What Was I Thinking!

… and a Stupiphany

at long last the baby challenge quilt has been birthed and now that I can see it as a single piece as opposed to blocks laid out next to each other, I’m liking it better and feeling that hopefully the family that ultimately receives it will like it to, or at least not totally hate it.

Photos of the finished quilt will appear sometime next week.  In the meantime (1) I have to play by the Quilt Guild rules and (2) it still has to be quilted and stitched closed.

So for now, the photo above shows what it does NOT look like!  I realized in time that the black and white pebbly fabric is not a good background.  There’s enough blocks with it in to make a doll’s quilt, which is probably what I’ll do with it, AFTER finishing the projects I committed to finish.

My slogan for this year was “Create and Complete,” and I need to keep it for 2010 too at this rate!

Decided that posting pix of stash is probably counter productive because in reveling in stash and my plans for it I fool my mind into believing I actually accomplished something.  Something other than shopping, that is.

The stupiphany of the day hit me like a ton of bricks.  A thought that came out of nowhere as I was taking a short walk enjoying fresh air and sunshine this morning.

I finally realized that it’s a good thing that I can’t sing.

Never in my whole life was I ever allowed to be in a choir or a chorus.  In high school I was told to mouth the words for the Christmas concert so as not to ruin the performance of the other 599 girls!  When my son was two he was already telling me not to sing.  Apparently even my humming is off key, although it sounds perfect to me.

Today I realized that if I could sing this would be one more distraction in my life.  I have enough trouble with the things I am blessed to be able to do.  If I was always rushing off to  practice with the Sweet Adelines I probably wouldn’t be as good at writing, art, or quilting.  And given that Islamic worship takes a different (and to me less distracting) form, I might miss choral music.

Inspiration

My local fibre arts group FAD (Fibre Art and Design) has decided that our next meeting is to share our favourite websites and other sources of inspiration.  This post is so everyone will have a permanent record of mine, and perhaps we can all somehow link or find a way to share each others’ sources (not everyone blogs).

BOOKS:

Transitions: Unlocking the Creative Quilter Within, by Andrea Balosky, That Patchwork Place, 1996

Contains a lot of info about creativity and has a good approach (working in series and using easy blocks).  Another thing I like about this book is that her examples are made with mostly commercial fabrics, to show that you can make an art quilt without throwing out your existing stash

Silk Unraveled: experiments in tearing, fusing, layering & stitching, by Lorna Moffat, Dragon Threads, 2008

Inspiring projects using silk in a variety of ways.  The author has lived overseas in Turkey and Malaysia.   The techniques in the book are simple and have many possibilities.

OLD SKETCHBOOKS:

I have sketchbooks in various sizes going back years with quilt designs, websites, paint chips, postcards, quotes, notes from presentations at guild meetings and workshops, etc.  It’s interesting to look back and see how long some concepts have been percolating and how they’ve developed.

Also interesting is how the page size keeps increasing, although after the Gail Harker workshop I dialed it down a notch with one purse size one and one 9″ square sketchbook with heavy paper that will take acrylic paint.

FROM MY BLOGROLL

Vivika Denegre, a Connecticut art quilter: http://vdenegrequilts.blogspot.com

Professional quilter, very cool hip designs and big on challenging the rest of us:  http://tallgrassprairiestudio.blogspot.com

Plus the rest of the blogroll too!

Don’t take a fence

Anyone who thinks this book is portraying them as a cow, a pig, or a donkey need not sue for defamation. Politicians, take note!

Productivity/ Finishing Projects

all my life I’ve struggled with finishing things — be it missing the last day I was going to a particular school, attending graduation at University (but at the time it was NOT a cool thing to go to grad, my mother was in the hospital and I was leaving the UK for a job).  Finishing off quilts and other projects is all part of that pattern, hence my collection of UFOs.  But I’ve joined the Joy in the New Year challenge and with Jacquie and 200 other crafters cheering me on I’ll get there.

The Star is Born baby quilt challenge is due absolutely no later than the Guild meeting in early December (the original deadline was last Tuesday, didn’t happen).  I can’t show photos because I’m under a gag order, that’s part of the challenge.  However just before I turn it in I might post some of the What was I thinking? blocks

Next up will be Geode, because it’s been untouched for years and when I took it out the other night I can see just a little more design is needed and a lot of the parts are in fact already constructed.  I will need to tape it up on the living room wall, step back, take pix and perhaps even print them to audition what the best design is.  I’ve already decided this will be quilted by someone with a long arm, since it’s easily queen size.

The wordle above is a new wrinkle.  I already posted about wordle here, but while surfing yesterday I found this cool tutorial about a feature enhancement.  Yay, Cool Cotton Cocktails!  This automatically creates a wordle from recent posts on any blog or website.  So you could do your own or you could wordle somebody else’s.  Interesting that the only colour names I can find (but I could be mistaken, it’s been known to happen!)  are green, white, and burgundy.

Cotton Cocktails explains how to grab a wordle in a screenprint but this computer is getting to the stage in its lifecycle where I don’t want to download much more in the way of programming, so I simply scanned and uploaded a print of my wordle.

I’m going to paste the original print out into my sketchbook.  That’s a whole other post in itself.  More art/creativity/fibre things happen in my life than I can keep up with in the blogosphere.  Anyone else have that problem?  I have a folder full of blog fodder pix on my pc and paper notes as well and yet work and life and the need to complete things get in the way.

What do YOU think?  Is the unblogged life not worth living, to twist a quotation?

Spot the deliberate error!

Last weekend I volunteered as an assistant at our Quilt Guild sale.  This was the first time I attended ~ last year I had only just moved to the island and something or other came up that weekend so I didn’t even get to visit.

Next year I’m gung ho with intentions to volunteer for the Friday morning when it’s a feeding frenzy.  By my Friday evening shift it was quiet although there were some serious shoppers.  I got the opportunity to ask some of the others about their work and discovered a couple of people who work in production mode year round for the holiday craft sale season.  I also got the chance to shop and picked up a matched set of placemats and coasters made by Joan Wotherspoon, who is one of the guilds’ heavy hitters.  The coasters were on one table and the placemats on another.

Still it was my DD at home who spotted the “deliberate error” ~ not REALLY an error but something I hadn’t noticed.  Can you see what it is?

UFO Challenge

While surfing around the Fall Quilt Festival, I discovered this great challenge by Jacquie of Tallgrass Prairie Studio, Joy in the New Year.  If you click you can see how this has really hit a nerve in the quilting community as about 200 people have signed up.

This is definitely one I need to participate in!  Especially as the Baby Quilt Challenge is due tomorrow and I’m still piecing …

My list of UFO’s is going up in a sidebar going to be edited so it makes sense in the sidebar!  and that will keep me motivated.  The list I mean.

Last week I worked almost 43 hours, which is more than usual!

One Way to Nurture Creativity

… live in a completely different environment.

Jinny Beyer is famous in the quilting world for being the first person to design fabric specifically with quilters in mind.  When you go into a quilt store today it’s hard to remember a time when we didn’t have a wealth of gorgeous fabrics to drool over, but that’s thanks to this lady!

Jinny Beyer started quilting while living as a transplanted corporate wife in New Delhi, India. Older American ladies decided to make a quilt and she wanted to use the bright colours from the bazaars, while their concept was very traditional with lots of white background and tame calicoes from home. Of course back in the early 70s that’s what people had to quilt with.

Dena Crain is a quilter living in Kenya.  She teaches through Quilt University and has said that the colours of Africa and the wonderful African fabrics are a wonderful inspiration but on the other hand electricity is interrupted sometimes and you can’t just run out to a craft or fabric store every time you need something, plus some supplies are not available.

Wanting a photo to illustrate this post but not wanting to be tacky, here’s a photo of a piece I made in her Structured Fabric class which I took some time ago (some time ago as in don’t ask, ahem!) .   As you can see it’s a process piece and not quite finished.

Pippa Moore of Kitambaa is perhaps combining both worlds.  She travels to Uganda to train women raising AIDS orphans to make quilted items for sale at a fair trade price, but is based in Canada.  Check out her blog here.  And if you get a chance to hear her presentation Travels with my Treadle about her project, drop everything and go.  At the Victoria Sewing Show they had put her into one of the smaller rooms, and all of her presentations filled up (no one else’s did, by the way.)

She’s on my blogroll too as a fellow Island dweller and member of the Fibre Art Network, a Western Canadian art quilt group.

And Lucy is a newer quilter living in challenging but exciting circumstances in Sudan, and reading her blog I can see the same pioneer spirit shining through!

For myself although I’ve traveled a lot and lived in different places I’m not sure that I would have the patience to deal with the inconveniences of living outside North America.   After a couple of days in England I’m often tied in knots over how difficult it is to get things done.  What do you think?  Let us know!

Parting is such sweet sorrow …

… especially when it comes to one’s fabric stash!

Our guild is having its annual garage sale next week so I bravely went through my bins and pulled out fabric I could sell to fellow addicts quilters.  No prizes for guessing what I’ll do with all that money.

After bagging and pricing my pile, these are the ones that upon mature consideration I decided I just am not yet ready to part with.  Actually there’s even a few more because just yesterday I bought Susan Teece’s Roses and Windows pattern and decided to keep some pink and burgundy fabric until I’ve made the roses.  After all it is an annual sale.  Susan did a workshop on this in May but with traveling to Phoenix it wasn’t possible for me to attend.

There’s a rationale of sorts behind my other keep choices in the photo.  The red is what I used to screen print the animal faces and with matching fabric the possibilities of making a jacket are that much easier.

The black and white bears and the green turtles are in honour of my preliterate assistant and partner in creativity.  The green bandana on the right is a Lily Pulitzer Race for the Cure design, and it occurred to me that this might be useful for a workshop Susan Purney Mark is developing for spring.  And the other fabrics suddenly presented more possibilities than I had seen as I pulled them from their bins.

Does anyone else go through these gyrations?  It boggles my mind that I supposedly cleaned out my stash before moving here, sold some to Fabric Traders, and STILL have a pile to go!

 

 

I’ve been slimed, part 3

Well, my faith in Method is somewhat restored, as it seems they discontinued some of the less popular fragrances in the U.S.  However Canadians may have to be content with cross border shopping or buying from Amazon.  Retail therapy here is in need of therapy!

I’ve been slimed, part 2

Found this in my inbox this morning, it looks to me like a computer generated reply:

Hey there, it’s us, the method folks… thanks for getting in touch! Your question has been received, and you should expect a response from us within 48 hours.

Except the subject line of the email was Aroma Bills (not pills) and I definitely wrote pills in my message.  Talk about a Freudian slip!

Watch this space for updates.