A brief detour from the recent work. Yesterday the power went out at 3 (half an hour after I got home from errands), came back on at 7, at which point the internet connection was dead. Sigh. Since I got nothing wothwhile done (although sitting on the screened porch, getting misted with the sideways rain during the thunderstorms was wonderful), I thought I’d post this book review which I wrote a while ago….

I read this book while visiting my mom in California in early May, and have been wanting to blog about it ever since, but stuff keeps happening in the meantime!

First published in 1963 by Yale University Press, Josef Albers’ approach to color was considered radical and outside the mainstream at the time. By now, his theories are so widely accepted that it’s hard to believe they were ever “outside” ideas.

The introduction says the books is a “record of an experimental way of studying color and of teaching color.

“In visual perception a color is almsot never seen as it really is–as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art.

“…First, it should be learned that one and the same color evokes innumerable readins. … distinct color effects are produced –through the recognition of the interaction of color.”

For example, in the scan just above, the ochre squares in the blue field and in the yellow-orange field are the same color. By being surrounded by complementary colors (opposites on the color wheel), one’s “reading” of the ochre color is completely changed. In the blue field, the ochre loos orange-ish; in the orange field, the ochre looks brown. Albers says that in the original design for this study, the horizontal blue and yellow stripes were strips of paper that could be lifted to reveal that a single strip of ochre paper was used to make both the small squares…wow!

The book is a fairly academic treatise, so will not suit all readers. But, if like me, you learn from words as well as pictures, it’s a fabulous work.

The original book and class was significantly larger, and therefore priced out of range of most folks. Over the past forty years, a smaller version of the book was available, but many called for an expanded edition with more of the illustrations. This revised and expanded paperback edition is copyrighted in 2006, and is now available through Amazon for an amazingly low price, so you can see why I snapped it up!

Here’s another page /example that fascinated me… hope it entices you to get the book from the library or add it to your library!

Here’s the technical stuff:

Albers, Josef. Interaction of Color: Revised and Expanded Edition. New Haven: Yale University Press, (c) 1963, revised and expanded edition (c) 2006.
ISBN-13: 978-0-300-11595-6
ISBN-10: 0-300-11595-4
List Price US $15, Amazon Price $9.75.

I LOVE this quilt! I love everything about the way it turned out…. I began with a photo (taken by me) of the Marshall Point Lighthouse in Port Clyde, Maine. Maine’s glorious, rocky, peninsula- and bay-riddled coastline is the result of glaciers on the move during the last ice age. Port Clyde is at the tip of the peninsula just south of Camden…it takes a bit over an hour to get there from here.

I wanted to extend the photo beyond the four edges of the picture with scraps of cloth before I quilted it. When it was done, I decided I wanted to set it off against a background. A huge/wide piece of barnwood or driftwood would have been perfect, but I didn’t have any (and didn’t think I’d find any I could afford) that were large enough. So, out came my hand-dyed fabrics. This brown piece reminds me of wood and the forest floor, and is in fact a length of the same fabric I used in my Nativity quilt for the ground (see posts from June for lots more on that quilt). I wrapped stretcher bars with batting, then this cloth, then stitched the quilted central piece to the brown background.

Here’s a close up of the stitching…as usual, I got carried away and had a ball thread painting:

This piece is currently hanging in my show at Camden National Bank and, if it doesn’t sell from there, will move down to Ducktrap Bay Trading Company for sale. The piece is 14×19 inches overall size.

Long-time readers of this blog may recognize the photo in this quiltlet from a post this February which featured this photo . I cropped a similar photo, printed it onto cloth, and then quilted up this small piece ( 9 1/4 x 13 inches) with a dark blue border:

I LOVE the intensity of the colors in the winter sky! I have another piece, based on a photo of a similar sunset photo taken from Route 1 (the Old Atlantic Coast Highway), framed in black cloth that is waiting to be quilted, and is a bit larger…stay tuned!

Oh, and in case you couldn’t tell, I love to quilt!

Camden, Maine, and environs has been a vacation spot for well over a century. The area is known as the “Camden Hills” region, and even has its own state park. When the leaves are off the trees, we can see the outline of Mount Battie, the “mountain” (more like a tall hill) that is closest to the center of town, and Megunticook, the next hill inland, through the bare tree-tops.

The photo in the center of this quilt (transferred to cloth via my printer) is of the Megunticook river in the middle distance and “Mount Megunticook” in the background. I took the photo while on a walk from my home, about a mile away. In winter, the river freezes solid, and “ice out” (when the last ice in the lake–which is upstream, of course–and the river melts) is usually around April 10-12. A hundred years ago, the tannery (torn down last year…about a mile from our house and located alongside the river) and two woolen mills in town used energy from the river to power their businesses.

This piece is small…. 9 3/4″ x 15 1/2″, and I was surprised at how much I like it, despite its simplicity.

Caz asked a question about how I attached the turtle to the canvas (and her message came as an “anonymous” post meaning I can’t reply directly to her), so I decided to post the reply here.

I just use thread and needle, but you definitely want to use a thimble…painted canvas is stiff and takes a good poke to get the needle through. I pick a color used on the edge…in this case, that spring green that I used to attach the yarns on the outside edge. I’ll knot the thread, come up from the back through one of the stitches already on the small piece, take a small (1/8 inch) stitch on top that is unobtrusive, then move 1/2 inch to 1 inch along the back. If the piece is long, like Tree Branch Moon, I might make the stitches more like 1/2 inch apart along the top edge (to support the weight…smaller pieces aren’t as heavy so you can actually take slightly longer stitches), then use 3/4 to 1 inch stitches along the sides and bottom.

Another option, that I haven’t used *yet*, is to sew velcro to the piece, then sew or glue velcro to the canvas. I am thinking this might be an option for using with pieces mounted on Plexiglas, especially if, for example, I had a series of seasonal quilts that are the same size. I could then mount velcro on a sheet of Plexiglas, and position velcro in the same spots on each of the quilts. With a quick “rip” I could remove one seasonal piece, and replace it with the next season, needing only the one piece of Plexi….

Hope that helps! Caz–sorry I couldn’t reply directly to you, and hope you see this!