Yarn...

Well, I finally got brave and did something for the whiplash competition on whipup.net. I don't remember where I found whipup - probably from the ReadyMade blog - but I love it and read it every day. I don't consider myself a crafter, really, other than the collage boxes I made for Christmas presents, but I'm inspired by all the hip, cool craft stuff that's going on these days. I'm encouraged that in this age of impersonal technology, young people are taking up activities that were most likely passed on to them from their mothers or grandmothers.

The point of the whiplash competition is to make something over the weekend inspired by the theme. This time it's "yarn."

OK, enough stalling, here's my entry:

I don't crochet or knit, although I've always wanted to learn to knit... The yarn theme made me think of a ball of yarn that one of my students left with me after an encaustic workshop. Maybe it's not technically yarn, I don't know, but it's really cool. She had been playing around with covering the yarn with wax and then pulling it away to get some cool patterns.

Here's what the yarn looks like:

I started with a scrap piece of 2x4 (roughly 4" x 6"), brushed on 2 coats of wax medium that I tinted with prussian blue oil paint. I then brushed some yellow encaustic paint over the yarn and pulled it away. I did it again with magenta and yellow-green wax. I fused each layer with a heat gun.

Here's a cropped shot of the piece:

I'm sorry it took me so long to finally enter whiplash (this is the last week), but hopefully they'll do it again soon and I'll be more brave!