Monday, June 4, 2012

Collaboration

Yay!! This month marks the first time I will have some of my work on display here in Juneau. As many of you know I work at an Assisted Living Home in Juneau providing services for adults with developmental delays. The house I work at is owned by Reach, who provides many different services throughout Juneau (as well as some in Haines) for people of all ages who have developmental delays. One of the more awesome departments at Reach is The Canvas. The Canvas is a gallery and day habilitation center located on the bottom floor of Reach. They provide art therapy for our clients, offer community art classes, have a pottery studio and operate a gallery which displays different artwork every month. It's a pretty cool place...

  This month the gallery is showing an exhibit (for lack of a better word) entitled Collaboration. Collaboration will be showcasing collaborative artwork created by Reach Clients and Staff. My coworker Reid and I have been hard at work this month working in tandem with each of our clients to create some artwork for the show. It has been both fun and challenging working with my clients to make some artwork together. As many of you know, I prefer to work in the fiber arts category, so naturally I chose to work with my clients to sew something awesome together.

   The idea for our pieces came from some place mats we also made this month.  We all were invited to an old coworkers wedding this past weekend and while thinking about what we could possibly get her for a gift, I came up with a much better idea - why not make a gift?? So I headed to the fabric store with my clients to pick up a few supplies...

      We decided to use the leftover scraps we had from Brooke's wedding gift to make some coaster's together. We had just enough scraps leftover for each client to make three coasters. I was really fun to work with my clients to put them together. They provided the art work for one side, and chose which scraps they wanted sewn together for the other side. I sewed them all up, turned them inside out and quilted them together for the final project...

One of my clients checking out some of her artwork at First Friday this last week.

 I then decided to hang all the coasters from a dowel rod so that both sides of the coasters could be displayed throughout the month. I am pretty happy with the final project and even more happy to have worked so hard to make something beautiful and useful with my clients. The exhibit will be up all this month so you should swing by and check it out because there really is some awesome artwork to be seen!! There is also some amazing artwork to be bought (I was very tempted to purchase a few pieces but resisted the temptation as all my excess money went to a new sewing machine). My clients and I decided to sell our coasters for $20. Whomever wants to buy them (there are three separate packs of four with each of my clients artwork on the back) can do so, all the proceeds will go to The Canvas and my clients.


The place mats we made for Brooke's Wedding gift to give you an idea of what the coasters look like because, like a champ, I neglected to take a photos of the coasters...





New Machine

    Sorry I've been absent for awhile, I have been super busy with job interviews, applications and trying to buy a new sewing machine as my old one broke. It was a sad day when my old machine broke because it had taken me so far, taught me so many things and completed so many projects for me. Yet I was pretty excited because I had really outgrown that machine and now I had the perfect reason to get a new machine. I spent a lot of time researching different machines and trying to figure out what I wanted because I don't live in a place where I can test drive a machine and I knew I would have to buy one sight unseen. Also, I knew I couldn't live without a machine until August or September which is likely the next time I will be down south. Eventually I made a decision and bought a new machine that I was hoping would better suit my needs. And guess what?!? Today my new machine arrived!!!
   I must admit I was pretty excited to get it from the post office this morning, but it spent most of the day sitting in my room while I was out hiking and enjoying the hot summer day (as I write this I am sitting on my front deck in sweatpants and a tank top with bare feet and it's 9pm).

I know many of you think that it doesn't get hot up here but we do have our days. May was rainy and chilly and after a full month of that a day like today is appreciated by everyone in town. I was not the only person getting out to hike in this amazing weather....

When I did finally come home around 6:30 pm I thought I would break out my new machine and see how well it operates. I must say that so far I am pretty happy, it's much quieter than my old machine and and still really easy to operate. I decided that this hot summer day required an appropriate summer dress and made one real quick to test out the capabilities of my machine. I was quite happy with how the machine handled the task.
 


The dress does not look so great on the hanger but it looks much better when I am actually wearing it. Hopefully we will have some more wonderful summer weather in June and I will get to wear it!! I also made a matching head band from the scraps...

I am looking forward to making a baby quilt for my friends Justin and Gwen the next time we've got crappy weather!! Hopefully my new machine will handle that task with as much ease...