Point, Click, Quilt! is the title of Susan Brubaker Knapp’s wonderful book which is subtitled “Turn your Photos in to Fabulous Fabric Art.”  And this is a SERIOUSLY overdue review!  I received my copy of the book from Susan in July, just before heading out to teach in Nebraska.  I liked the book so much that I wanted to review it before I went, but felt I really needed to read the entire book closely first….then I got back and life happened!   So now that I have almost (but not quite) dug out from under the accumulated “life happening” stuff, I would like to recommend this book to you.  And offer the disclaimer that Susan is an internet friend and she asked me to have a piece in her book.  However, I’d say all these good things anyway!  Check below for information on winning a copy of this book!

Susan Brubaker Knapp's Point, Click, Quilt!

There are a lot of books out there these days about using your photography as the starting point for your art quilts.  Many of them, alas, make me think of “paint by numbers”–artworks that are slaving imitations of a photo without much thought–fortunately this book is all about thinking.  Susan’s book  begins by teaching you to THINK and to SEE–to improve your own photos so that the process of modifying them into textile art starts with a really good image from the get-go.  The Creativity and Learning to See section talks about one of my favorite things:   actually SEEING what is there, not what you think is there–about learning to really look at the elements of the composition (your photo’s composition) to make it a strong visual image. She covers the basics elements of design, including showing you how to crop a so-so photo into a much better composition, and how you can modify an existing photo to make a better composition in your quilt.

Learning to SEE!

Susan then goes on to “On a Mission:  Photography exercises to build your skills” which has five separate exercises, lavishly illustrated with Susan’s photos.  These exercises show how you can take what I call “reference” photos to put  into practice (and into your imagery) what you learned in the Creativity section.  These two sections are, for me, worth the entire price of the book and more!  They are JUST what you want from a book like this!

Table of Contents. Sorry the photo is a tad blurry...click to see larger.

The “Getting Started” chapter then shows you how to take your photo and turn it into a quilt pattern. Finally, there are sixteen projects, each using a different special technique.  These projects are good learning exercises for those new (and not so new) to art quilts.  Once you have begun to practice SEEING, and interpreting first Susan’s and then your own images in cloth, you’ll be ready to move on to creating your original art.

At the end is a gallery of quilts made from photos to give you an idea how contemporary quilt artists are using photographs to create art.  My quilt of Blue Buoys, made for a Coastal Quilters (local chapter of the Pine Tree Quilt Guild)  Challenge a while back, uses a very tight crop of some buoys in a photo by D. Pitcairn (used with permission) and faces a quilt of an adorable dog made by Pam George.

Blue Buoys (mine) on the left, Peanut by Pam George on the right. Click to view larger.

I’m happy to be able to recommend this book, and so thankful that Susan asked me to be a part of it!  You can order directly from Susan at her website.

LATE NEWS BULLETIN:  I wrote Susan to let her know this post would be going live today, and she said “OH!  I’d love to donate a copy of the book in a giveaway!”  So thank you Susan!  To be eligible to win a copy, please leave a comment below.  I’ll use a random number generator (may be my son!) to  select the winner.  I’d love it if you’d tell me which of Susan’s works you most like…she has a mind-boggling array of beautiful work here (her Gallery page) as well as in her series of six articles on thread sketching for Quilting Arts magazine.  PS:  Susan is heading to Quilt Market and Festival, so I’ll do the drawing on November 9th (after I’m back from teaching in NH, too).

I found it…the last photo of the page with the pitcher and eggs.  Someone in the online class commented that it looked like breakfast. Well, it did!  So I turned it into a journal page about a family favorite:  Waffles!  I’m fairly happy with the way it turned out:

The finished journal page, complete with recipe. Click for larger view.

Back soon with more fun stuff!

As you might gather by the gap in my postings, it has been another busy week with both art and soccer (keep reading for the art part)!  Eli is in the final week or two of both league soccer and school cross country, with the championships for the latter last week, and….DRUM ROLL and MAJOR HOLLERING please…. ELI WON!   Yes, Eli won the Busline Cross Country Championship (Class B) on Tuesday!  Close on his heels (literally) was his best friend Ben, who came in second.  Both Boys and Girls teams won with undefeated season for the second year in a row (ya think Coach Morse is doing a fantastic job or what?!!!).    That was followed on Friday by Eli winning the Winthrop Invitational Cross Country meet, a course with lots of hills–best of all, they were competing against seven or more teams they had never raced, including the Class A Champion Cony Middle School Team AND he did it setting a new course record!  And to everyone (at least from our area) utter delight, both boys and girls won the team championships too!

And they're off! Eli is the arrow on the right, his best friend Ben W. on the left, and a passle of other middle school boys. This photo shows maybe one-third of the runners!

Eli crests the last small hill before heading into the chute and the finish line at the midcoast Maine Busline League Cross Country Championships

Eli WINS, with Ben close behind.... wow!

In August, I came across a bit Jane LaFazio posted on FaceBook about a sketchbook “On Location” class she is teaching online via Joggles.  Very uncharacteristically for me, I signed up on the spur of the moment, and I promise I’ll get caught up on blogposts and share with you the great stuff I did.  THEN she had a new class on Mixed Media Journals starting in October.  I really want to get in to the habit of using journals for my art, so I signed up right away.  Here is part of the first lesson:

The lesson was using water-soluble pen; first you sketch (well, I sure do!) in pencil, then ink, allow the ink to dry, erase the pencil and then "wash" the ink to shade. Here's the outlining.

The pitcher with *complicated* kitchen utensils (that spaghetti scoop was hard!) and my sketchbook. A while back I'd heard that drawing eggs is good practice in seeing shadows, so what is why the eggs on the spoon rest.

The two sketches. I've finished the page but haven't taken a picture (get with it Sarah!), so will do that later. Anyway, I'm reasonably pleased.

Now we’re off to the soccer league playoffs for all of Sunday, then more cross country and soccer next weekend and the following one….

Hi all!  For nearly 8 years now (whoosh…the sound of time whizzing by!) I have been privileged to work with Janome-America and use one of their fantabulous machines for my work, starting with the 6500, moving to the 6600, and now the delectable 7700.  Starting yesterday, they are featuring three blog lessons from me on machine quilting on the Janome-America website!

Go here to the Janome-America home page and follow the links (scroll down if you need to reach the October 14th post) to your free FMQ lesson number one.  Here’s a link directly to the lesson.  And here’s a link to the Horizon 7700, the machine I currently use and love!

I’m so happy to be able to share this information with you and through Janome.  They have been wonderful supporters, including me in the program before my first article or quilt was published.  I have done so much in the past 8 years that they have sponsored me, that it is hard to fathom–from complete unknown to exhibiting for the first time at Houston to being published in a magazine, then a series of articles for Machine Quilting Unlimited, to articles in Quilting Arts, to teaching in national venues like IQA Houston, AQS Paducah and Knoxville, NQA in Ohio, and guilds across the nation, writing my first (but I hope not last) book, and even winning an award in Houston.  It is sometimes hard to believe this has all happened to me.  And I am so thankful to Janome for their support and their machines, which have helped me do all of this.

So please, surf on over to the Janome site and feel free to download a copy of my lessons for your personal use! Wooohooo!

As usual, crazy busy, but looking for a brief reprieve soon….

On Sunday, there was a Fruit and Fiber day at Hope Orchards, down at Hope Corner (across the street from the General Store).  I decided that I really need to begin exercising…after about 21 months of being a pudge, it is really getting to me, and life has settled down enough that I can re-focus.  So I asked hubby if he would pick me up if I walked the 3 miles to “town” (an intersection in rural Maine qualifies as a town).  The answer was yes, as long as it isn’t when the Patriots play!  So I went before 4!
It was GLORIOUS!

Then Paul came rushing in one morning and said quick, you gotta see this sunrise (at 6:30 a.m.), it may be picture worthy.  It was!

Hubby on the porch off the living room, but the camera metered on the sky...erk

Then I figured out how to get the camera to take a picture the way I was seeing the sky…WOW!

OH MY! Worth getting up to see this!

All this week I have been on a rip and a tear to clear the last things out of the storage unit that held mom’s stuff.  When she moved here in 2008, I rented the unit for things that wouldn’t fit in her small 2-room place at Quarry Hill (assisted living).  Since she was still kinda with it, I didn’t feel like I could sell it off or get rid of it, because I wanted to have it to give her if she asked for something (painting, memento, etc).  Last summer when she moved to one room in the memory loss unit, had to rent a second (kaChing) unit.  Emptied the second one about a month ago.  This one, before I started liquidating things about a year ago, was full, front to back, floor to near ceiling.  This week it had two large pieces of furniture and 31 BOXES of books I had to sort through.  After selling some to an antique dealer (as reference books), sending some off with a used book store guy, more donated to the Camden Public Library, and yet more to Goodwill, this is how the unit looked at 3 p.m. yesterday:

Hallelujah! The great emptying is DONE!

When Paul’s dad died, there was an “estate sale lady” that basically took care of selling everything off from the house, took a percentage, donated the rest, and we cleaned out the house.  Nothing like that here so it was dribs and drabs to liquidate things.  I have promised my kids I will do my best not to depart this earth and leave them with so much STUFF!

This morning, the drippies have arrived:

Even in heavy mist (the weather station said it was raining tho it was really just wet air)! it is beautiful here...this was about 7:10 a.m.

And this glorious view off the other side of the kitchen porch/entry:

The back 40 (well, OK, maybe the back 4 acres), and I really need to clean up the flowerbeds for winter!

AND, drum roll, this week we modified the membership at the Y to include me, and today I began!  I will NOT regain that weight!  I will NOT be a pudge!  I WILL get healthy!  Now…off to play as a reward to myself…taking Jane LaFazio’s mixed media journal class at joggles.com and can’t wait to get started on this week’s lesson!