Zine Wowzers!

I received my I Heart Zines swaps in the mail today! A motherlode of fantastic stuff.........and I haven't even opened any of them yet! I am so impressed with just the covers and packaging that I had to make a neat pile on the floor and take a picture. Sort of like Christmas a few weeks early (sans the tree of course!). I am savoring just the outsides for now and after I return with my pizza and savor that............ I will have a ball checking out the actual pages! Thank you, Alma for hosting this wonderous swap!

12 Days of Christmas Artsy Style

The blog Where Women Create has created a huge giveaway............one for each of the first days of December. 12, count them 12! giveaways...........so.........go there............and enjoy!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Oh, hai! Just wanted to tell everyone out there in Blog-land to have a stress-free Thanksgiving. I plan to work on my new VA book and then head over to April's for lasagna! Nom, nom, nom...........

After much time goes by............

....I figured out why I don't like to blog here much. I just waited what seems like an eternity for the pictures to upload. Went and read a couple of chapters of my book while waiting. Might as well multi-task!

Since my last post I have completed several projects. A couple of weeks ago I went to Jane's studio with Karen and took her Halloween book class. It was fun and the kids in my class enjoyed looking at my finished book:

For the past several weeks I have been toiling away at my contribution to Alma Stoller's I "heart" zines exchange. I was to make 10 zines and send them to her. I just mailed them off today, big relief to have that huge project finished and out of the way! I made 3 extras: one for me in case I don't get one back, one for April, and one for my niece, Sara in New York. The zines are several different colors, but essentially the same inside. The covers of the three I kept back:

April's copy:

Just finished this last book today. April, Sara, and I are at the end of a Schmutz Book round robin. We each created covers and sent them on to be decorated and pages added. Schmutz books are created using leftovers and whatever is laying around. The first Schmutz book I ever made was created at April's one night. She started handing me stuff she didn't want or like and I said I would make an attractive book out of it.... and I did! It's almost a tradition now when I go over to her house that I sit and dig through her schmutz bucket and glean "treasures" and start another book for her. Our next project is to create schmutz book kits for each other.

Jabberwocky!

I LOVE this book! Last spring my 7th grade students presented the nonsense poem, "Jabberwocky" in a reader's theater. This is a nonsense poem written by Lewis Carroll for Alice in Wonderland. I loved the poem so much that I decided I needed to incorporate it some way into a book. While in VA this summer Somerset Studio announced that their March 2010 issue was to be dedicated to this very story! Kismet! Fate! Wahoo! I will be sending this book in for possible publication. I have been working on it for several months now and finally finished yesterday over at Jane's studio. The entire poem is "written" in free hand free motion embroidery (no, my machine did not write the text for me!) and each page has hand embroidered accents, some are images from a book I purchased in Powell's while in Portland last June. The front cover is also hand-embroidered, the back (not shown) was written with machine stitching. The final book is nowhere near what I envisioned, but I think I love it even more than what I originally planned. I used red hand-dyed muslin for the cover (the Red Queen), and tea-dyed muslin for the pages. The spine is a stick from my yard in VA attached with hand-dyed twill, the tie is also hand-dyed ribbon.
The front cover:

The final page (one of my favorites):

One of my favorite image; the flying salt shaker from when Alice rips the tablecloth off the table:

One of my other favorite images, the borogove bird whose body is embroidered in turkey work stitches to look "fluffy":

Whew!

I have working like a dog to get books ready to send off to magazines for possible publication. I am almost finished with my Jabberwocky book, one more page to embroider and then put the book together by the Oct. 15 deadline. Since returning from VA I have started teaching 8th grade language arts, sold our house and moved into an apartment and made almost 3 new books.
This is the rather "fat" book I made for April to chronicle our trip to upstate NY last October. It is made primarily from fabric and incorporates many of the souvenirs we picked up while there. It features the photos taken by April. We visited Cooperstown, Cazenovia, and Chittenango as well as Hamilton, Sangerfield, and of course Madison. The leaves were gorgeous as was the weather. We had a small family reunion the last day we were there visiting.
This is the cover: the colors of the book were chosen to work with the photo of the two of us at Grandma's house

A postcard featuring my alma mater, the leaves, and a feather:

A mini "nom, nom, nom" book with a pic of Grandma making bread. The book has take out menus from the restaurants we visited:

One of my favorite spreads showing my father's grave stone, the church in which Dave and I were married, and my sister and me walking through town:

There is a story behind this spine! I made the original cover at the same time I made each of the page spreads but by the time I was finished with the book the cover was way too small, so I split the spine, added some hand-dyed fabric, and re-stitched the blanket stitch on the edges. The book is about 3 inches thick! I'll be sending this along with my brown nature book to Art Quilting Studio to see if they want to publish them in their March 2010 issue. Keep your fingers crossed!

Cool Blog

Just visited Kelly Kilmer's blog and on an earlier post she sends her readers to Danielle Hession's blog. I loved it! She is interviewed by Rice Freeman-Zachery in the latest issue of Somerset Studio. Go look!

Yard Sale!

If you live anywhere on the northwest side of the Phoenix valley and want to get some good stuff, April and I are having a two family yard sale. Dave and I have sold our house in El Mirage and need to downsize for the temporary apartment and the permanent move next May to Virginia. I have lots of art/craft/scrapbooking items, we have a big screen TV, lots of household items......
We are listed on Craig's List and in the AZ Republic. If you need info like location please email me: penney.klaproth@cox.net and I will tell you what you need to know!

Coming to a Book Store near you in January!

I am so excited that my Needle Book is going to be published in the same issue of Sew Somerset as my good friend Jane and her daughter Jeane! I just received an email from the fabulous Jenny Doh, editor-in-chief of many, many Stampington magazines congratulating me........what a thrill and honor! The best part is that I get to share this excitement with my art sister and her daughter. This is a needle book I made from frustration and necessity this past summer in Virginia. I needed a place to store my different needles that would be labeled as well. So I created this cute little book to hold my needles, needle threaders, scissors, razor blades (for ripping seams quickly). I used the free-motion technique of writing that I learned in Ruth Rae's ArtFiberFest class this summer, got to practice embroidery stitches, and used some ultra soft silk ribbon. It was fun and I made two versions so that I would have one to use after sending the other in for possible publication.
Here is the cover:

one of the page spreads:

and the back:

Interview by EtsyTeamSNEAK

Celeste over at EtsyTeamSNEAK interviewed me via email so go here to check it out. I love the idea that this Team is sneak attacking new Etsy shops to support their handmade work. What a great support system. Go and see what's new in the world of Etsy!

Collage Packs on Etsy

April came over this afternoon to drop off a truck full of yard sale stuff and we spent an hour or so destashing my supplies. We put together some collage packs for my Etsy store. These packs are full of papers and ephemera from my personal collection of "stuff." Hopefully these will be popular because I have much more where these came from! Hop on over to my store and check them out.......... here is a close up of some of the goodies:

Etsy!!!!! Now!!!!!!! Buy!!!!!!!!!

Thanks to my hubby, my Etsy store now has two more items! I LOVE making books, albums, journals! So much so that I end up with too many. It almost feels like selling a piece of me (probably all artists feel this way at first?), but there must be loving homes that would adopt my work and keep it safe from the boogyman........ so, that said..............
This is my Blue Green book (not very original titles, but, hey.........it works for me!) which has 42 embellished and numbered pages:

I call this my Spring journal because the colors are, well........ spring-like! This book has a free motion stitched "star flower" on the cover (hand dyed fabric, too!) as well as 40 embellished numbered pages.

Both books are very interactive with tags plus lots of ribbons and tabs sticking out all over the place. Check out more pics on my etsy store.

Welcome to Faerie Acres

Welcome to my new blog! I'm following in Jane's footsteps and consolidating/coordinating all of my blogs, emails, etc. to match my Etsy store for when I am famous and rich (snort!) so my followers won't be confused! Right now I am in the middle of sorting, reorganizing, tossing, etc. my huge stash of "stuff" to get ready for our little move to be followed by our BIG move to VA. Our house is under contract so when it sells we will be selling many things in a big yard sale, moving to an apartment and then trucking what's left to our home in VA. If all goes as plans we should be there permanently in May. In anticipation of the move and losing our Cox services you can reach me at penney.klaproth@gmail.com. Dave created and bought me some pretty cool business cards with all of the new information on them!
My next creative step is to send more items for attempted publication. And thanks to Miranda for the wonderful idea for Etsy, I will soon be taking special orders for fabric memento books like the one I made in VA this summer (this will be winging its way to Somerset Studio soon so I'm only posting the cover). I incorporated my photos of VA and the trip April and I took last fall to upstate NY along with some of the treasures we found there (sticks from my yard, blue jay feather, etc.). I loved making it and adding the hand sewn touches to make it unique.