Something I gotta try … and a confession

I’ve been studying Pat Langford’s Embroidery from Sketch to Stitch, Quilters’ Resource, Inc, 1996, ISBN 0-9629056-7-4

This lady is first and foremost an embroiderer, which I’m really not, although various little things are nudging me in that direction.

Sketching is obviously a huge part of what she does.  Maybe this will be the impetus that will get me sketching on a more regular basis instead of wringing my hands and being a sniveling wannabe.

I’m intrigued by the way she pushes the envelope, using puff paint on a baby blanket (although you would never know from looking at the finished work), and crayoning onto microfibre.

Specific things I want to try:

Polychromos coloured pencils on microfibre, ironed to heat set

Transfer dyeing with Crayola fabric crayons on paper, ironed onto the microfibre fabric.

Pentel crayons directly onto linen in several layers.  Langford actually covered the fabric in places.  Hmmm, thrift store hunt for old linen coming up maybe?   Too bad I no longer have the orange linen tablecloth that was in my wedding registry, that would have been so dramatic!

Langford has many platters, which are round or oval art quilts.  That’s a possible direction.

CONFESSION

After the busyness and frenzy of preparing for and being in the Artists In Motion @ The Empress show, I vowed to take things easy/take the summer off.  Of course THAT’S not gonna happen, but as I recuperated I challenged myself to write down all the different outstanding projects and tasks of every description that I have on my plate.  It’s four pages long, so I’m forcing myself to look at this list every day, cross things off it as and when possible, and not undertake any more new projects.

So in order to stay focused artistically, I’m starting a new page on the blog for things I want to try, so that I can have a handy reference.  Of course I have a sketchbook on the go too but this will be a good handy way to preserve links electronically.

Before the show I did find that restricting myself to working in a series was helpful.  I am continuing with that series in order to have more to show at the Moss Street Paint-In, where we will be exhibiting on Thurlow Street next to the Moss Street market.

 

Looking backwards and forwards

Autism Home Rescue has challenged her readers to respond to the prompt:  What was your greatest achievement of 2010 and how do you plan to top it in 2011?

My comment is posted here because it’s more to do with fibre art than with homeschooling.  However reading her blog I’m humbled by what others have to take in stride day after day after day.

“”I completed an art quilt, Geode, I had started in 2003, involving hours of hand beading. It was shown at one of the exhibitions at the Canadian National Quilt Show in Calgary and I got to meet other quilt artists and had a very encouraging message from the author of the fantasy novel that inspired it.

My plans for 2011 don’t include one giant piece like this one, but I plan to be more consistently productive in my quilting and art endeavours, and more diligent in promoting myself through networking.”

People, please, whatever you did last year, surely you can do better in 2011?  Tell us about it and let’s spread the energy!

The one that got away

Well, it REALLY got away!

I was going to post a scan of a coloured sketch done as part of Elizabeth Barton’s Inspired to Design class which I’m currently taking through Quilt University.  But for some reason my scanner decided to make it a TIF file and I can neither post it to the class gallery nor here.

Oh well, too bad.  Here’s another sketch, based on one of the National Geographic photos of bees’ nests I blogged about earlier.

Now all I have to do is try and figure out why my scanner has suddenly decided this week to save everything as a .TIF instead of .JPG!

Am certainly learning a lot in this class.  She challenges us to cover our design wall with sketches each week.  My wall is four bifold closet doors each about 24 inches wide and 80 inches tall, so I haven’t yet covered the entire space in either lesson.  I left a lot of last week’s sketches up until yesterday when I realized I needed to be able to contemplate the work I’m engaged in now, so I removed them into a folder.  I was very good and didn’t throw anything into recycling!  Although some sketches were just horrible and never made it to the wall in the first place.

My inner critic works overtime. Maybe I should visualize packing his bags and sending him off to the French Riviera for a long, decadent holiday!  Then I could just say “Get back there and work on your tan!” whenever I hear “That’s rubbish, you can’t draw, just give it to the animal shelter now and be done with it.”

How do YOU turn off your inner critic?

PS:  got it back by playing around with the scanner settings.  This never happened before although I suspect that using grayscale may have something to do with this! The colours are placeholders, not a final decision, just a step along the way, or perhaps a step off the beaten track, who knows?

 

New Year, Clean Slate!

Appreciation was the virtue I pulled a day or so ago, reminding me to be more expressive when people do nice things.

So, a shout out to my DD, who is the most organized person in the family.  Here are the “after” shots of my lair, er studio.  No “before” shots are fit to be shared, and that is one hundred percent moi!

As can be imagined, the closet doors do double duty as bulletin board/design wall, soon to be covered with sketches for Elizabeth Barton’s Inspired to Design class through Quilt University.  But it doesn’t hurt to be reminded that under all the masking tape and paper there’s actual doors.

My prized write-on/wipe-off globe.  It just sits in the stand so you can put Antarctica on top if you feel inclined.  The ginger jar is modern and I use it to store inspirational concepts, as suggested by Julia Cameron.

Scrap busting pillow and on the bed, Who Moved My Haloumi?  a quilt that has turned out to be oddly prophetic!

Also much appreciated was the tactful way DD accomplished this rebarbative and gargantuan task, non confrontationally and kindly, and without throwing much out (although I know she would probably love to!)  I just trundled back and forth to the recycling bins and the Dumpster with stuff and she tidied and vacuumed away very cheerfully.  Since then, I’ve tidied away a few more bits and pieces and really made an effort to keep things shipshape.  Why, I recycled the remains of one of last year’s calendars (I have to keep two desk blotter sized calendars, one for editing and one for everything else ~ just not quite ready to recycle the work one yet).  I also scrubbed industriously at my whiteboard to try and clean it off.  I hate how whiteboards get messy and you can never quite clean them totally.  Mine is more of a pale green, blue, and pink board these days!

What’s your opinion?  Are creative people more untidy and disorganized than others, or does it just SEEM that way?  It’s one of my biggest struggles in life … please tell me I’m not alone!

Tote bag finished

Well, here is the little tote bag I was experimenting with.  It is variegated through and through to the point that I used Valdani thread in Graffiti for the topstitching around the top of the bag.  Valdani is one of my indulgences, every time I go to Satin Moon I gravitate to the display and drool, then figure that if I didn’t spend the money on thread I would blow it on chocolate!

This is the perfect size for wooden blocks, which came packaged in an environmentally friendly box that they exactly fit into if put in in the right order.  At bedtime when there’s a tidal pool of toy bits all over the floor and no one has the energy or patience, a bag is something that anyone, ANYONE! can put blocks into.

Having made one I can certainly see making more and experimenting.  And I’m further cannibalizing the assembled scrap fabric to replace a tired old cushion cover, just have to put a piece together that’s 20 by 45, and find something large and boring for the lining, and I’ll be off to the races!

Dragonfly

How much stash do we quilters have that is just too precious to slice into?  It sits there for year after year, maybe when you bought it you had a project in mind but then it was just too beautiful to cut and if you use it all up there won’t be any left, and of course the older the fabric is the more true that is, because designs get retired faster and faster these days.

By the way, off on a tangent, I really appreciate the manufacturers who have the guts to put the year the fabric was issued into the selvedge!   Why doesn’t everyone do that?  To me it just makes so much sense.  I always look at the publication date of any book I’m reading (yes, even cookery books, I know, I’m a nerd!)

Back on topic again, Cathy Miller aka the Singing Quilter teaches a reverse applique mola class that’s intended to use up the fabric that’s too beautiful to cut, and she doesn’t make you cut it!   This little dragonfly is my first attempt at this technique, complete with my own little wrinkle that sidesteps binding and showcases the fabulous fabric on the back of the piece as well as in the image.

Cathy just released another CD and I went to the launch party at Satin Moon recently where she not only performed the songs but told us the stories behind them, which was fascinating.

Sidestepping binding is a hot topic with me right now because I’ve had a busy week with one thing and another, but I need to get the binding hand sewn onto the Shattered Angles quilt.  I get sidetracked so easily between taking stretch breaks, tending to family needs, work deadlines.  But I did make good progress today so I’m confident that tomorrow I’ll get it finished so it can go to the Post Office on Sunday (ours is open, since it’s in the back of the drugstore, what a blessing!)  I have a scrap of bright orange and turquoise batik pinned where I stopped yesterday, so that encourages me to keep going.

Also because I have another longer term project on the go at the moment, workwise, I have started scheduling in a set amount of time per day to work on each of these projects.  I just have to remind myself that you eat an elephant one bite at a time.

Does anyone else struggle with this, elusive balance in life (well, probably everyone does!)  And what do you do to keep yourself on track?

Idea Tree

This is a scan of my completed small beaded piece, Idea Tree.  It was fun to do and I learned new techniques, beading and doing a back to front finish instead of sewing on binding or doing a pillowslip finish.

The fabric started out as plain muslin that I worked on in the first workshop I took with Melly Testa, and layers were monoprinted onto it using soy wax resist and green and yellow thickened dyes.  I used a lot of this yardage in a very large bold piece called Commotion.

This offcut almost went into the scrap quilt I’m slowly making using up smaller surface designed, hand-dyed, and mottled fabrics.  This is a back burner project because there is no block design.

Then thinking about another larger piece of sunprinted fabric I would like to hand quilt and make into a wall hanging I decided I should practice the back to front finish on a small test piece first.  The wall hanging cannot be started until the beading on Geode is finished.

Turning over a new leaf

First off, I love what I do for a living! Would I sometimes like less deadlines and more money? Yes, but wouldn’t we all? I enjoy editing people’s work so that others will want to read it, and it makes sense and reflects well upon the speaker or writer. There’s plenty of variety, some drama, and the challenge of researching terms of art and acronyms.

Still, it’s satisfying to come to the end of this year’s deadline-driven assignments and know that everything is submitted and dealt with. Plus I’ve been juggling next year’s calendar with its meeting dates since October so it’s a relief to have one less large piece of cardboard to handle every day.

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?

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!