"She opened the door of the art house!"

The Lakeshore Fiber Arts Guild met last night and made fabric postcards, guided by multimedia artist Kelli Perkins.

Kelli had a wonderful display table of some of her other art, including pillows, jewelry, altered books, and artist trading cards. You can see some of them here.

I really enjoyed looking through the altered books, and handling a cloth book that I thought of as a "cloth book for grown-ups". Beads, buttons, and all kinds of ephemeral treasures were included in these books, lots of textures and visual delights. I wish I'd brought my camera, but you can see a lot of her work at her blogs.

I picked up a lot of ideas for using some of the yarn, tatting threads, and beads that I've accumulated over the years and not known what to do with. Not to mention I gained an excuse for buying beautiful fabric, which I never really had before (because my sewing is pretty rough and unskillful). Uh-oh.

If her name sounds familiar, maybe you have seen it recently in the magazine Cloth Paper Scissors.

One of the things I have always loved about my other group, the West Michigan Lace Group, was that I'd go to a meeting with something to show and tell about that I'd been doing, and I'd see sixty-eleven different things that other members were doing, and go home with my brain fizzing and sparking with new ideas.

The Lakeshore Fiber Arts Guild has been a pretty small group for the last couple of years, but we're making a concerted effort to expand again, and the monthly programs have been part of that effort. And after last night's meeting, wow, did I go home with a head full of ideas.

I really love the cross-pollination that happens when artists in different media get together. For example, Kelli was at our meeting last month when doll artist Jennifer Gould talked about discharge dyeing using bleach pens.

Kelli took this idea, played with discharge dyeing, and used some of her discharged fabric in fabric postcards.

The title of this post comes from the phrase on the fourth postcard down, which I instantly loved. "She opened the door of the art house!"

And I'll bet there was quite the party going on in there!