Flowers in Color and in Black and White

When I created the black and white still life for Lesson One of Think Like an Artist Workshop, I was thinking to myself, do I really want to create black flowers? Normally when they turn black, it is not a good sign, LOL. Then, in the mail the other day, there was a flyer for this quilting book:

Maybe I was on to something! While on the subject of flowers, here are some more spring pictures for those of you longing for the snow to melt and temperatures to thaw.

This handsome fellow (a mockingbird) was perched atop the loropetalum bush in full bloom in my front yard. Thanks to my friend, Jean, for identifying this shrub for me when she visited on Wednesday. It is in full bloom now, and has really brightened up the gray days of this rainy week.And here is a last shot of the cherry blossoms before they all drift to the ground, with the loropetalum in the distance.

My earliest daffodils have faded now, but with many varieties, they continue to provide sunny spots of color throughout the yard. These are below one of my garden feeders- OOPS, it looks empty. A chore for this morning!

I like this double flowering variety next to my front steps.

These are candytuft (Iberis) and grape hyacinth against a backdrop of dwarf crimson barberry.

On our morning walk yesterday, I noticed that the Carolina Jessamine is blooming wildly in a vacant wooded lot. And the first of the dogwoods is now blooming. My favorite time of year here in the South is when the dogwoods and azaleas are in bloom.

Unfortunately, as soon as the dogwood trees blossom, so do the pine trees. The dreaded yellow dust of pine pollen is already starting to cover automobiles, lawn furniture, sidewalks and streets. My formerly slate blue porch chairs turn a sickly chartreuse, and so does the seat of your pants when you sit in one. With the current ban on washing cars and hosing off landscaping due to the drought, I guess we will all be seeing sickly green for awhile. At least the rain will help not only the drought, but also the pollen removal. Here are the beginnings of pine pollen forming a sickening scum on the surface of our little garden pond.

Well, after all this nature talk, I am inspired to get back to quilting The Green Man, which I started yesterday. Hope to finish the quilting today and start the embellishing!

Quilting for Fun

I intended to work on the triptych project for my Think Like an Artist workshop today. However, my quilting muse was calling me to quilt one of these art projects. (I had just been using my Gammill for Jean's quilts for a couple of afternoons, and I was just dying to do one of my own projects.) Look at this long table, big machine, and itty bitty quilt!

In this workshop, everything is meant to be freehand and fun. That includes the free-motion quilting. Well, I am not new to machine quilting, but I have all kinds of new ideas from Pamela Allen to quilt in a few surprises. She says this is to keep herself amused and interested in the project. I think it adds some fun for the viewer, as well. For example, on Pamela's quilt featuring a bride, she quilted in a fish and some eyeballs. (By the way, this quilt is made for a novel featuring an art quilter who admires Pamela's work!) See Pamela's website for more details. I just requested this book from our library.

Well, with the fabrics and threads I chose for the front, most of the quilting motifs do not show. But check out the back!

What a happy surprise! When you are quilting on a long-arm frame, you really can't see the back until you take it off the machine. I decided in the spirit of fun to use a variety of bobbin threads, using up quite a few of those old bobbins with just a little thread left on them. I think the black designs look like line drawings.

The cursive writing at the bottom says, "freedom". I also included the word FUN on the side.

The back fabric is a Ricky Tims hand-dye, just drenched with bold hues for a relief from the stark black and white of the front.

The quilting does not have to be limited to filling in a certain shape, but can flow out from it. Thus I have a bird whose body sort of conforms to the roundness of the vase, but whose head and tail feathers stick out. Notice the cat and other folksy figures, including a fish just for Pamela.

WIP- Still Stitching

Here is my workshop project again, mostly embroidered. I still have to stitch down two flowers and a little of the background. Pamela is right that the embroidery floss adds additional line and dimension to the quilt. On my piece, that is most noticeable on the white area of the leaves, and around the flowers. The centers of my flowers just have a long running stitch. I am thinking there will be some beads or buttons or both when this thing is done. And knowing me, it will still have a go on Grendel the Gammill to add some fun machine quilting!

Cut Flowers Continuing

Despite my trepidation about the online Think Like an Artist online workshop with Pamela Allen, apparently I passed Lesson One! Pamela says she PhotoShopped my piece and couldn't recommend any changes. Now I am stitching down the raw edges with three strands of embroidery floss. It looked like she used a blanket stitch in the photos. I did some of that, then actually scrolled farther down the page and saw that it was a ladder stitch. Much easier and quicker. I would say that I am about halfway finished or more.

I spent some time perusing Pamela Allen's work yesterday. I love her sense of humor and the whimsical folkiness of her quilts.

Long school day today: faculty meeting before school and a training meeting in another town after school until 6:00 PM. Oh, for my lolly-gagging days! I really wasted a lot of time before I went back to work. (And thoroughly enjoyed not even wearing a watch!)

WIP-Think Like an Artist, Lesson 1

Finally, a new project to blog about! Between returning to full-time teaching and having my sewing room in a remodeling wreck, I have not done any quilting for a couple of weeks. But, I had signed up for the online class through Quilters' Threads. It is Think Like an Artist with Pamela Allen. The first lesson is about shape, placement, space, and contrasts. I have a lot to learn about these concepts and am looking forward to the experience. It is a little intimidating to put yourself out there to be criticized on the Internet by the instructor and classmates. I just uploaded my photo, so I am eagerly awaiting the feedback. We could only use black and white fabrics, with freehand cutting with scissors. No drawing, no patterns, no rotary cutting. Those scissors are a little funky-looking! All the fabric pieces are just glue-sticked down to a batting. Once we get the OK on the placement of objects, we are to do a blanket-stitch around the edges with three strands of embroidery floss.

In non-quilting news, we had a blessing of heavy rain this week. About two inches or three inches total. When I came home Friday afternoon, my neighbor up the street was out by his pond in rubber boots watching his dam get breached by the water. This is unreal- that pond has been a scummy icky stagnant puddle with no water for about the last year. With all the heavy rain, his pond washed over his earthen dam, across the neighbor's driveway and into their pond, which also overflowed. The creek behind my house is usually about a foot across, but it also flooded and created some new creekbeds and standing water. Well, it hasn't hurt anything in my yard, and we are grateful for the rain. Just when everything has started blooming, it turned very cold and windy today. I hope all the blossoms don't blow off the trees just when they are getting pretty.

My neighbor's driveway that was flooded by breach of dam. Their lower pond is on the right.

Another neighbor's house with forsythia and Bradford pears in bloom.

And this is the new development at the end of my street. Anyone want to buy Lot 4? Looks like it might be a little soggy! Actually, the developer made a series of sediment ponds to protect the creek from mud being washed in. Good thing, huh? They filled up for the first time this week.