Long time, no blog

For some reason, I just don't have much work to show right now.   The piece below was accepted into the Dinner At Eight exhibit titled "Exquisite Moments".  It's called "Fiji" and is a reminder of our trip there last year.  For more information on the exhibit, check out the website at http://dinnerateightartists.blogspot.com

Last week we went to the Santa Barbara Mission, which I've been to before, but I've never really walked the grounds.

It's so classic california mission style, which I think is my favorite architectural style.

I think if I could design a house from ground up, this is what I would go for.

The colors are soft,

and everything has an aged look about it.

The grounds are well kept, but surprisingly to me, the graves are not.

Some of California's early settler families are buried here, but the

crypts and headstones seem to be crumbling. I happen to like that back to earth feeling.

Marlee brought life to the old ruins

Next week I'm going to Quilt National and will be part of a panel discussion along with Pamela Allen, Susan Shie and Kate Themel.  I'm a little nervous, I've never been much of a public speaker, but what an honor to sit on a panel with these three.

Pregnancy

I seem to be surrounded by pregnant images right now.  Our oldest daughter Julie is pregnant, and sending me frequent ultrasound pictures, and I just completed a series of in utero pieces from my other two daughters pregnancies.  This piece below is from an image Paula found on the internet that I blogged about here.

I wanted to see if I could keep the  lines really simple, yet still tell the story.

I think I'm done with these images for a while,  I'm going to return to body parts, but keep the simple lines.

We just spent the weekend with the grandgirls for Passover.  Marlee hasn't figured out how to close her mouth when she gives kisses, and Riley doesn't know what to do about that.

And this picture is just to leave you with a smile

Have a peaceful weekend.

SAQA Auction

This is the second piece I made for the SAQA auction this year.  The first one was about an inch to short, and I couldn't stretch it enough to get that inch back.

It's similar to last years piece, I used wool felt to shrink it, but this time after bleaching, I overdyed it a very pale blue, which took away the cream color I usually get when with bleach. I added a few buttons just because I thought it needed them.

New Work

For some reason, I ended up working on 5 separate projects at once, all in various stages. I usually like to work on a few different pieces at the same time, but 5 just stressed me out.  I'm also a little annoyed that I've finished, or just about finished all of them, so now I need to start up with something new to keep my brain shifting around.  I'm going to spread out the postings on these because I don't post often enough, and this way I'll be good for the next few weeks at least.

These three pieces are based on my daughter's ultrasounds while pregnant with Marlee.  I have done a bit of a shift in my work in the "A View Within" series, I'm using wool felt for the batting as I have done with my other work, and I'm trying to simplify,  just trying to capture a few lines, or sometimes

sketching out what I am thinking about when I look at the images.  My daughter is a L and D nurse,

and gave herself frequent ultrasounds when she was first pregnant.  She proudly sent me the pictures, with an arrow pointing to the penis, proclaiming it a boy.  A few weeks later, at the official utz., she found out it was a girl.  I never miss an opportunity to tease her about this.

I've been working steadily on a few large pieces that I'm not willing to show you yet, in fact I wasn't even ready to show my crit group.  Sometimes I find myself working on something that is not cropped, in the middle of stitching and kind of ugly, and I know it will be ok, but it's still kind of ugly right now, so it remains unseen.

I did feel like I needed a break from the large work though, and started thinking about my SAQA auction piece for this year.  I miss the monthly challenges of the 12's, the chance to experiment a little, so I gave my self permission to mess around with some of my small precious pieces of black that discharges to white.

I started with a narrow piece that couldn't really be used for anything else, and looked at black on white, then white on black.  I used soy wax resist on the left using a Kitska, which is used in making Ukrainian easter eggs and makes a very thin line. On the right,  I tried making thin lines with pure bleach using the same method.

For my SAQA auction submission, I stitched a piece of fabric with wool felt underneath to shrink it up for texture, then tried using soy wax to make marks.  This method does not make crisp marks, because the soy wax stays on top of the textured piece when making these thin marks, so I get a lot of greyed areas, but I also get the wonderful black lines marching across it. This will have a little hand stitching added in.

On this piece I made the bleach marks first, then stitched it to the wool felt and shrunk it.  A totally different look.  This piece is only about 10 inches wide, too narrow for the auction,  but I will use it for something else.

Both of these pieces seem slightly tilted to me, which is typical, I think I look at life a little tilted.

Change in habit

There's a lot of sketching going on with the blogs I read, and I'm sort of, timidly, jumping on that band wagon. What I'm interest in right now is trying to say what I want with a minimum amount of lines.  That can be tricky, because you can go too far.

Obviously, I didn't sketch the picture above,  it's an MRI image that I like.

I traced most of the lines on it and it's too busy and realistic for me, but I like being able to study the lines and try to figure out what I can remove.

This effort is better, but I don't like including the whole baby shape, I just want a hint of what this is.

Now this is very spare, and I may have overdone it.  There's a lot of empty space to fill in, unless I lose the line on the right and center it more.  Another thought is to use fabric with subtle shapes on it to bring back some of what I cut out.

My original intention with this was to sketch my own images then remove some of the lines, and I may still do that.  It's one of those habits that needs to be formed, someone told me that takes 21 days.  I think I can do that.

Resolutions

I am not one for New Years Resolutions, but I've been reading a lot of blogs where people are picking focus words, or introducing new practices to their daily life.  I started paying attention to what my studio rhythm is and noticed I"m a lot happier when I have more than one project going on at a time.

I like stitching something mindlessly, such as the piece above, which was already pinned in place and just needed to be straight stitched,

I like to stitch with intention, making decisions as I go along,

all the while glancing at my design wall, making small changes then thinking about them while I'm working on the other projects.
Occasionally I'm only working on one project and that is torture for me, because my mind wants the distraction of something else.  I tend to make bad decisions when that happens.