Fun With Doodles on a Rainy Day

This is what it looked like on our greenway walk today.  Gray, beige, and wet.

Kasey and I were the only idiots out there.  Hope SHE enjoyed it! 

I decided it was a good day to work on fun, colorful journal pages.  First, I got out my hardcover watercolor journal and turned to a page that I had previously painted with some orange/pink watercolors.  This month's theme for The Sketchbook Challenge is DOODLES.  So, I used two widths of Sharpies to add some doodle designs.

Doodling is also the theme of the first of this year's Strathmore Online Workshops.  If you have any interest in mixed media or art journaling, you should sign up for this free series of online classes with well-known artists.  The first series of videos is by Traci Bautista.  In the first lesson, you make marks with a variety of paints, markers, and stencils.  Then you use India ink and white-out marker to add more marks.

Here is my first lesson.  I hear the Seventies are calling, and they want their Flower Power back!

Since I had an extra sheet of watercolor paper handy, I made another one to use up the extra paint.

It is my understanding that these are to be cropped and cut up in future lessons for use as journal covers or other mixed media creations.

I also started Lesson 2 with Traci, which involves painting big shapes with watercolor paint, then adding stamps.  When this is all dry, I will write all over it with transparent ink colors- probably my Tsukineko inks.

I highly recommend color therapy for a dismal winter afternoon!

Thinking Like an Artist

Today I hosted the monthly meeting of the Anything Art quilt bee.  I decided that I would share some of the knowledge I have gained from taking so many of Pamela Allen's online art quilt classes.  This task was simplified immensely by showing parts of Pamela's DVD, Think Like an Artist. 

She goes through her improvisational process of composition, shows how she embroiders and prepares for machine quilting.  Then there is an extensive section on how she chooses and attaches her embellishments.  Great fun, and we may have an embellishment swap at our next monthly meeting!


I had instructed everyone to bring a small piece of batting and a piece of dark, medium, and light valued fabric for the background.  After watching the first part of the video, we got to work creating backgrounds and then adding shapes.  The ladies did a good job of getting started on a piece of fabric art.


Peg wanted to try a composition similar to this Monet scene on a Christmas card at the left of the photo.  She may make it more snowy when she gets home to her stash and has more white fabric.

Roberta created a still life utilizing some striped fabric.  I showed her how to add some dimension to the vase a la Pamela by altering the direction of the stripe.

Ruth-Ellen put together this very charming house and yard with perky fabric prints.

Toni was working on a landscape that was showing a lot of promise.



While the gals were working at their compositions on my kitchen table,

I got lunch ready.  I served light, medium, and dark fabric scraps on one side of the counter, and baked ziti and salad on the other side!  Nothing like a fabric/salad bar!

Peg brought a book with beautiful Caribbean photographs.  I took one look at this lady's portrait and just had to take a picture of that page.  (Sorry about the flash reflection on her face.)

The reason is because I had already started a portrait quilt of a bodacious lady and could not decide how to finish her.  Several of the participants in Pamela Allen's workshops challenged ourselves to make a woman's face that was full of personality.  The portrait in the book reminded me of my lady.  Now I think I have an idea!  Doesn't my WIP portrait remind you of the one in the book?

 

Look out lady, you are probably getting a turban and some dreads!

Last year when I hosted, we worked on a watercolor painting lesson, using many of the techniques that I learned in a Karlyn Holman watercolor class at Art of the Carolinas.  Ruth-Ellen never finished hers, so she brought it along  We were working on a simplified drawing of hollyhocks.  Here is the one that I did at AOC.

I have actually painted the hollyhocks four times now.  To help Ruth-Ellen with the leaves and flowers, I quickly drew some similar shapes and painted them on a plain sheet of watercolor paper with no background.  How very different the flowers look without the juicy background!

Maybe I will add some background color or negative painting.

It was a very fun day with friends!

Whacky Ladies Sew-In Day

Today was a day of fun and fellowship for the Whacky Ladies, my local quilt bee.  For three years in a row, our January meeting has been a sew-in day to make charity quilts to donate to Capital Quilters Guild.  The guild donates to neonatal intensive care units, rest home residents, children whose families are in a program for  prevention of child abuse, and other worthy causes.

Instead of meeting at Quilts Like Crazy, our LQS, we met at Donna Sontag's new storefront business, Whatever's Quilted.  Donna was formerly housed at Quilts Like Crazy, but has moved just down the street at 1318-156 S. Main St. in Wake Forest, NC.  Donna offers both hand-guided and computerized longarm quilting service, and also is a dealer for Handi-Quilter machines.  She will even train you to use the machines and then rent them to you to quilt your own projects.



 Donna showed us the raffle quilt for the Carolina Longarm Association's next show.  She did a fabulous job using both computerized and hand-guided quilting.

Many members contributed green fabrics and helped piece the quilt top, which has Tree of Life blocks with an applique vine in the outer border.

Donna cleverly extended the outline of the vine into the plain parts of the border.

The alternate blocks have a beautiful feathered design.

She will turn it in at the CLA meeting in Greensboro on Saturday for someone else to bind.

Another show-and-tell was this amazing American Flag quilt top that Kathy Miller and a group of women are working on for the Veteran's Administration Hospital.  It will be used when there is a death of a patient, to respectfully honor and cover the body when it is being moved.  Much nicer than draping a white sheet, yes?  It will be quilted and donated.

Mary made a quilt at home and donated it to the guild.  I think it will be perfect for a Safechild quilt with its happy colors and frog motif.

On to today's projects!  I went through a stack of my UFO's and handed them out.  Marilyn finished a top made from a pattern in Quilts From Aunt Amy.  It is made from muted Civil War reproduction fabrics.  It has free-hand circles cut into quarters, then sewn together with raw edge remaining.  Once it is quilted and washed, the edges will fray, making a ruffled look.  I think this will be great for a rest-home resident as it will have a tactile quality.

Kathy took some of my 5-inch cut squares and made this joyous quilt top for a child.

Two years ago, I made a Yellow Brick Road quilt for Quilts on Wheels, and had lots of leftover blocks and partial blocks.  Mary put those together along with some other fabrics that I cut up for her as needed. 

Lori also dove into her UFO (Un-Finished Object) pile and came up with enough blocks for two quilts.  She made one and Carolyn made the other.  They both have nine-patch and alternate blocks in a scrappy design.

Sharon came late and started putting together a top from some orphan blocks of mine.  Donna got out her quilt tops from our meeting two years ago, and got them started on her computerized machine during our get-together.

It is so much fun to work on these projects together.  In just a few hours we made a lot of quilt tops which will later warm their recipients, body and soul.

Wednesday Work-in-Progress

I don't think I have done a Wednesday Work-in-Progress post in a long time.  Here is the Mary Cassatt color study that I did in Pamela Allen's latest online class.  It is based on Portrait of Mlle. C. Lydia Cassatt, the artist's sister.

This piece was cut freehand from fabrics pulled from my stash to try to capture the colors in the palette of the original painting.  I have finished hand-stitching all the pieces to a piece of batting, and next will be machine-quilting.

This piece was just supposed to be a study, but I liked it so well that I am going to finish it.  The original is an impressionist painting, with a rather lonely-looking woman sitting in a voluminous coat on a park bench.  She blends into the background, and there is so much light reflected in the painting although the palette is dark.  To try to achieve the same effect, I have used some hand-dyed fabric, wrong side of printed fabric, variegated threads, and it may end up getting some paint applied as well once it is quilted.

I think my lady looks a little happier than Lydia does in her portrait.

Let There Be Light

Today's project:  replace cheap ugly dining room chandelier.  The main thing I hated is that those metal rings at the base of the lamps will never stay seated around the base.

When we bought the house, we got to select most of the fixtures and flooring, but the builder had a budget allowance.  We went way over on some things, like a leaded glass door and a larger deck and a finished attic.  But you have to stop at some point before you upgrade yourself right out of your price range.

So, seventeen years later, here is the new dining room light fixture, installed by my own personal electrician (Charlie.)

I also cleaned the oven and re-arranged my kitchen drawers.  Yikes!  Who is this stranger who has inhabited my body?

I did finish stitching the handwork on one of my Pamela Allen workshop projects from the last class.  I need to machine-applique the face, and then I'll show it to you prior to machine-quilting.  It's the color study of the Mary Cassatt portrait.  Here it is before stitching.



Some New Artsy/Quilty Things

Here are a few more things that might interest you from my lovely Christmas gifts.  (Amazon Wish List is a wonderful thing!  You can add things from any website as you are browsing the web.)


First is the little piece of artwork that Tom Jones enclosed in the package with his book on Watercolor Landscapes.  Pretty!

In case I run out of watercolor projects, here is a DVD by Frank Francese that looks like a great way to learn more about the subject.  I saw his name listed as an instructor for the summer workshops at Cheap Joe's in Boone.

And another DVD by local quilt artist Lyric Kinard.  This one is called Bead It Like You Mean It.  It looks really interesting.

We are having extremely mild weather this weekend to celebrate the end of the year.  It is sixty and sunny today.  Yesterday I took the dog for a walk on a new section of the greenway that begins at the Smith Creek Soccer Center on Heritage Lake Road.  Previously this trail followed the creek left to Rogers Road.  Now it continues to roughly parallel the creek to the right, all the way to the Highway 98 Bypass.  It is not quite finished yet.  We saw them installing this metal bridge at the beginning of the new section quite a while ago.

It is somewhat muddy on the unpaved section behind these houses in Heritage.

Then it becomes partly paved, partly boardwalk, as it continues along more woodsy areas.  In fact, there are two or three more of these bridges to cross the creek as it meanders along.

It ends at a concrete tunnel that goes under Hwy 98, and is supposed to eventually connect to a trail around the Wake Forest Reservoir on 98.

Kasey was all for exploring the tunnel, but it looked really muddy and dark.  No thank you!

It is nice to have a new trail to explore.  Kasey is mostly a small golden retriever, but she does not retrieve at all.  She loves to stick her nose in grass and dirt and make snorting sounds like a pig.  Can she be part terrier?

There are some pretty views of the creek, some nice natural areas,

and a pine woods so thick that it reminds me of the mountains.

I took down all our Christmas decorations today, and spent a long time sealing up the boxes.  We are probably going to put our Wake Forest house on the market some time in 2012, and so I packed like we were moving.  The prospect is rather daunting because we have been in this house for seventeen years and have accumulated tons of stuff.  I am sure you will hear more about this effort next year.

Happy New Year, and I hope it is a good one for you and yours.

One More Hand-Made Gift

Here is the last of the projects that you glimpsed in my "teaser" post about what I was making.  It's the one I started in October 2010 and misplaced until I was making Christmas bookmarks with my embellishing machine this year.






Peak Creek in Autumn, 2011

This piece began with a piece of batting, over which I arranged fabric, fibers, silk and wool roving until I built up the colors and depth and luminosity that I wanted.  Then I added additional batting and backing and quilted it on my longarm.  That may have been overkill, since this piece is only about 10" x 11".    But I find I can "draw" much better with the hand-guided machine.



 Of course, this piece was inspired by our favorite place, our mountain retreat.  It represents the view from our bridge over Peak Creek, looking downstream.  Each afternoon, the sun quickly disappears over the mountain, but the last rays will light up the water and one side of the creek bank.  The next photo is the view upstream from the bridge, looking toward the dam.

For that reason, I chose this piece as my study for Chiaroscuro, or Dark and Light, for the Fast Friday Fabric Challenge 49.  One of the group members issues a challenge each month, and you are supposed to create a piece in one week or less.  I guess fourteen months to completion is not fast, but I really spent less than a week on it!