An Artsy Retort

When I posted my final pictures of the stitched-down Cut Flowers piece, I received this reply from the workshop instructor (artist Pamela Allen):

Hasn't the stitching enhanced the leaves especially! You tell your turning applique friend that your stems and the stitching is an element that makes the viewer take pleasure in the NEGATIVE space between the stems. This had a good start and now a great finish!

Wow, I could never have phrased that so well. I did not know the viewer was taking pleasure in my negative space!

Yesterday, I was outside weeding the mini-garden surrounding my mailbox when it started to rain. A soft, gentle rain. Just what my flowers needed! Later in the day, the bottom fell out of the clouds and we got at least an inch of rain. Charlie and I had a rare opportunity to sit on the front porch rockers and watch the lightning while we sipped our wine. (Our area has had very little rain for the past year.) Some time during the night, our power went off. I was awakened by a blinding flash of lightning, followed by eerie darkness and silence. We normally have two fans on in our bedroom, a ceiling fan and a box fan, to muffle sounds of barking dogs and provide a nice "white noise." It was strange to try to sleep in total silence. The power was restored before morning.

Yesterday, I went upstairs to begin my Lesson 2 for the workshop I am taking. I had to decide on the two hues I will use. I got all my hand-dyed fabrics out and sorted them by color from light to dark. I did not know I had so much! I collected hand-dyes for several years from a New Zealand fabric dyer who sold on e-Bay. Sometimes I was able to get a meter of gorgeous hand-dye for as a little as $3.00. She does not seem to be e-Baying as frequently any more, but her selling name is 2dye4-fabrics. Anyway, I never did decide on my two hues. I did get a lot of my fabric sorted, including several drawers in my dresser full of fat-quarter size commercial fabrics. And I started going through my two plastic file cabinets of "scraps." Most of these I can get rid of, since the pieces are too small to deal with.

Then, I started cutting some of the scraps into various-sized squares for scrappy quilt projects.

All this did not get my new sewing room put together, or my Lesson 2 completed, but it was satisfying to make some order out of the chaos in the old sewing room.