I’m now home from Festival in Houston, which was WONDERFUL. I filled a 1 Gig memory card, but alas have only about that much space left on my hard drive so this is going to be interesting… I’ll post about it as soon as I can get the computer to work (hah!). And I need sleep….went out today only to go to the post office, and forgot the thing I needed to mail at home. Yep, sleep. In the meantime…..

April: After looking at the January non-achromatic quilt for three months, I decided I needed to do it right. So, I made a second attempt at doing achromatic, or black-white-gray. This time, I got it. I took a close up photo of the rushing water at Camden Falls, where the Megunticook River spills into Camden Harbor. The river is actually fairly small, a large stream in some ways, and the falls aren’t that huge, either, but they sure are beautiful. I used every single black or gray fabric I had (which is obviously not a lot). Even at that, I ended up using a deep navy/forest batik and some others that stretch the achromatic scheme.

May: When I was visiting my mom in California, I took more photos of birds of paradise and other flowers in the grounds near where she lives. She had never seen a digital camera, or a photo processing program. I had Paul’s laptop with me, so I showed her how I could take a walk, come in, upload photos, adn then tweak them in Photoshop. I liked this particular tweak so much, it became the May journal. This is basically a primary triadic combination: red (fucshia), yellow and blue (turquoise).

May:

June: I have been mulling over some ideas about patterns and designs, so decided to do a contemporary twist on the traditional Moon Over the Mountain block. The combination here is complementary: purple and yellow. Or, if you’d prefer, split complementary: pale yellow and deep dark purple and its neighbors on the color wheel, including deep navy.

June:

Hi all…uploading this post from Festival in Houston! If you click here, you can go to the Quilts Inc website and take a loot by clicking on the Ruby Slippers. I’ll post lots more when I get home… until then…..

At LONG last, I can share the journal quilts for this year, since Festival is now officially open! Remember that tutorial series I did a while back on color? Well, I wanted to continue the color studies with a more “art-y” set of journals. For my first attempt, I wanted to do achromatic, meaning no color or black-white-gray. Obviously, I didn’t quite manage. Doing no color is very hard for me, so this ended up being a wintery monochromatic of sorts…white, pale blues, grays, a bit of taupe:

January:

In February, I decided that I’d do a bird of paradise, which happens to be a perfect split complementary. The flower itself if the complementary pair of orange and blue, while the stalk and leave are green with slivers of red.

February:

Deborah, one of the Frayed Edges, moved to Dallas in February. The rest of us had hoped to have a farewell gift for her. Ahem. Things slid due to the holidays and life and hecticness in general. So she got a house-warming gift in May! We made journal sized quilts and hung them from a piece of driftwood (to see more about this, click here). This month’s piece is what I call “natural” colors. If I were to head to the color wheel, I guess I’d call this analogous colors..green and blue are next to each other on the color wheel.

March:

The January and February journals are two of five (the others are from previous years) that were included in the Creative Quilting: The Journal Quilt Project book, which is now available here. Yippeee!

At LONG last, I can share! I was thrilled beyond belief to have my quilt, The Tide is Hire, juried into the prestigious Viking Masterpieces exhibit which will be in Houston, Chicago and (I think) the next Expo in Europe in 2 years. Reflecting on it, I don’t know why this exhibit is so prestigious, and I can still barely believe I made it in, but I did…..a new internet friend who is at Market confirmed for me before I got to Houston that indeed my quilt is there and on p. 95 in the accompanying show / exhibit catalog! Now that the exhibit is public, I can share this quilt here and on my website (that’ll come next week).

The picture above is, of course, the full quilt. I used a technique I learned from Dianne Hire for “curvaceous squares” for the center blocks, then went on from there. I wanted to use the blocks for the Viking entry, but the quilts must be 51 x 51 inches, and the blocks were nowhere near that big. So I added red! and the inner border, and it worked, especially once I added the “waves” appliqued and satin stitched to the top.

I did beading and sequins on this quilt…more than I’ve ever done before, and I’m in LOVE with the sparkle and glint of bugle b eads (the long ones that look like colorful chocolate sprinkles). I also learned from Eco (a friend from an on-line group) that using larger b eads, size 6 and 8 instead of little 11 seed beads, gives a great impact with fewer stitches! So I used them, too, inside the appliqued waves.

I thought the squares on point looked like the surface of the ocean. The show theme is “Imagine That,” so I imagined a technicolored ocean. The color of the thread ranges from yellow at the top to deep blue at the bottom, and I quilted in a seagull (see detail photo), a parrotfish swimming into the quilt, and swimming out of it on the other side, an anemone on a rock, a starfish and lotsa wave froth and bubbles. FUN!

Eli wanted to be a mage (a wiseman, wizard, sage) since he has been playing a game on the computer with said character. He asked me to make a costume just like his characters, so here you go…white robe with black trim, silver-grey hood with black trim. There isn’t quite as much “room” in the upper body as I would have liked for warm shirt underneath…the temps are dropping into the freezing range every evening here!

On Sunday, while internet was down (all day!), we finished the costume and carved Eli’s pumpkin. He drew the face, cleaned out the innards, found the candle, and I used the keyhole saw (the kind for drywall) to carve…a VAST improvement over a knife!

And Eli took some photos of our house and critters:

Thumper (of the many, MANY toes):

Zeus, the kind daddy-cat:

Hannah on her high perch (at the top of the cat tree…the large, wide-load dark blob…..)

Tyger, as usual, was hiding somewhere. He is sweet, but can really absent himself very well….

Yeti, the wonder dog, asleep as usual:

The stovetop dragon (aka steamer…when he’s running a good boil he blows smoke out his nose)

The fleece mouse Eli and I made: he gave directions, I figured out the “how”, make the pattern, etc. Eli helped a tiny bit with sewing, but decided I could handle it. Still need to add eyes, whiskers, maybe a belt and sword….. think Reepicheep in one of the middle Narnia books….

The pumpkins pre-carving:

During (Joshua making Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas)

and after:

And to add one more photo to this hodge-podge, I went for a walk on Monday the 30th and this was the reward for looking up! Glorious!

Last summer I did some postcards for the FiberArts for A Cause fundraiser that featured nudes. I didn’t get these cards done in time to include with the ones I did manage to get to FFAC in time for the Festival fundraiser, but they are done in time to share here. This year, in addition to the man and the woman, I have added one that I love, called Anticipation (there are two blue ones…one above, #2, stitched in blue thread, the other–#3– in a lavender/purple).

All the cards are “wholecloth”, that is there is just the background cloth and the thread, not piecing, no applique.

I used Peltex stiffener in the middle, and couched yarns to the outside edge.

There is a tweedy wool on the purple ones, cotton on the blues, and on the orange. All are free-motion machine stitched using Superior Threads Highlights 40-wt. trilobal polyester.

For some reason, one of the plum cards appears lighter than the others, though all three were scanned on the same machine. The actual color is closest to the darker versions.

All these cards are for sale, $30 each (including first class domestic US postage). I don’t have paypal set up yet, but will take personal checks. Write if you’re interested. I AM headed to Houston and will take these with me…don’t know if I will sell any there or not….