Book Art Exhibit a Great Success

The Hendersonville Times News billed this event like this:
There is a local book arts guild of sorts. This group numbers fewer than a dozen, primarily people who studied or shopped at Jane Powell's Random Arts store in Saluda. That store is a magnet for all people in the area who deal with mixed media art, and taking a clue from the stores name, the book artists themselves "randomly altered divas". They meet together to learn techniques, have a "show and tell" of their latest book and art projects and discuss serious issues of artistic goals and practices.
Penny Baugh is a good example of a book artist. She has always stitched and sewn. While living in Georgia eight years ago and concentrating on primitive dolls, she noticed that the same craft magazines that covered art dolls also covered artists books. By the time she moved to Hendersonville 4 years ago, she was thoroughly engrossed in the new field.

That was his promo to our book show that was held Feb 1-15th last month and nothing but rave reviews were heard during and after the show. We are all so pleased with the amount of visitors who came to enjoy and discover what book arts is all about. About 15 past and present members submitted over 50 books which were on display. Penny sold 5 of her books and was as happy as could be about that. Good for you Penny!

Added bonuses

Our new divas brought along some of the things that they have created although this.... is not the end of their story.
Linda Hartzig shows off her torn diva
project and Marney McClung shares her
hand crafted dolls.

Fast forward.....

It begins for all intensive purposes.... today, as we start the "posting" of our events, shows, work, play and activities for the Randomly Altered Divas mixed up media group at Random Arts in Saluda, NC.
Members include Penny Baugh, Meg Fowler, Betsy Libbey, Jane Powell, Linda Hartzig and soon to be joining us is Sharon Kolbye. Cool group, huh?
Without making this sound like "minutes" of a meeting, which it is not, a short explanation and some photos of what we are doing will suffice.
Betsy Libbey shows off her Feminine Icon piece that she created as part of a workshop here with Katie Kendrick back in June of this year.

Penny has worked with the Hendersonville Arts Council to set up a showing of Book Art in February 2008 and all of here will have at least 2 books on display for the length of the show.
So, now for us the pressure is on to create some bodies of work before that date. In the meantime we experiment with a variety of techniques and show what we have done. Penny brought in 2 beaded fabric books that she had recently created and told us about some of her work that will be featured in Somerset Sew due out this fall. Hurray for Penny!!!
We re-visited altered book pages that Meg created in Penny's book entitled " fly me to the moon".

We start our group meeting with some journaling led by Betsy Libbey of Saluda, NC. She prompts us with short exercises to stimulate our creative thoughts and get us
into "action" for the afternoon. Today with the help of Penny and a book by Sherrill Kahn entitled "Creative Embellishments for Fabric, Paper and more" we created our own fabulous embellishments by exploring one of Sherrill's techniques.
Here is photo of some of the beads and fabric pieces created in this mini workshop.