My wonderfully boring life!

    Last week was busy for me. Dinner with pals at a very fine dining establishment on Monday. The next evening, Tuesday, I gave a presentation on journal quilts, which was well received, I hope...all the guild members present where quiet during my talk, or should I say blathering. I do enjoy my series of journal quilts and feel like I have a fairly decent body of work that tells parts of my story.
    Then there was all the regular stuff- BFCC on Monday morning, dental appointment Tuesday afternoon, checking on friend's house all week, fulfilling other obligations and duties, too.
    The weather has been perfect the last few days, so I spent the ENTIRE day yesterday in my yard. I got a lot accomplished, planting, digging out crap. Sadly, my favorite little shovel broke while trying to dig up a rotted tree stump. There's a backup shovel in the truck, but I hesitate to take it out, because one never knows when one will have to bury somebo.......er.....dig up something......

Bizzy (and photo of clematis)

I've been working on the other graduation dress and will start on the third one this week. In addition, I have made progress on the carnival costumes, and am seeing the light at the end of the tunnel on that project. The carnival stuff is interesting and I've been making these suits for over ten years except for a few of them. One of the "kings" went to Prince Charles' tailor one year, at least that's what I heard. It got held up in customs and arrived at a very late hour (or so I was told). Looked pretty good in the photos and I'd really like to know what the invoice on that adventure was.
  I have been taking photos of the progress on the graduation dress, but for some reason I haven't on the carnival costume. Maybe I should. When time allows, I will post updates on the dresses. The first one is completed--well--there are a couple of snaps and some pressing left to do, but it is finished and the graduate and her mother really love it.
  Soon I will be working on a lovely wedding dress for a friend's daughter. She wants a vintagey type dress and I have some nice lace and some ideas on how to put it together with a very nice piece of cotton/silk lawn from Thai Silks.

  Not much time for art, although I did get some stitching done today on an art quilt that I started in a workshop led by my friend, Vanessa, a few weeks ago. It is from a photo I took in 2007 in Southern California at Crystal Cove. I have many great pictures from that trip. One of them was the subject of my entry into the last chapter of the Journal Quilt Project at the Houston quilt show. Ahh the good old days.... 
  On the personal front, things are not so great. My granddaughter is in trouble, my dear little grandson has disappeared with his mentally unstable mother, and the marriage counselor fired us today.
Good thing I have work to keep me busy.

Challenge quilts

The other day I sewed all the 16x 20 quilts together and put a sleeve on the top edge and hung it up. Then I took it down to hang up the quilt I needed to photograph to enter the AQS contest, then hung it back up. Whew the ladder got a workout too. Probably the most exercise I've got since this crappy cold weather set in. It's just too cold and dreary for walking (no matter how much I bundle up) and although the temps forecasted (sp?) for tomorrow sound good, rain is imminent. Boohoo! Since my spectacular week of Thanksgiving, when I walked over 30 miles, I have been a slug in comparison. Plus I've nearly eaten my body weight in candy. Ugh. I do not want to get that sweet tooth back. And my vehicle is acting up again.
Will stress and anxiety see me out of this year? Okay by me as long as it does not follow me into the next one!

2010 online challenge quilts

   So here's a photo of all my challenge quilts from 2010. I really did enjoy doing these and was able to put so much more of my heart into my work than ever before. I hope to continue the feeling with whatever art I make from here on out.

2010 challenge quilt

Alas, the 2010 online challenge has come to an end, as all good things must. I'm not sure where we are supposed to post the final installments so I'm showing it here.

  The final theme is "Destination". Very fitting place to end up, I think. This offering describes a happy place for me, the home body. I hope to someday get to that happy place, wherever it may be.(For some reason I remain the eternal optimist, despite my comments to the contrary.)
  I sewed all the challenge quilts together today and will post a photo of that on a different day. 

Aftermath

The day after the huge feast. This day is completely different from yesterday--it's 30 degrees colder, I'm 200% fuller, the sun is shining and I'm waiting on the plumber to come back again. Old house, old pipes and the same could be said for me too (haha).
   Since I'm stuck here for who knows how long, I worked on the final online challenge quilt. The last theme is "Destination" which I think is very fitting for the final chapter. Notice how many references I make to the end of this exercise. I am very sad for the challenge to end. It has been such a rewarding experience for me to explore different techniques and put a little more of my heart into my art work. And the challenge helped me express some of the turmoil in my life this past year or so. (Lots of "ex" words too. Hmmmm....maybe I'm up for a little more exploring?)   Anyway, the quilt is mostly done, just some hand stitching left, and it seems to fit my conception of the theme in a non threatening way. Every challenge theme offered up a suggestion for the extreme in my mind. But my main goal is to keep the peace and I might have myself a personal challenge in 2011 to produce the quilts I REALLY wanted to make. At the very least I did get to think about how to make them and that was fun too.

theme of the day

veggies for poncit

noodles for poncit

a few dishes being served

  Enough of me, back to food. Every thing was yummy and there was lots of it. Bad Americans!

Online challenge- Music

Hear My Song

This time it was harder for me to visualize and execute the design for the theme "Music" but I did it and finished last Saturday. I was trying to capture the ethereal feeling of music, which I think floats on the air and slips through your fingers if you try to catch it. And of course, I continued with the heart and black X's as design elements to tie all the pieces together. I really like how this turned out.

I'm going all 21st century

My son came by today to bring me a portable hard drive and showed me how to put music on my computer. I didn't even know I could do that. Right now I'm listening to Brian Eno and David Byrne's "My Life In the Bush of Ghosts", one of my all time favorite albums. Life is good. I've spent the better part of the last week in the dungeon, er, basement with the deconstructed screen printing. My red dye is acting up though and I've gotten some very unpredictable results, but nothing I can't save by over dyeing or over printing. I received an invitation to be in a gallery in October so I've busied myself making book covers. Photos later. The postcard workshop has inspired me to make some more to have available to sell at the gallery, too. I mailed one to myself to prove they could go through the post office, but when it came today it wasn't even postmarked and the stamp has not been canceled. Shhhh, don't tell anyone. I'm going to remail it.
   The new theme for the online challenge is "Music" (queue Twilight Zone music) how appropriate for today now that my computer has a song to sing. I have no clue how to interpret this theme. The others came to me so fast and I had the quilts constructed in my head right away.  And the other quilts had symptoms of the problems I've been dealing with this past year. Music never figured into any of that crap except as an escape from the anxiety. Hmmmmm.....I smell an inspiration. Oh my, the song playing now is titled "Jezebel" where can I go with this???

2010 challenge

Here's the latest  entry for the online challenge. The theme is "Reflection" and I spent several evenings watching the sun go down on the Mississippi River to capture the right moment for this quilt. I took lots of photos and printed some onto fabric. Then I pieced the background and did a bit of machine applique for the face. After quilting I applied adhesive with a popsicle stick and fused on gold foiling. Hand stitching reminds me of the starlings that fly over the water eating the dreaded mosquitoes. Hurray for starlings!
  I am enjoying the challenge and really like the themes and am making every attempt to stretch myself as an artist.  Only time will tell that I have succeeded. Click on the badge for other submissions to the challenge.

Online challenge--"Rhythm"

It's reveal week finally. I had this quilt finished with a week of the theme being issued. The writing around the heart is the names of goddesses from different cultures, who represent love, marriage and fidelity. I did throw in a ringer--the Chinese goddess of face cream--Hsi Shih. That was too funny to resist.

The full title of the quilt is "Chants to Your Favorite Goddess...a beating heart, the comfort of the circle, soft voices in the chant, the hum of a sewing machine."
For more info on this quilt and to see other equally amazing art works, click on the 2010 online challenge badge. Good stuff

Sneak peek

The idea for the online challenge quilt begged for my attention,

so I had to get it done. I cannot reveal it in tis entirety till June, so here's a little bit.

 

Sorry for the glare of the camera flash.

New theme

The theme for the online challenge is "rhythm". My first idea was very exciting and I did the whole thing mentally while walking. Suddenly it seemed like a terrible idea and I felt I needed to do something a little more uplifting than that original thought--although the first one was fun in a devilish way!
So I have the "look" of this thing in my mind. Now I'm stepping out of my comfort zone to put it together. I'm taking some influence from Susan Shie's style of wholecloth quilting, which is WAY cool, I think. Fingers crossed it comes together to look like what's in my head.  I really hate to do a lot of work and be disappointed. But it doesn't have to be done till the end of June, so if it tanks there's time to recoup.

2010 challenge

It's reveal week so I can show you the quilt I made for the online challenge. The image of the young woman is me in a picture taken long, long ago in one of my former lives. I scanned the photo-b&w 8x 10 that I hand colored-cropped it and printed it onto Transfer Artist Paper. Thank you Leslie Riley for this wonderful stuff. The image was ironed onto pima cotton, trimmed, then appliqued by machine to the background, a piece of medium weight muslin that I monoprinted several months ago.
Other design elements, small pieces of hand painted fabric were collaged to the background and the whole thing was quilted with batting and backing fabric.
 Certain areas were enhanced with colored pencil, paint, and hand stitching.

    The theme of this quarter's challenge was "passage" and this piece is named "On the Road to Heartbreak..."

2010 challenge

It's almost reveal week for the next online quilt challenge. The theme this time is "Passage". In spite of my heavy work schedule I made time for getting this submission done. Nothing like a deadline to get you going on a project.
 For this quilt I used some techniques I hadn't used before. It was fun to experiment, of course, and I plan on doing more experimental things in the upcoming challenges, too.

  Since the unveiling of the quilt has to wait till reveal week I can only show a little bit of it right now.

Reveal week

The 2010 online challenge quilts are being shown this week. Click on the badge to see postings of the other challenge participants works.

This is the quilt I made. It's named "Puzzled by Love-Missing Pieces". There is stuff written on the back to explain what I was thinking, which I will post next time as I cannot remember what I wrote. That's why we write things down isn't it--to keep all that crap from cluttering up our brains???
    Some of the black spots are empty spaces-something I had never done in a quilt before. Kinda fun to cut a hole in a quilt.