Where I've been...

I just had the best two days at Jill K. Berry's Painted Pages and Bookmaking Workshop held at Barbara Beck's delightful Artful Living shop and workspace in Ojai, Ca! Jill is a fantastic teacher who led us on a fast paced class of making painted pages with paste paint for making art books or whatever else you might want to use it for. Jill makes the most incredible books and is a very organized and knowledgeable teacher who shares her resources and techniques and kept us hopping. I confused the dates on the workshop and missed the first day of painted pages but got caught up on Thursday and came back Friday and got to get in on the book making . We made 5 books in one day using our painted paper from the day before. These are the books that we made: Nested Accordian Book, Four Rooms Book , the Dowl Spine Portfolio, Crown Spine Book, and the Carousel House Book.
Jill teaching and showing us Barbara's leaf stencil paper.
Jill's painted paper, step one.
Jill's paper step two...filling in the spaces with color.
Here's the one I did. Can't wait to use it for collage or book making.
Here another page I made using a bird stencil and paste paint.
Here's Barbara, showing us some paper sculpture masks from some visitors to her shop.
Jill's "Road Trip" book.
A fuzzy close up of Road Trip...
This was made from the "Four Rooms" book and has a Robert Frost poem called "Dust of Snow" on each page. Jill's original design. It all folds up and has pop outs on each page....a really fun book to make.
Everyone had such a great time. We had a wonderful group of women...Jill's mother came and we had another mother - daughter team....and it turned out that we had met many years ago in Sausalito when the commune I lived in bought the Danish sailboat that Judy and her husband had made into a houseboat. It took us a half a day trying to figure out how we knew each other...I thought it must have been at an art show somewhere, but that wasn't it. It was so fun to see her again and spend two days making art with her and her daughter who lives in Oakland. Judy is a master calligrapher and they both inspired me with their creations.
So if you ever get a chance, take a class from Jill! A wonderful artist and a great teacher!!!!
And Barbara has created a geat space for workshops....I hope to do some teaching there soon.
Her husband, Marv, is a real sweetheart too...he brought the ladies Margaritas at the end of class....and for two of us, not being real drinkers, plus I had an hour drive home, he made us Virign Margaritas!
Now I'm back to work on more Fiber Stuff!