Stringing you along

I didn't think to take a photo of the last quilt I made.  It was a gift for a friend and I was in a hurry to finish it before she had her baby... and that was more than a year ago.  So this is the only image I have:

I really like string quilts, and this pattern in particular.  It is visually complicated, but so easy to make.  I like that it involves very little measuring or precision -- and allows maximum freedom to play with color.

Now I'm working on a version in a completely different colorway. 

Don't look for a finished version anytime soon.  These days, life tends to get in the way of quilting.  The most I can do seems to be handwork while I'm on the train.  I've been working on these little pillows to turn into a journal cover, a la Teesha Moore.  It's nice to find a use for all the fabric I've dyed, printed, doodled, and batiked over the years!

Thank heaven there are a lot of train trips in my future!

I've been away from blogging for awhile... life does speed up sometime.  I've had a few creative setbacks that have kept me away, too.  If you've seen my blog in the past, you'll know that my camera is happiest when it is overseas -- and 2012 was certainly a banner year for travel!  I had a chance to go to Russia this summer, but returned home only to find that one of my larger memory cards was corrupted.  I lost tons of wonderful pictures.  Right after that trip, I found out that the USPS lost a quilt I was sending out to be quilted.  I had made it for my youngest daughter to take to college, so the loss was especially hard to take -- especially because this was probably the one and only time I did not put a tracking number and insurance on a quilt I sent out!  All that heartache has made it kind of hard to pick up my camera, or set a stitch in a quilt.

Lost by USPS in July, 2012.... Let me know if you ever see it!!

While I've been daunted, I haven't given up.  Creativity just switched gears: I've been putting a lot of energy in my genealogy projects and I have been spending more time lately at Loop of the Loom, enjoying the peace and tranquility of Saori weaving:

my Saori portfolio! 

sideways detail of the first scarf I made (back in April)

I love weaving!  I am fascinated by the textures, and the possibilities for playing with color.

I'm especially interested in the interlock technique, where you hook the weft to a second color thread to get broken strands of color across the width of a piece; I've used it in every piece I've made. 

I like variegated color and couldn't find exactly what I wanted at my local yarn store, so I dyed my own wool:

Scarf in progress -- using my own hand-dyed yarns

I do tend to carry ideas out to their logical conclusion.  If hand-dyed yarn is good, then shouldn't I spin my own hand-dyed yarn?  I have some roving on hand, dyed back in 2009, and I bought an inexpensive drop spindle the other day to give it a go.  Unfortunately, spinning doesn't seem to be a popular activity where I live, so I can't find a class -- but after checking out some youtube videos, I managed to produce some yarn.  A little kinky, a little wobbly, but definitely yarn!  I need another project like I need a hole in the head, but I have to follow my curiosity or I'm not a happy camper.

And in case you were wondering, I don't think I will ever lose my love of quilting.  I had been working on this one off and on for a few years, but decided to finish it after I made my daughter's quilt (but before it was lost).  This one made it back safely through the mail, so here it is, for the record.

I've even made something new (albeit much smaller): a table runner for my quilt guild's Christmas gift exchange:

As for photography..... yes, I've had lots of opportunities to take more shots after losing so many this summer.  But.....now I'm learning Lightroom, too.  It isn't huge learning curve, but I have lots of work to catalog everything, so it might be awhile before I start sharing again!

What goes around comes around....

A year ago, Julie Fei-Fan Balzer asked me to write a guest post for her blog on how I combine quilting and art journaling (you can read it here).  I wrote that moving from quilting to mixed media felt like the next logical step in my self-directed art education.  What I didn't realize then was that passions ebb and flow in cycles, and those cycles inform and move the subsequent ones.

I mentioned in my last blog post that I've been moving back to an obsession with fabric and quilting, with less emphasis on the mixed media and photography than I've had in recent months.  But this time around, I sense a difference:  now I'm fascinated with composition and color, not just color alone.  This quilt-in-progress gives you an idea of what I mean:

Free-form piecing inspired by the work of Nancy Crow

I don't think I could have made a quilt like this before.  I wasn't able to see beyond the block, or grid, orientation that most quilts have -- but since I've taken classes in collage and have begun to work in mixed media, this is beginning to change.

One thing that I think is unique to patchwork, as compared with art journaling -- the fact that you can easily change your style just by changing fabrics and construction techniques!  These 6" blocks are also current projects of mine.  While I am artistically inspired by free-form, intuitive piecing, I'm equally fascinated by precision work, especially if it involves applique or hand-piecing.   

By staying open to whatever inspires me in the moment, I avoid boxing myself in to any one identity.  I can be a free spirit!  And that includes art journaling, too.  Lately I have also been feeling like drawing faces, so why not?

And now for something completely different....

Lighthouse at Fort Point, San Francisco --
Processed with Kim Klassen's "Felicity" and a texture I created from a photo I took at the fort,
 using the tutorial Kim shared in our "Beyond Layers" class
(linking with Texture Tuesday)

I'm taking a break from showing images from my trip to Thailand ..... Instead, my husband and I decided to take a quick trip out to California last week to visit family.  The weather was wonderful, and we were outside as much as possible.  One day we explored the parks around the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.  

Although I've been to San Francisco many times (I even lived here for a few years when I was a child), I had never visited Fort Point before.  Fort Point was the main naval defense for the city of San Francisco until the civil war.  It is tucked away under the base of the bridge, and probably isn't high on tourists' must-see lists.  Despite my fear of heights, I had a marvelous time -- there were so many interesting angles to capture:

This was the walk back from the fort towards Crissy Field:

Crissy Field was originally an early aviation strip, and is now a well-used park along the beach.  It certainly is a magnet for dogs!  We met my husband's sister and her boys there with their Golden, Brooklyn.  As you can see from the first photo, he was so happy in the water (it would take an awful lot of treats to get our Golden, Jackson, to venture anywhere near it)!  I was surprised to see how many professional dog-walkers were out, too.  I am still a little nervous about taking pictures of strangers, so I only got a few shots of them, but they were legion that day:

And now, on a completely different subject......

My creativity seems to run in cycles, and lately all I want to do is work in fabric.  In the last few weeks I have completed three quilt tops.  I will send two of them out to be finished by machine, but I plan on quilting this one by hand.  Since it might be awhile (a long while) before I am finished, I'll show it now:

It's really big, so wish me luck!

The creative journey....part I

Lotus flower, Thailand
(processed with a layer of Kim Klassen's "Sweet Treat" and "Warm Grunge")

I always tell my children that it is not what happens to you in life that matters, but rather how you react to what happens to you that is important.  "Stuff" happens to people all the time and there is nothing magical about you that keeps the "bad" from happening sometimes.  The question is, will you allow it to cloud your life and your attitudes, or will you use the situation to change something in yourself.

My creative journey is so wrapped up in the circumstances of my life that it is hard to unravel the separate threads. I had a wonderful childhood and young adulthood.... I was happy, and things came easily to me:  academics, friendships, career, marriage and three wonderful children.  I expected that life would just continue along this positive trajectory.  And really, in a way, it has.... just not the way I thought it would.  For the most part, my life is picture perfect except for one rather significant thing: my oldest child, now a 22 year-old young man, has to deal with issues that significantly impact his ability to live an independent life.  The curve ball our family has been dealt in this life is not something that we recognized immediately or that came on suddenly -- rather, its severity has been revealed so gradually that, painful as it is, it has never come as a shock, but has settled down on us like a dull ache.  

One of my favorite journal pages...

The details of his story are my son's to share or not, but let's just say that the consequences of his illness have been the impetus for my own creative journey.  I have been "artsy" all my life, but the thought never even crossed my mind that I could be an artist.... after all, I didn't go to art school!  I knew that to ignore my son's illness -- or to wallow in despair about it -- were both useless exercises.  I had to turn to something to keep me busy and focused. I discovered quiltmaking when I was 40, and immediately fell in love with the way I could play with color without getting messy.  Not only that, but I could sew while still paying attention to my kids. 

This is the first quilt I made (for my son), back in 2000.  It was hand-pieced... I remember every stitch!

I soon realized that the quiet time spent making quilts was my spiritual solace, a time when I could reflect on my life and its lessons and to find beauty in fragments.  My needle and thread became the crucible in which despair became beauty, tempered by patience.  Quilting was a perfect expression of my need for endurance.  You can't achieve a finished quilt without putting in a lot of time!  As I moved on in the last few years to include mixed media art and photography, the sense of time as a vital element in my work became more and more evident.  I love using textures in photographs precisely because they introduce a fourth dimension -- time -- to an image, suggesting that it has withstood the ravages of time to exist today.  I am in this game with my son for the long haul, and that sense of time as a distiller of something exquisite is very important to me.

I am looking forward to 2012, and participating in the creative communities online.  By nurturing our creativity every day, we will envision a world that is better than the one we live in today -- and everyone knows that once we visualize something, it is on its way.

Houston!

I had the most amazing time at the International Quilt Festival in Houston last week.  It was my first time there, and I was in fiber heaven.  My mother, who is also a quilter, came along too, and we had a wonderful girls week out.  We even made time to visit my son, who lives in Houston, and as a result we were spared those drab hotel meals I heard so many attendees complain about.  Every night we went to a restaurant that was featured on one TV show or another.  I had no idea that Houston was a culinary destination, so all the good food was a surprise bonus!

This was just a tiny section of the huge convention center.  I told myself I didn't need to buy anything because I have enough quilting and mixed media supplies to last the rest of my life.  HA!  I'll give you three guesses on how long that resolve lasted.....

I took a wonderful class with Leslie Tucker Jenison and Jamie Fingal on Friday.  We were about ten students in all, and we spent the morning playing musical chairs, collaboratively painting two canvases. Here are the final products before we cut them up in the afternoon (I am the second on the left):

We were fascinated by our hands:

Here are some detail shots of the canvases.  I love the random exuberance!

In the afternoon, we divided the canvases and made mini quilts.  Mine is the one with all the triangles on the second row, right side.

On Saturday, my mom won a spot in Make It University's Sketchbook Challenge class (I enjoyed the chance to sit down for an hour)!  Here she is having fun and learning about monoprinting on gel plates:

I'll close with a picture of my mother's latest quilt.  This is a Ginny Beyer pattern that she tweaked to suit her own taste.  She has been a sewer all her life, but only recently decided to make quilts.  I have to say, I am in awe of her skills!

My erosion bundle ...revealed

On August 5, 2010, I bundled together fabrics, photos, tea leaves and various papers, and placed it on my fence to weather for a year.

I wrote about the Erosion Bundle project a few months ago (here); I meant to open my bundle exactly one year later, but life (and Irene) intervened.  So, better late than never, here is what I found:

The bundle itself was in pretty good shape.

The fabrics definitely faded where they were in the light, but showed little wear in the areas that were encased in the bundle.

I decided to make a table runner with my weathered fabric.  I wanted to make something that looked like it had been used for years.  My husband, very tactfully, asked me if I had experienced some problems making it.

...He doesn't get "wonky:"

I didn't photograph the back, but I used the pojagi method of piecing, which encloses the seams so front and back are interchangeable. Victoria, over at The Silly BooDilly, has a very clearly-written tutorial (and if you search for "pojagi" on her blog, you will find some gorgeous examples.  Pojagi is a Korean form of patchwork that can be interpreted in so many ways -- see videos of Korean artist Chunghie Lee
here, or here).

My erosion bundle also revealed some gorgeous papers.  The photos I included discharged their ink in interesting ways.  I can't wait to use them as backgrounds in collage:

Some of the papers look like they are covered in black mold.  I had painted them with black tempera paint -- it's not mold, so no health worries here!!  Actually, I wish I had used a more permanent acrylic paint, since the tempera brushed off the surface after everything dried out, leaving a more subtle charcoal effect than the black streaks you see here.

I put some tea leaves in the bundle, too.  They really didn't have much of an effect at all -- in fact, you really can't see them:

I think this was a pretty successful effort overall.  I am going to do this again, but this time I will include rusty items among the fabrics.  I will add some threads and laces, too, and lots more photographs.  I really like the way the inks ran.... I wonder how they would run on fabric? Hmmm... lots to think about here.  Any suggestions?