Sonya Nimri

Like every other mom with an eye for the environmental future, I seem to have unwittingly built up an armory of recyclable shopping bags well beyond my actual needs.  I have large ones, small ones, some made of recycled plastic bottles, some of vinyl, some of canvas.  While I do use one or two every day for everything from toys to groceries to diapers to a last-chance change of clothes and a few wipes while out on the road(essential, btw...), the fact is that if I was to fill up every one of my bags on a single trip I'd need a military convoy to carry everything home. No one needs that much stuff. But every mom needs a tote. So I'm looking to downsize my own collection and hand off some convenient carrying-capacity to a new mom in need.  This particular re-constituted tote I made for a friend of mine who just had her first baby boy 3 months ago (okay, okay, I run late...).  His name is Niko so I thought a big "N" would get him on the letter train early.  I ...

I found this swaying cherry blossom tree in a Tim Walker  book totally inspiring and wanted to recreate it for the UCLA Commons window. I knew it was going to take a lot of stamping so I took a cherry blossom stamp that I already had and stamped on a linoleum stamp then carved around the flowers to make a great big swath of cherry blossoms. I took a large piece of cotton muslin and dip dyed the bottom 1/3 into a warm salty bath of Rit dye Denim Blue.  I hung it to dry outside on a line.  After it dried, I appliqued the tree using three different bark-y colored fabrics cut into flame shapes.  As usual- Wonder-under was my friend, ironed to the back of the fabrics, they stuck really well to the muslin.   Next came the fun stamp-a-thon. I loosely mixed three different colors of Folk Art paint - Pure Orange, Metallic Rose, and Metallic Peach Pure. I hand-sewed a swing to the tapestry too to convey a camp-y feel.  It's pretty rad here on my picnic table, migh...