Flat Out Under Pressure 24-Hour Art-Making Competition 2023

I participated in the Flat Out Under Pressure 24-Hour art-making competition this year in Greenville, SC and it was so much fun (a LOT of work, but worth it!). My mixed media fiber art piece included punch needled yarn, rug hooked fabric strips, and needle felted wool fiber. I’ve participate for several years in a row but this is by far the largest piece I’ve attempted for this competition (and I was really pushing my luck to finish on time).

The piece is about 20" in diameter, featuring a scene inspired by Lake Jocassee, here in the upstate of South Carolina. The finish piece, along with all of the incredible work made by 100+ other local artists is now on display at Metropolitan Arts Council in downtown Greenville, SC and will eventually be available on my website.

Hope you enjoy the process video!

Greenville Open Studios: This Weekend!

Calling all Greenville-area art lovers! This weekend (November 13 & 14) is Metropolitan Arts Council’s Open Studios event, where over 100 local artists open up their workspaces and invite the public in to see where the magic happens. Greenville is a very artsy city, and if you live here, there’s a pretty high chance you have an artist living in your neighborhood. Now’s your chance to get out there and meet them and learn about their work!

Plan your route using the Metropolitan Arts Council (MAC) app on their website - you can filter my name, medium, location. I’m stop #59 in Greer.

I’ve always enjoyed visiting studios in the past, but I’ve never participated. Our previous home, where I grew this small biz from 2011 up until about 9 months ago, wasn’t laid out in a way where I could have a lot of visitors, and my workspaces were separated on 3 different floors. Not great for Open Studios. When we started house hunting, one of top things we were searching for was a home with a large workspace, where ALL of my artistic and business needs could be met in one place. We got lucky - we found such a space in Greer, SC, just 4 miles away! I can’t wait to invite you into my home studio next weekend to show you where I create jewelry, fiber art, and run my small business.

I’m not the only artist out this way - there’s so may of us here! I just met my neighbor down the road, artist James Greene, because of Open Studios. He’s a mixed media sculptor and he’s new to the event this year as well. Go check him out while you’re in the area. His barn / studio is full of so many fascinating treasures, and there’s a very sweet, very large pig living in the backyard. Win, win, if you ask me.

One stop you should not miss is the MAC art gallery downtown. The current exhibition is all 12x12 work from each artist participating in Open Studios this year. That grid wall is a dream, so many different subject matters, mediums, and styles, all scaled to this one uniform dimension. It’s a great way to get a taste of the art scene in Greenville and may also help you plan which studios you want to visit.

Here’s a look at a blog post I wrote after touring some of the studios in 2018.

Artisphere 2021

This is Artisphere weekend and if you’re anywhere in the Greenville, SC area, you know this is one of the best weekends of the year. Over 100 artists from all over the country will be set up on South Main Street surrounded by food, performances, and family activities. The festival is intentionally much smaller this year. Artisphere typically draws 100,000 people downtown, but this year they’re limiting attendance for safety reasons. I recommend grabbing a timed entry ticket from Artisphere.org to ensure you can get in when you arrive. The tickets are $5 but it’s basically a store credit to the festival. As soon as you purchase something from one of the artist booths, you can apply your ticket/coupon to the purchase, making the admission free in the end.

My fiber art will be exhibited at booth #19, and my location is right near Husk Restaurant on South Main. I’ll be demoing needle felting throughout the weekend so I hope you can stop by and see the magic for yourself. Artisphere will be open Friday May 7th from 12-8PM, Saturday 9AM-8:30PM, and Sunday 10AM-6:30PM.

And here’s a special bonus for fans of my handmade jewelry! Just a few yards away I’ll be having a trunk show at Custard Boutique at 718 South Main Street, Greenville SC.

Quaranteeny Art Show

I had way too much fun entering the “Quaranteeny Art Show” competition earlier this month. Everything about this contest appealed to me: tiny art, to-scale models, animal figurines. @tinyartshow is one of my all-time favorite instagram accounts to follow and they inspired me to go smaller with my needle felted landscapes. I recently launched a new “mini” landscape size (3”x3”). When I saw Tiny Art Show was hosting a tiny art show competition (during COVID-19 Quarantine), I knew it would be a fun & imaginative way to play around with my own art for an afternoon and more importantly, an excuse to make miniature stuff to go with it all.

I had my collection of 8 wool paintings made & framed fairly quickly. I’ve been needle felting larger landscapes for awhile now, so these little guys were done in record time. However, I needed a gallery setting and a scale figure for the contest, and that took a lot of thinking and experimenting. I’ll admit I wandered around the house for a bit, looking at corners, ledges, any flat surface, really. I finally settled on the kitchen counter because the white quartz countertop looked like terrazzo at the scale I needed, plus the under-cabinet lighting would provide semi-realistic shadows. I propped up two pieces of white foam core and mounted my tiny pieces of art work.

I decided to go a little further with my to-scale gallery. I added some pedestals and a tiny vase, and made miniature stanchions using dowels, red yarn, and thumb tacks. Now, for my scale figure. It HAD to be a sheep! After all, the art in this exhibit is made entirely of wool. I used a little lamb figurine I got at the Southeastern Animal Fiber Fair a few years ago (made by Collin’s Creatures), and set my art-loving creature in the gallery for a look around.

The collection of mini wool landscapes featured in the tiny art show has already sold out on my website and more are coming very soon! I’m thrilled with the response these tiny wool paintings have gotten so far and can’t wait to share more these with my collectors. Take a tour of the tiny gallery and experience the show for yourself!

My needle felted wool landscapes are getting smaller and smaller, and when @tinyartshow announced their art competition during the 2020 Covid-19 Quarantine, ...

Now here’s where a good thing gets even better. I submitted my work to this contest for fun, I encouraged other’s to do the same, so all in all it was a great time. But then to top it off, I won first place! I still can’t believe it. There were so many fantastic applications I actually made myself wait to look at what other’s had done until after I submitted my own because I didn’t want to get discouraged. The judges had their work cut out for them!