He Loves Me

The Opening at 2 Friends Gallery was wonderful. Thankfully, the First Friday for November wasn’t weather impaired or weather challenged! Lots of events and openings on that Friday evening brought out lots of friends that circled through my opening and even bought some of my ART!  Thank you to everyone who had kind words for me, were supportive and took the time to fit in seeing my show amidst all of the other FAB openings that night, thank you again friends. Speaking of openings –our friends Gina Hollomon and Georgia Blue will be hosting the grand opening of of Blue.Hollomon Gallery today! Georgia, formerly with the Anchorage Museum used to be one of the "friends" in the “2 Friends Gallery.” Gina is an incredible Raku artist of Red Door Studios. Stop by for refreshments and door prizes today from 1:00 - 4:00, they are located at 3555 Arctic Blvd. in the Olympic Center -near Jen's. 

Thursday, November 15^th was the Anchorage Neighborhood Health Center Heath Center Heroes Lab Coat Auction and Fundraiser at Snow City Café (which is a great venue for an event BTW!). While the art, food, beverages, music and company were perfect, the attendance of bidders were fewer than organizers had hoped for. Minimum bids were lowered on the three featured coats (mine was one of those featured) for the live auction. All 12 Lab Coats still received silent auction bids but all bids that evening were not what the ANHC had hoped for. This time of year I think calendars are packed with events, parties, fairs, shows and family commitments that has us all feeling a spread a bit thin for time. One of the best ideas for the evening was that the organizers created a limited edition of 20 prints (with prior permission of the artists) selling for $100 each, of the three artful lab coats as an additional fundraiser!  The three artists were asked to sign and number the prints and they were a huge hit bringing in the much needed additional dollars.  Here is a link from a KTVA segment. http://www.ktva.com/home/outbound-xml-feeds/Unique-Fundraiser-Thursday-for-Neighborhood-Health-Center-179220721.html

While walking Olive-dog near the neighborhood junior high school this week, Daddy-O found a denim-stained worn note lying abandoned on the sidewalk. He said it looked like it had fallen out of a backpack or back pocket. It said “To: S____” with a heart. Handing it to me when he got home he said, “this is something I would give you.”     Awwwwww! 

xOx

A Little Surprise For the Re-gifter...

Detail of the front of my entry.

Detail of the back of "Ravens Lend A Helping Hand" my piece for the ANHC Health Center Hero Lab Coat Project

The Anchorage Neighborhood Health Center will be celebrating their grand opening in their brand new, expanded facility tomorrow! This new facility doubles their primary care capacity and expands their support facilities such as labs and radiology departments. Access to primary care is one of the most critical needs among the medically underserved and uninsured in Anchorage, Alaska. As part of their grand opening celebrations, artists were requested to use blank lab coats (provided by ANHC) as their "canvas" with finished works to be auctioned off as a fundraiser to help meet the goal of finishing the facility to better serve the healthcare needs of our community.

My white lab coat was immediately turned cyan using RIT Dye and hand painting with acrylic and fabric paints.

 I wanted the coat to have a tie-dye effect with the bottom and edging on the sleeves to be a bit darker so I hand painted and "dipped" those into a small bowl of acrylic fabric paint. Once the coat dried I heat-set the paint using my iron.

Using my original Raven illustrated designs, I sized, then drew the birds onto various black print fabrics and used the applique method for application.

Because I wanted a bit of realism for the medical instruments, I used digital images printed onto Transfer Artist Paper and then applied the images with fusible web to the lab coat.

Front of the Lab Coat -the "Ravens Lend A helping Hand" are popping up out of the pockets and hold a Reflex Tool and an X-Ray. The RAvens on the back are wearing a Stethoscope and have another Reflex tool -for everyone's FUNNY BONE! These were done using royalty free images on Transfer Artist Paper. 

After all the fabric components and digital images were ironed on using fusible web, I used various colors of thread to free motion stitching for the final embellishment.

Viola!

From the ANHC Facebook Page - https://www.facebook.com/anchoragehealth :

Above: "What an incredible and creative lab coat. This lab coat has nitrile exam gloves as fringe, x-ray film logos, and white gauze accents. Catherine Joan Petersen is one talented artist!"

Below: "Look at this incredible design from renowned Alaskan artist, Barbara Lavallee. Artists across our community are using their talents for the Health Center Heroes Campaign, by designing lab coats. A huge thank you to artists who are helping build a healthier Anchorage. We love it!"

So... speaking of fellow artist Barbara Lavallee -her Lab Coat is featured above on the ANHC Facebook page I've included, she let me have her leftover fabric paints that I used for the sunflower's detail work on my Lab Coat -thanks Barbara.  I love her work. Barbara also has a very successful commercial art business and her illustrations are featured on a number of things including CALENDARS.  Please don’t judge me gentle readers, but under certain circumstances I am a re-gifter. Over the holiday I WAS going to re-gift this wonderful 2012 Coffee Klatch calendar by Barbara that another friend gave me for Christmas, ONLY because I already had another one. Luckily I didn’t re-gift this one but hung it in the studio… because look what my gift-giving friend had Barbara WRITE on the month of September!! I actually shared this story with Barbara AND my gift-giving friend and everyone thought it was funny.