I'm Moving -- to a New Blog Address!

Please join me at my newly re-designed website and blog, now integrated into one.

Come on over to www.janedavila.com for all the latest news on products, workshops, books and magazine articles, and events.

This blog will remain live to preserve all of its great content, but all new posts will appear on the new blog.

Please remember to update your blog readers too. Thanks! See you at my new place. :)

Printing on Fabric with Natural Materials starts now!

Does surface design summer camp sound like fun to you? Then join me in my online course Printing on Fabric with Natural Materials on Craft University! Registration is open through August 29.

The supplies needed are simple to find, non-toxic, and mostly inexpensive - and you'll be creating unique and interesting fabrics with everyday materials like artichokes, onions, ferns, lace, even fish!

Treat yourself, sign up with a friend, and work through the lessons. I'll be standing by to answer questions, lend encouragement, and dish even more tips and tricks.

Use coupon code PRINT20 for a 20% discount on the price of the class. See you at camp!

Printing on Fabric with Natural Materials - online course!

Back at the beginning of May I took a trip out to the Denver area and recorded an online video workshop for Craft University called Printing on Fabric with Natural Materials. Working with the team there was a blast and I'm so proud of the content of this workshop.

In the workshop I teach you all about how to sun print with acrylic paints and inks, how to direct print leaves, fruits, and veggies, how to print 3D objects like seashells and bumpy leaves, how to print fish, and even how to print your own photos with UV reactive dyes.

The team put together a preview of the workshop and you can watch it here:

Printing on Fabric with Natural Materials starts on July 25 and runs through Sept 5, but you own it forever, in case your summer gets busy. But! If you want to play along in real time, I'll be around to cheerlead, answer questions and troubleshoot, and share some more fun tips, tricks, and resources. You all are encouraged to post photos from the lessons and ask as many questions as your heart desires. I'll be right there guiding you!

You can use coupon code PRINT20 to save 20% on the course, and I'll be giving away a free gyotaku rubber fish for printing on Facebook and Instagram, so make sure you friend and follow me there too!

Summer is the best time to Nature Print - head out into the backyard to gather some supplies and then come join me in class!

New Classes for Spring!

I'm SO excited to release a new class schedule for spring! I have new classes, including one with my friend Susan Murray of Finished with Style, who has a studio across the hall from me at the NEST Arts Factory. She does some wicked cool decorative finishing techniques that look spectacular on fabric (or paper!) with materials that fabric surface designers don't usually use. New toys and new tools to play with!

You can find more details and sign up for the workshops on my workshop page here. Class sizes are limited so you'll want to hurry to save your spot!

There are several printing workshops - Simple Screen Printing and Four-Color Block Printing, plus an in-depth Intro to Image Transfers. If class is being held on a day that isn't convenient for you, think about setting up a custom class. With a minimum of 4 students, I can arrange a workshop on a day that you're available, so find a group of friends and have a fabulous day of art, creativity, and learning.

Printmaking and more at Create Mixed Media retreat in Chicago!

I had such a great time teaching at the Create Mixed Media retreat in New Jersey in July that I'm doing it again in Chicago this month. I'd love for you to join me!

I'll be teaching four workshops. First up is the 4-color block printing class. You'll learn about design, registration for perfect prints, marketing and selling prints, and even cut your own mat. You can add some stitching by hand and/or machine. Everyone works on their own design and New Jersey's students came up with some stellar ones!

On Saturday I'll be teaching a class called Art Websites for Beginners. All you need is a laptop with wifi capability and some images of your work. There's no software to buy or download, no special knowledge needed. By the end of class you'll be well on your way to a beautiful website you can maintain and update yourself. We work on the websites in real time, one step at a time, until everyone is confident and ready to move onto the next step. In New Jersey we joked about having a hacker party with pizza and beer in the hotel lobby after class to keep working on our sites together. Fun!

Saturday night we jump into the Live Tweets class. This is a great introduction to soft sculpture and the results are delightful. Make a bird with fabric and paper that you've painted or printed yourself. What a fabulous way to show off your handiwork!

And on Sunday morning join me for a great inspirational exercise that ends up as a house with a bird on it in the Bird:House workshop. Randomly choose a "bird word" and create a collaged and stitched house to illustrate it. We talk about inspiration, the principles of design, and many construction techniques. The houses can either hang on the wall or sit in a wooden stand when complete.

The Create retreats are great fun, inspirational, educational, and a wonderful way to connect with our "tribe" while trying new things and meeting new people. I hope to see you there!

Workshops - Online, In Studio and One-on-One Mentoring!

I'm pleased to announce a new line-up of classes that will be starting in the new year! One fabulous online course plus a number of workshops to be held in my studio in Connecticut. Tell Santa - a workshop makes a great gift!

Jump Start Your Art Career, my intense action-packed, knowledge-rich, six-week online course, will begin on Monday January 13, 2014. This class can help anyone with a creative business - working artists in any medium, art teachers, people wanting to get published in magazines or write a book, anyone wanting to start an art retreat, and so many more. We dig deep into a wide variety of topics and, through worksheets and homework, you'll develop a plan for your own business moving forward. Find more details and a sign-up button for Jump Start Your Art Career here.

The Jump Start class is an online class with extensive written material, informative blog posts every week day for 6 weeks, interaction with your fellow students, focused advice for your creative business, deep thinking exercises, and great resources! I hope you can join me.

Workshops held in my loft studio in Bridgeport Connecticut are of both the learn-new-art-techniques, make-cool-stuff variety and the nurture-your-creative-business variety. You can find classes in gyotaku (fish) printed collages, creative stamp making, spirit flags, and a sampler of all of the fun surface design supplies. Plus workshops in building a website, creating and editing videos, making art connections with social media, and as a special bonus - I will be offering one-on-one creative mentoring in 2014!

If you'd like a chance to work directly with me on your art business, either online and over the phone or in person, this is your opportunity. There are only a limited number of mentorships slots available for the first quarter and I'd love to work with you.

If you have any questions about the online or studio workshops, or about the one-on-one mentoring, please contact me at info @ janedavila dot com

Jump Start Your Art Career!

It's back, just in time to get your art career started or moving along! Sign up for my 6-week online workshop starting Monday July 25. The online format is ideal for this type of information and boy, do I have a LOT of information for you!  More details below:

Jump Start your Art Career

What do you want out of your art career? Do you want to exhibit more often? Sell more art? Teach workshops? Get published? Create a polished, professional online prescence? This practical, hands-on class will guide you through an individualized course of study to attain these aspirations & more. Start by defining and setting your specific goals, create your brand, come up with a marketing plan and put it into action, all with step-by-step guidance from an industry expert.

Learn how to -

•      create a brand that will help you stand out from the crowd
•      outline a marketing plan to help you reach your goals
•      put together a professional portfolio
•      find, research and approach art galleries
•      start an etsy store and promote it
•      build up a mailing list and use it effectively
•      analyze the success of your marketing plan
•      get published - start small and think big 

With interactive lessons, homework, brainstorming, critiques and more you will be well on your way to realizing your art career goals.

On each of the six Mondays you will receive an email with the PDF lesson and worksheet for the week. The interactive part of the class will mainly be run from a private blog where everyone registered for class will have the opportunity to see the lessons in visual form, anyone comfortable with having the work they're doing for class will have it posted, and comments on each lesson will be highly encouraged to foster discussion, brainstorming and feedback.

The blog will have updates from me, relevant to that week's lesson, every weekday and I will be available for email consultation and help during the entire 6 weeks. The blog will remain available for three weeks after class has finished.

The PDFs and worksheets will help you focus on your own specific goals and the steps you will be taking to attain them, while the blog will help you track your progress, and your fellow students', with our real-life examples.

6 online lessons beginning Monday July 25 $75.00

the workshop includes pdf handouts, worksheets, resources and references plus a forum for sharing questions, answers and progress all in a supportive, encouraging and empowering environment.

This class is only run about every 15 months so jump if you're interested. It'll be a while before it's back again!

Please contact me if you have any questions. I hope to see you in class!

Sisters Oregon & A Quilter's Affair

This summer I will once again be teaching at the phenomenal Quilter's Affair conference in Sisters, Oregon. I am so looking forward to it! This event is really well-organized and the week is topped off by the most amazing outdoor quilt show.

This year I'll be teaching two sessions of my workshop, Project Patchwork. I love this class and I get to be Tim Gunn to all of the designers in the room. I issue three challenges throughout the day and participants create 3 small quilts using their favorite techniques. It's a tremendous amount of fun and very inspiring for all!

I'll also be teaching a Nature Printing workshop (with, among other goodies, rubber fishies!) and a nifty Stampmaking for Quilters workshop, plus an intense day I call Outer Limits where you'll learn more than 20 non-traditional ways to finish off the edges of your art quilts. Look Ma, No Binding!

I hope you can join me - the setting is glorious and the entire week is delightful.

Join me at Art-Is-You

Take a class here on the East Coast! Art-Is-You, the hippest mixed-media conference on the right coast, is around the corner and registration closes tomorrow. I hope you can join me (and a slew of other talented mixed-media artists including my uber-cool co-author, Elin Waterston) for a fun roster of classes in Danbury, Connecticut over Columbus Day weekend this October.

I'll be teaching a Bricolage workshop on Saturday, Oct 9. We'll be starting with paint, illustration board, stamps and a pile of found objects and will create unique, personal shadow boxes, a la Joseph Cornell but with a modern edge.

On Monday, October 11 we'll be constructing 3-dimensional Fiber Art Houses. These clever houses incorporate all sorts of imagery and can tell a story, pay homage to a favorite artist, express an idea or feeling, or be a neat way to show off all of your favorite things. I'm working on a whole village right now and am having so much fun!

If you want in on all the hip happenings, don't delay! Registration closes on Monday, Sept 6 at midnight.

Bricolage revisited

Remember the bricolage shadow boxes I made last July? Well, if you have a hankering to make one of your own, come join me at the Art-Is-You east coast art retreat in Danbury CT this October. I'll be teaching three different classes over the weekend and know that we'll have a rollicking good time.

The theme this year is Art Is... Wickedly Good and you can adapt your bricolage to that theme - oh the possibilities!

This retreat is about 15 minutes from my studio and I'll be able to bring tons of goodies to show and share. I'm so excited!

Workshop opportunity in New Jersey

There are a few spaces left in the Sketches from Nature workshop I'm teaching at the Garden State Quilters' Guild next Tuesday, April 13 in Chatham NJ. If you're interested please contact Becky at the guild to sign up. You don't need to be a member to take the class.

We'll be free-motion quilting with black thread and then adding acrylic ink to create the look of pen-and-ink drawings with watercolor effects. A really creative and easy process that looks more difficult than it is, this technique is from my new book, Jane Davila's Surface Design Essentials. The supply list is minimal and I provide all of the inks for use in class. I hope you can join me!

Jump Start Your Art Career

I'm very excited to announce the first of my online classes. This is a topic near and dear to my heart and I'm thrilled to share the knowledge I've gained over the last 20 years as a professional fine artist, author and teacher.

Jump Start your Art Career

What do you want to get out of your art career? Do you want to exhibit more often? Sell more art? Teach workshops? Get published? Create a polished, professional online presence? This practical, hands-on class will guide you through an individualized course of study to attain these aspirations and more. Start by defining and setting your specific goals, create your brand, come up with a marketing plan and put it into action, all with step-by-step guidance from an industry expert.

Learn how to -
     create a brand that will help you stand out from the crowd
     outline a marketing plan to help you reach your goals
     put together a professional portfolio
     find, research and approach art galleries
     start an etsy store and promote it
     build up a mailing list and use it effectively
     analyze the success of your marketing plan
     get published - start small and think big


With interactive lessons, homework, brainstorming, critiques and more you will be well on your way to realizing your art career goals.

6 online lessons beginning Monday April 5          $60.00


the workshop includes pdf handouts, worksheets, resources and references plus a forum for sharing questions, answers and progress all in a supportive, encouraging and empowering environment.

Loteria - first 20

Lotería Collage Project

This is what the first 20 lotería blocks look like next to each other. Progress is being made and things are happening!

This weekend, among other things, I've been working on my first offering of online classes. Stay tuned for the full descriptions and sign-up information. There will be a project class, a process class and a class focused on how to jump start your art career. Whee!

Workshop in the Hudson Valley

I hope you can join me for a workshop at the beautiful Hudson River Valley Art Workshops in March in Greenville, New York.

I'll be teaching Layers of Meaning, a workshop where you'll make a series of small art quilts incorporating a variety of techniques.

The official description:

Working within a theme, Jane Davila guides you to create a series of small art quilts. Develop your theme using techniques such as direct and indirect inkjet photo transfers, block printing and found object printing. Explore the concept of personal imagery by creating your own motifs to incorporate into your work. Layer your compositions with collage and printing, use quilting as the element of line, and end with a wide assortment of very unusual edge-finishing techniques.

Jane will be bringing an Epson Durabright all-in-one printer with her so that you will be learning and practicing the image transfer techniques hands-on with your own photos. She will also be bringing a number of interesting supplies that are for the use of the students, so it's a great opportunity to experiment with things you may not be familiar with without having to invest in those supplies before you're sure if you like them.

And... they have chocolate! Amazing, handmade chocolate. Really, what else do we need?

Art Quilt Studio Workshops

Four new workshops offered this Winter in Fairfield County, Connecticut. Treat yourself to a relaxing, educational and artistic day. Class sizes are limited, so don't delay!

Playing with Paint
Learn a wide assortment of ways to apply acrylic paint to create unique and original fabric and effects. A great introduction to Jane's new book, coming in January, 2010.

Thursday January 28 or Wednesday March 17
10 am - 4 pm $75.00

Surface Design Sampler
Come to play with a large variety of materials and supplies - paintstiks, neocolor pastels, assorted inks, mediums, paints, stamp pads, glitter, foil, smooch, angelina fibers and films, and more.

Thursday February 4 or Saturday March 20
10 am - 4 pm $95.00
most supplies included in the class fee

Introduction to Image Transfers
Learn direct and indirect transfer methods to add images to your projects. TAP, acrylic paint and medium transfers, and direct printing on a variety of fabrics and surfaces will be covered.

Saturday January 23, Wednesday February 10 or Thursday March 11
10 am - 2 pm $75.00
most supplies included in the class fee

Sketches from Nature
Create a free-motion thread sketch and then apply acrylic ink to complete a small quilt with a hand-drawn and hand-painted watercolor effect.
Wednesday January 20 or Saturday February 13
10 am - 4pm $75.00

Workshops are held in Fairfield County, Connecticut with a limited class size for individual attention. For more information email me at info @ janedavila (dot) com

Printmaking Workshop - July

Friday and Saturday, July 17 & 18, is the next session of my Printmaking for Art Quilters workshop. There are still a couple of spaces if you hurry!


collagraph with acrylic paint on pfd cotton

More details can be found on my website. We'll be working on a variety of printmaking techniques, adapted for printing on fabric with acrylic paints and mediums, with a good mix of hand and press printing processes. Come join us!

Postcards from the edge

Okay, maybe not from the edge, but some days are more interesting than others. Still transitioning into a whole new life, still trying to find structure and organization in the midst of change and still trying to get caught up, but I'm getting there.

I'm knocking things off my list and working toward some big deadlines. I have a wonderful group of people signed up for the June Printmaking for Art Quilters workshop next weekend.

And I've nearly finished the postcards that I owe to some very patient people. Postmark'd Art, the fantastic postcard group that I've belonged to for the past 4-5 years, had a theme of mixed media this spring and I used Loteria cards to create mine. Of course, I couldn't just mixed the media, I mixed the cultures too. The red stamp is one that my brother brought back for me from a trip to China. It's really beautiful, I love the scale of it with the Mexican loteria cards.

And to mix more culture in here, I finished a really good book last night, Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah, about his youth in Sierra Leone during the civil war. It was hard to read because of the subject matter but the honesty of the author made it very worthwhile. I highly recommend it.

Summer Workshops

I'm excited to announce that I'll be offering workshops in our barn this summer. We're located about an hour north of NYC in Fairfield County, Connecticut. I have a list of local hotels, including a couple of charming B&Bs on or near our completely authentic New England Main Street, if you're coming from a distance and need to stay overnight (and one hotel to warn you away from, lol).

Each two-day workshop is offered on a Friday and Saturday, in June, July and August. We'll be working on a variety of printmaking techniques, both by hand and with printing equipment (hello, etching press!) You'll create a lot of fabric that you can incorporate into future art quilts and you'll have a fantastic time doing it! We'll even feed you lunch and snacks each day. I hope you can join me!

This summer's sessions are: June 19 & 20, July 17 & 18 or Aug 14 & 15. If you need more info, please email me.

PS: The June session is filling fast -- just so's ya knows.

Upcoming...

Coming up - lots of events and traveling and teaching!

Next week I'll be in Chicago for International Quilt Festival. I'll be vending in the mixed-media section as Flourish-Country Quilter. I'll be teaching a Make It University workshop on Friday afternoon (1:30 - 2:30) on collage pendant necklaces and then demonstrating in the Open Studios section both Friday and Saturday from 2:45 to 4:45. Please stop by and say hi!



Saturday, April 25th from 12 - 3 pm will find both me and Elin at Elm Street Books in New Canaan CT for a book signing and talk about art quilts. We'll be signing both Art Quilt Workbook and Art Quilts at Play. Elm Street Books is a gem of a bookstore, one of the last great independent booksellers in our area. They bring in lots of authors for signings and host lots of interesting events. I'd love to have a really big turnout for our signing - we aren't as mainstream as Calvin Trillin (a recent author there), but I like to think that our readers are just as dedicated.



Saturday and Sunday, May 2-3 is the quilt show in Somers, put on by the Northern Star Quilter's Guild. I'll be vending all weekend and demoing on Saturday afternoon. This is a fantastic show with something for everyone. It's on the train line from Manhattan and an easy drive from anywhere in the tri-state area (NY-NJ-CT).



And Saturday, May 23, I'll be at the City Quilter in NYC teaching a workshop on self-expression quilts. You'll learn a variety of direct and indirect photo-transfer techniques and lots about composition and design as you make a small art quilt that expresses you.

A busy, busy spring!

Workshop at Sew Inspired

Elin Waterston and I will each be teaching a workshop at Sew Inspired Quilt Shop in Simsbury CT on Saturday April 4th. We'll also be signing copies of our new book, Art Quilts at Play from 1-2 pm.

Elin is teaching Artist Trading Cards with Angelina fibers, painted fusibles and Shiva Paintstiks from 10am - 1pm and I'll be teaching Fiber Art Postcards with Tsukineko inks, metallic foil and gel medium transfers from 2-5 pm.

Hope to see you there!