Art & Love part 2

Watercolor study of reds.  I wrote "I love you" all around in the shape of a heart.

When last you saw the parts for the woven valentine I made this year there were cut strips of papers I have inked and painted, a love letter, some "I love you" messages and a big pastel heart.

The background is mainly light and the foreground mainly dark.  

The heart of "I love you" on the dark red paper overlaps with the red pastel heart on the long background strips, but after weaving a few inches I can see that it doesn't read as a heart.  The contrast of the light and dark highlights the weaving but the heart is too delicate.  It needs repetition, something to show the eye where to look for the angles of the heart design.

There are plenty of touches of orange in the paper, so I chose to paste a yellow watercolor heart cut from my paper stash onto the background.  I then repeated the pastel drawing of a heart on that.  That should do it.

The weaving pattern is called a 2/2 twill.

Strip by strip I cut and then wove my messages and images and colors together.  

I like the way the yellow heart is not traditional, but makes the whole thing bright and cheery.  Like a little sun.

I considered writing on the heart too, but I decided against it because this is busy enough.  

There has to be a few places where your eye can rest, not just work, work, work to read and understand.

Happy Valentine's Day.

Not just to my loves but to my readers and Valentine's Blog Party friends too!

Butter Girl gives Thanks

Over at Modern Alternative Mama I read this post about Prayers for Praising not Pleas.  I spend a lot of time thanking the Goddess for what I have and what I have been through, both good and bad.

I don't like the pressure on either of us to give a fancy "just right" valentine so each year I try to make one.
This is a ransom note I made for Bearded Bob a few years ago from a wood cutout, magazine cutouts
 and a beautiful folded paper lobster. It is hard to read, but it is signed: Butter Girl.

I managed to stumble my way onto the idea that focusing on the HAVE and not the NEED TO HAVE would make me happier (with the help of a wonderful spouse, marriage therapy and some really bad examples of marriages around me).  Then, it was just a matter of spending most of 20 years figuring out how to make my head stop collecting mistakes and start collecting triumph.

Oh how I wish I had seen that post about list making when I was a newlywed!   It is the formula for a really sincere Valentine, so I have shared it over at The Valentine's Blog Party.

Yarny love

I keep going to look at the beautiful three dimensional crochet Valentine here at Cornflower Blue.  Rachel does amazing things with yarn, every one of her ideas inspires me to use materials I have seen in new ways.

The beautiful heart looks like it is made of sea urchins or barnacles or some other amazing sea life to me.  It has been chosen to be on the cover of the Valentine special edition of a Madison Wisconsin newspaper.  Do go visit Rachel and see more of what she can do!

This post has been linked to the Valentine's Blog Party 2013.  Go see what else is heart shaped and hot for February!