Here's Something I Made

It has been a very busy time since Memorial Weekend!  We just got back from a week at the beach with our family.  Our granddaughter Lily had a birthday, and I finished the patchwork bag that we started together when she was on spring break.

The lovely posy was made by my friend Tama Brooks as a remembrance after my father died.  Lily selected the rest of the fabrics to make up the front and sewed them together.  I then added enough patchwork to fold over and make into a tote bag.  

The way I have been making sturdy tote bags is to make a regular quilt complete with binding, then hand-sew up the sides.  The back of the quilt becomes the lining of the bag.  I also make handles that are quilted, and securely sew them to the bag.

Unfortunately, we left the bag of birthday gifts at home, (along with all our towels and the paints and papers I meant to bring) so she will have to wait until we see them in a couple weeks to get her finished bag.

She will also be getting tho framed print of pears on a windowsill.  She was going through my stack of finished paintings and expressed an interest in this one, which surprised me.  I thought she would want one of my more vibrant paintings.  I think it turned out very nice matted and framed.

I have continued with the Fabulous and Free Journaling Challenge with Irresistibly Moi on Facebook.


The "Stamp It Out" prompt produced this ocean scene, just before we left for the beach.  I used a commercial stamp for the ship and also for the little shore bids in the foreground.  I tried some home-made stamps from a carved Styrofoam food package for the clouds, sun, and waves.  Then I brushed on some more paint to make it look more artistic.

Another prompt, "Numbers," happened to fall on my anniversary.  So, I had fun with the 44 years we have been married, and the wedding date.  Watercolor, markers, and white dimensional paint.

I did this quick watercolor painting in response to the "Monochrome Mania" prompt.  It is of course inspired by the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.

Here is our family group at the beach.  We had a wonderful time, great weather, good food.

And I will leave you with one of our glorious Sunset Beach sunsets.

Grandchildren, Journal Pages, Easter...Fun!

It has been a busy couple of weeks for this sewing/painting grandma!  I had our two oldest grandchildren here in Raleigh for a few days last week during their spring break.  Since I also babysit for the littlest one on Mondays and Tuesdays, it was a fun time for me and the little cousins.  You might understand why I have not had much time for blogging!

We did lots of painting and sidewalk chalk art.

I took them to the sculpture trail at the North Carolina Museum of Art.  It was a beautiful day to be outside.  Little Charlie saw this giant sculpture and must have thought it was a big patchwork quilt. She went running up to it...

but when she touched it, it did not feel like a quilt at all!

At the end of the walk there was a sidewalk full of pulsing fountains to cool us off!

We have lived in a rented house in Raleigh for close to two years, but never tried fishing in the pond in front of the house until recently.  My husband got two fishing rods for his birthday in March, and we discovered that we have a perfect fishing retreat right at home!  Lily caught a fish right away.  Most are bream, but I caught a little bass.

Now everyone wants to go fishing all the time!

Lily wanted to do some sewing while they were at my house, so we started a patchwork project.  I had a lovely floral block made for me by my friend Tama.  Lily loved it, so it will be featured on her tote back when it is finished.  She picked out all the coordinating fabrics and colors.

I had to take the big kids back to their daddy on Wednesday, but on Thursday we went to our cabin in the North Carolina mountains for Easter weekend.  Dave, Emily, and little Charlie came too.  It was a wonderful family weekend.

We have a family compound up there.  My sister and her brother-in-law also had all their grandchildren there!  We had a giant Easter egg hunt in Katy's back yard.

Here are Lacy and Holly checking out the treasures they found.

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Then there were sack races across the yard.  I think there were lots of good memories made that day.

 Okay, so I have not had much time for sewing or painting, but I am still trying to complete the 21-Day Art Journaling Challenge that I joined on Facebook.  Here are some pages I have made according to the daily prompts.

Paint Over a Photo

Kitchen Kapers

Hearts and Wings

Map It!

Home is Where the Heart Is

I have also been doing lots of printmaking while watching the weekly video lessons from Traci Bautista on the Strathmore website.  The lessons are free.  It is a messy process.  I will share some of my printmaking attempts next time.  I'm not sure it is my thing...but it's lots of fun!

Fall in Raleigh

Fall is looking colorful and beautiful here in central North Carolina.  Our leaves are at the peak and I am enjoying our very woodsy yard.

I have put out baskets of mums by our front door, and the camellias in the garden beds have decided to bloom.  I put a little quilt banner in the garden.

I took our dog for a beautiful walk around Durant Nature Park in north Raleigh.  We both enjoyed the lakeside trail and the colorful reflections in the water.  (I enjoyed the reflections, she enjoyed the water!)

I have been dabbling at the two portraits that I started in my watercolor class, but I think I should have left them alone.  Too much mucking about can ruin them.  I'm still not satisfied...  but here is a funny little portrait I did in one of my journals.  The lady started out as a cosmetics ad in a magazine.  She probably never dreamed of being quite this colorful!

I have been enjoying my baby granddaughter, who turned ten months old this week.  She has been practicing walking behind this toy I bought her.

She took her first steps when I was there on Tuesday!  Look out world, here comes Charlotte!  But she also LOVES to watch Sesame Street.  Up close and personal!

This weekend we are staying in town.  My husband and his partners are throwing their annual client pig-picking on Saturday.  His brother, who does Elvis impressions, will be arriving tonight with his wife, Phyllis.  We are going to take them to the Angus Barn along with our friends Pauline and Tom.

When they leave Sunday, Charlie is driving to the mountains to be there for a Monday morning meeting with the contractor, site manager, crane operator, and concrete trucks.  We are getting close to getting the foundation ready for the modular log cabin.  It is sitting in a parking lot in South Carolina, wrapped in Tyvek, waiting for our lot to be prepared.  Lots of government red tape to deal with.  One of these days we will have a house in the mountains!

On Monday, I am hosting my art quilt bee.  I have been trying so hard to get boxes unpacked and find places for everything  but almost every room has a corner piled with stuff that has not yet found a home.  Oh, well, we will work around it!

New Easel

I requested and received a new tabletop easel for Christmas.  It is a small, easy- to- handle wooden easel by Trio.

You can change the height and angle with a simple twist of a knob.

I will probably use this for painting, as well as for displaying unframed art in my studio.  Here is a reworked version of a hollyhocks painting that I have done about four times.  I redid the background on this one.

Here is what it used to look like.  Much better, yes?

I have been painting some background pages for journals, trying different combinations of gel medium, stamping, watercolor, collage, and acrylics.  Might be something worth following up on here.

gel medium mixed with black acrylic paint and applied with stamps and stencils; collaged papers

gel medium stamps with acrylic paint

gel medium drizzled on page with watercolor dripped on

It was so nice and warm outside yesterday that I sat out in the yard after walking Kasey.   She loves getting "Furminated" which removes excess  undercoats of fur.  Puts her right in a zen kind of mode.  "Do me again!"

Last night we went to DPAC in Durham to see Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as part of the Broadway South series.  It starred Constantine Maroulis and Deborah Cox.

What a powerful production!  Great voices and very dramatic scenes.  We don't watch American Idol much, and were not familiar with former finalist Maroulis.  We were very impressed!  Definitely recommend this show.

Art Journal Pages

I was able to put together a couple of journal pages in my Moleskine journal yesterday while I was propping my leg up (I have a sprained ankle and a blood clot).

You may remember that I used leftover paint on my palette last week to create some painted background pages.  I used one of them to preserve this fabulous photograph by my father's first cousin, Cort Clifford, of Maryland.

Cort is a serious amateur photographer.  He took this photo in a cemetery on Kent Island on Maryland's Eastern Shore.  He sent me the photo and a poem about a mockingbird, which I transcribed on the facing page.

     The morning the Mockingbird
     halfway up the pale dune, and only
     a pitchpine for a pulpit, offered
     with infrangible exactitude
     Phoebe, Robin, Blue Jay, flicker, towhee,
     goldfinch, ovenbird, titmouse, linnets,
     grackle, bobwhite, cardinal, Carolina wren,
     Chickadee, Nuthatch, English Sparrow, Crested
     Flycatcher...Then he flung his body into the air!
       
                                        -Author Unknown

This was a wonderful surprise to get in the mail.  I have known Cort since I was a little girl.  He was about the same age as my father and my Uncle Bob.  But unlike his cousins who married right after World War II and created their own Baby Boom with 16 children between them, he was the Playboy Bachelor type.  He always had a Porsche and a fast motorboat and a pretty girlfriend.  One of my fondest childhood memories is going with Cort in his boat to watch the fireworks in Annapolis near the Chesapeake Bay Bridge on the Fourth of July.  He later finally succumbed to the charms of a beautiful lady and got married.  She just happened to be the heiress to a Fortune 500 company.  They had one child.  I saw them about ten years ago at a beautiful horse farm that Lani was building near Asheville, North Carolina.  They are now divorced, and Cort lives in a condo on the water where he has a wonderful world of nature to photograph.

I also decided to journal my thoughts about my recent bad luck, healthwise.  The collaged papers are scraps from a watercolor test page and some Gee's Bend quilt pictures from Keepsake Catalog.  Note the very fat lower leg!

Tonight I am going to the Capital Quilters Guild meeting.  My friend Janice offered to drive me so I don't have to hoof it all across the parking lot, which is hilly and sometimes involves walking across a mulched area.  Sure don't want to fall again!

The Viewer's Choice voting for the Heritage Days auction quilt will be held during the meeting.  I am hoping that the Heritage Star quilt made by my Whacky Ladies bee will make a good showing.

Mimosas

The mimosa trees are in bloom here in North Carolina.  This is a rather invasive tree that easily deposits its seeds in unwanted spots in gardens and lawns.  The trees can get rather large, like this one that blocks my neighbor's house.

                            

The leaves and branches are fern-like, and here in our area of North Carolina, the blossoms are light pink.

The flowers are long and feathery, and blow off in the breeze.

While I have been laid up today with my sprained ankle, I got out some watercolor pencils and used the back of a page in my hand-made journal.  It had some color leaking through from the other side.  I did not add any water.

When I get back to my quilting machine, I might try to do some quilting motifs that mimic the fluffy blossoms.  They look kind of like the floating seeds in Avatar.

Here is another journal page that I entered in this month's The Sketchbook Challenge.  The theme is "Element."



The Element of Surprise, 2011, Jeanne McBrayer

There are a few surprises in the drawing if you pay close attention.  The text says, "We are not always what we seem."





Fall Weekend

The rains ended, the sun came out, the weather was brisk...a perfect fall weekend, especially when the grandchildren came to visit!

Lots of painting projects on up my kitchen island...

Decorating pumpkins...Lily's has 360 degrees of pumpkin faces!

Avery went to his first college football game with Bryson  (NCSU vs Virginia Tech in Raleigh).

Lily and I went for a nature walk on the greenway.

Lily made me some cupcakes out of Play-Doh and decorated them with real flowers and berries...

 And after they all went home on Sunday, I finished a few art journal pages.

This one has watercolor background that I painted in the mountains last weekend.  I added some thick acrylic paint circles which became the flower centers.  The text is one of the styles from the Hand Lettering book I recently purchased.  The only chisel markers I had were Sharpie King-Size, and they bled through to the page behind it.  Don't use them in Moleskine journals!  The photo is of the view from Chimney Rock, NC, where The Last of the Mohicans was filmed.  That is only about twenty minutes from my brother-in-law Richard's house.

I enjoyed making my last house and tree so much that I made another collaged version using paper from a Keepsake Quilting catalog.  I saw a similar collage demonstrated on You-Tube, I think by Milliande. I used paint mixed with gesso for the dimensional quality on the tree trunk and branches.  The leaves, flowers, bird, and text are from a set of foam stamps.

Here is something that creeped me out on Sunday.  I found this discarded snake skin on the flat stones surrounding my garden pond in the front of the house.  My son is six one, so this is about a six foot long snake skin.  Wonder where its former owner is lurking?  I was about ready to go into my overgrown flower gardens and just start yanking out the weeds and gone-by flowers.  Nope---might have to wait until the first frost!