Canvas Corp, Ranger, American Crafts