Thank you, Mood! **Updated post!

If you are a Project Runway fan like me, you understand this post title.

A little inopportune timing, due to tomorrow's weather reports, but hubby and I are in NYC until Saturday afternoon. Hopefully the impending snowstorm won't keep us from the Matisse exhibit at the Metropolitan.  ** see update at end of post!

Anyhow, after we arrived, we shopped for fabric for new kitchen curtains (we are in the process of repainting, so new curtains will complete the makeover plan). At home, my fabric shopping choices include JoAnn's Fabrics, Wal-Mart, and the local quilt store. In other words, no options for anything special. So we spent the day in the garment district, going in and out of one fabulous fabric store after another loaded with bolts of fabric, floor to ceiling.

I recently read a book, Homer & Langley, a fictionalized account of the Collyer Brothers, a pair of eccentric Manhattan recluses from the early/mid 1900's. Their house was filled floor to ceiling with newspapers and all sorts of crazy stuff piled floor to ceiling high (the ultimate hoarders; there was even a car in their house).  The tunnels of newspaper and junk were booby-trapped to prevent intruders. Ironically, one brother died in his own booby trap, and the other brother, blind, died presumably left alone and unable to find a way out. I mention them here because the narrow passageways in some of these stores, with bolts of fabric balanced precariously, made me feel like I was caught in one of their booby-traps.  I had more than a couple bolts of fabric fall on my head!

But, oh, the fabric! Wonderful, wonderful! Shimmering, shiny, sparkly, glamorous and wonderful, and inexpensive too, but nobody had what I wanted for my curtains (I had specific color needs).  However if I was shopping for dance costumes, or a party dress... 

My original idea was to block print fabric - I had a very specific vision for what I wanted; but alas, as I previously told you, I have no studio, and therefore no place to block print yards and yards of fabric and let it dry. Hence, Plan B: shop.  And shop we did, store after store, as I said, looking at glamorous fabrics often for just $5 a yard.  Here's a sample of what I bought:

I ended up finding just what I wanted in Mood, fabulous Mood, the store of Project Runway fame. The fabric I chose was pricey, but I LOVE it, and I will 'make it work' (more Project Runway lingo). It picks up my floor colors, the wall and trim colors, and my counter colors, and ties them altogether in a cohesive and interesting print.  I promise to show you when my kitchen is complete.

And to top it off, I came home with a Thank You Mood T-shirt, and an appreciation of this fabulous store, three full stories of fabric (and actually room  enough to fit between the aisles) of every type of fabric, trim, leather, etc imaginable. (And by the way. I was watching Project Runway when I first typed this.)

 Thank you, Mood!

**New Postscript:  Hubby and I flew the coop.  On the advice of the hotel staff, in anticipation of the oncoming storm, we switched our train tickets and got ourselves out of Dodge, so to speak.  We were home by 8pm last night, and unfortunately never got to an art museum at all, and I never did my planned 6th Avenue bead-shopping excursion, a regular part of any visit I take to NYC.  But we are happy to be safe and home, and kitty was happy to be rescued a day early from her stay at the Country Kitty B&B  (seriously folks, if I was a cat, this is where I'd want to vacation).http://countrykitty.com/.  I am hoping that I will somehow get myself back to NYC before the Matisse exhibit leaves the Met,  but in better weather this time.

I usually love walking the streets of NY, even in snowy February (we've gone there every February for years, in good and bad weather, and I am always prepared with a great coat, and other winter gear) but yesterday was seriously awful.  It was not snowing yet, but was a combination of sleet/hail/freezing rain, blowing sideways in a stiff wind.  We had a couple of hours to kill before our train and decided to take a walk to the bead stores, and turned back after only 2 blocks.  Even with my hood up and cinched tight, I was being pelted in the face by icy chunks of hail, and it was painful.  We usually walk to/from the train station/hotel, since it's just a handful of blocks, but we ended up taking a cab. (By the way, the cab driver was reading a newspaper while he drove, in the midtown Manhattan traffic in nasty weather.  Just sayin'!)

If I do make it back to see Matisse, you can be sure you will read about it here on the blog!  I hope you all fared well in your locale's version of the storm.  My son is in Boston, digging out.

Where did that idea come from?

So often, I see lessons posted that I've seen before 'somewhere'. Earlier this week I was going through a binder of lesson ideas clipped from magazines for many years, and so today's post features a little sampling of what I found, that I've all seen recently on the blogs.

How many times have you seen this 'falling backwards' lesson?  Sometimes it's called falling into space, or falling into water, or foreshortening, or... you get the idea.  I first came across this lesson idea in a May 1985 Arts & Activities page where it was mentioned pictured to the left), but if you read the text, you'll see that the lesson was first featured in the September 1984 issue.  While I began teaching art in 1976, I was in a high school position until June 1985, so this lesson idea was probably one of the first things I clipped and saved.  And I've done various versions of this project over the years, with various media, but I've never posted any. I figured everyone has seen it before in one version or another.

So go ahead, post your versions, but please don't say you invented the idea! (You didn't.) After all, this magazine first published the lesson 28 years ago!!!!  And maybe it was somewhere else even before that!

And how about this much used Louise Nevelson lesson idea, in the left-hand photo below, from Spark magazine in 1994? (I posted my own version in this post from 2010.)

 Or this Laurel Burch lesson, in the right-hand photo above, from a School Arts article published in March 1999?  If you read the article, you will see it also references Matisse (Henri Matisse & Laurel Burch are both personal favorites), and the technique used is a drawing with white glue on black paper, which after drying is colored with pastel chalks.   You've all tried that technique, haven't you?! 

Then there's these 3 articles below,all from School Arts magazine, April 2000, April 2001, and April 2005

I actually collected shoes after I saw one of these articles, and my 6th graders did a fabulous sculptural painted project, re-imagining the shoes they brought in.  Stupidly, I have no photos, and since it was probably in the early 2000's, any remnant of these shoes in the art room are long since gone.

So many times I've seen lessons in magazines, or on the internet, that I've seen... and seen... and seen again.  If you've read School Arts and/or Arts & Activities for as many years as I have, you've undoubtedly seen lessons repeated many times with minor variations (or have posted a variation yourself), from coil pots, to mirror image names, to kaleidoscopic drawings, to taking lines for a walk, to Matisse goldfish bowls (I posted mine here and here), to Klimt trees, to Kandinsky circles, to Van Gogh starry nights, to Monet Japanese bridges, to collaborative circle paintings, to Mondrian animals, to dancing giraffes, to Wayne Thiebaud cakes (I posted mine here), to woven pouches (I posted mine here and here)...  you get the idea. I think I'd better stop.

And that's OK.  We don't always need to reinvent the wheel, and it's always miraculous to see kindergartners paint sunflowers, no matter how many times it's been done before, isn't it?  So keep on posting that wonderful student artwork, and your versions of the tried and true, but keep showing us your original ideas too!. 

Sometimes, I find wonderful original ideas, or interesting twists on old standards, when perusing the blogs.  Maybe it's Artful Artsy Amy's wonderful negative space value study paintings of bicycles painted on old maps, or Art Project Girl's creative version of Andy Goldsworthy, or these wonderful Matisse-style paintings on wallpaper at Fun Art 4 Kids, or Mr. MintArt's gorgeous notans, or Cassie Stephens' clever cuckoo clocks, or Art With Mr. Hall's value landscapes done on the computer.  And I'm only scratching the surface of what's out there. 

Where did your ideas source from originally?  Do you save decades-old magazine articles like I do?  Do you see the articles repeat themselves after a while?  What sparks an original idea?