Classes I'm teaching for 2012

I've been busy working on lesson plans for all my new classes for this year. I only have my timetable for semester 1., but that is still plenty of work for me to do. Below is a list of the classes I'm teaching and the work they will be doing.

I hope to post a few of my samples of work that I do with the students one we get going.

For those overseas people reading this, year 9 for example doesn't mean the students are aged 9. We just often say year 9, rather than grade 9.


Subjects
Yr 7 art- typography, paper mosaics

Yr 8 art- pattern animals, matisse paper cuts, pos/neg drawings, jackson pollock exercise

Yr 9 home group teacher

Yr 9 art- altered books

Yr 8 textiles- cushion covers

Yr 9 home ec- various cooking and nutrition tasks

Yr 10 textiles- children's wind-cheater

Yr 11 textiles- free choice garment


Time to go back and write more lesson plans now. yah for me.

Doing some hand quilting

I did a lot of work for the SAlt exhibition group earlier in the holidays, but haven't finished a couple of the pieces. One of the pieces I'd been working on involved a lot of applique and it resulted in the background fabric becoming slightly puckered. Therefore it is time for me to do some hand quilting.

I've only ever made one 'quilt' as such (quilts aren't really my thing) and it was for a friends baby so it didn't have to be perfect. This quilt however is for an exhibition so I thought I better actually do it right this time. I went over to Suzanne Gummow's house to do a trade. I helped her with some blogging issues and she helped me pin my quilt. Below are a few photos of the quilt pinning.

As the work is part of an exhibition, I cannot show photos of the actual 'real' work. Our group has agreed that no work is to be shown before it is exhibited.

Taping and clipping the bottom fabric and the 

Pellon to a table for a nice flat start. 

A closeup of all the clips keeping everything 

taught and in place.

The fun job of adding a thousand safety pins.

So tonight's job is now to do some hand quilting so that I don't leave the safety pins in too long and they mark the fabric. 

I really am still alive, here comes 2012

Right, it is way overdue for me to update on here and so here goes.

2011 was a busy year and the end of a few things in my life. For one, it was the end of my unhealthy eating habits and my no exercise regime. I am now much better at eating healthy and also trying to keep up exercising.

I also finished working at Marden Senior College. I loved my time at Marden and must say I’m sad to be leaving. I learnt so much in my time there and am very thankful to the staff I worked with.

I had been there for 4 years, on a yearly contract. Therefore it meant that at the end of every year I had to wait to see whether or not my contract would be renewed. This made life somewhat uncertain when you have bills and a mortgage to pay.  I also didn’t get paid for holidays so when you have 5 weeks off over summer and you’re waiting to find out if you even have a job the next year it is fairly stressful. It is for these reasons that I decided it was time to find myself a permanent job.

At the end of January (we’re 2012 now aren’t we?) I start a new job at St. Peter’s Girls. It will be a huge change for me as being a teacher at Marden was very different to most schools. 

So a new school and healthy habits are 2 of the plans for 2012. The other plans involve continuing with house renovations, working on a solo exhibition and working on a joint exhibition.

I’ve spent most of my holiday painting doors and doorways in our house, exciting, I know. They were buttercup yellow and had been driving me crazy since we bought the house 2 years ago. Once I finish all the doors, I will then start with the walls (not bright yellow, so not as urgent) and then start ripping up the carpet to show off the polished boards. So in other words, I have a large amount of work in front of me. My husband works 12-14 hour days and 7 days a week a lot of the time, so I do most of the renovation work.

During 2012 I will continue to be part of a textile arts group called SAlt. SAlt stands for South Australian living textiles. There are 5 women in our group, this includes; Julie Haddrick, Judi Bushby, Francie Mewett, Suzanne Gummow and myself. We meet once a month to review our progress and critique each others work.   During 2011 we each worked on 4 pieces of work, we all had the same theme for each piece and then simply took our own approach to creating the piece.

During this year we aim to complete another 4 pieces each, the themes for this year are linked to last years themes. We are currently working on the exhibiting part of the process. It won’t be for quite some time, don’t worry I’ll make sure the whole world knows about it when it happens.

The other thing I’m working on this year is the idea of me having a solo exhibition in the next couple of years.  I’ve talked about it on here before- I call it Exhibition X at this stage as I haven’t decided on a name. The work is based around the idea of vessels in nature. I am looking at nests in particular at this stage. I’m still at the drawing and planning stage as I want to put some real thought into this before starting the making part.  I’ve already posted some pictures on here before, they are not actual pieces of work, purely just me getting my head around this topic.

So after explaining all that, I wonder am I going to have any spare time this year? I’ve never been good with having spare time anyway, I’m not good at sitting still.

Well that’s it for me, until next time……

I'm still alive

Well I'm still alive, it has just been a super busy period between christmas, new years and everything else. I want to write a decent post that explains my work changes for 2012 and other bits and pieces. Therefore I decided that this is just a short message to say hello and hope you all had a good christmas and new year. In the next couple of days I will write a proper post and detail my plans, etc.