Empress Wu Designs with Wilma

Is there any connection between student dollmakers and jam? I guess both can be sweet? The real connection is these were two of my activites this week.  I went back temporarily to high school teaching this week in inner Sydney, teaching in a Links to Learning program - a program essentially for high school students having some difficulties either at school and/or at home. Although I was a high school principal, I have always thought that schools are not always the best places for learning for everyone, so it was good again to teach outside a school setting and doing something involving personal development. We made wrapped stick dolls and it was designed to be both a fun  and serious exercise, with the girls writing personal messages inside the doll, and then wrapping them with fabric and embellishing madly. I thought the results were great, and the exercise uplifting for all of us. So, back at home, with an abundance of home grown mandarins fro...

As the saying goes, you're never too old to learn something new - that includes tearing up bits of coloured paper! I am going to share some of the "tips" I picked up this week. None of them is related to one another, but I think perhaps at least one of these might be useful. Tip 1:  Play with paper to refresh design ideas whether you usually work with paper, textiles, clay and /or mixed media. I attended a mini-workshop with Judy Hooworth (NSW textile artist) at the Newcastle Creative Embroiderers and Textile Artists . We started off with a postcard of someone else's art - I chose this one, called Pandanus and Pelicans Townsville Common by  Sylvia Ditchburn , I have always liked the subject, the composition and the colours. Then we enlarged the postcard to A4 size - black and white and made a tracing of the outlines on tracing paper. Here's the interesting investigative bit - divide the tracing in half both horizontally and vertically, and join up points of in...