Quilting on the Edge

Creativity with a Photo

Here's a photo I took around the holidays.  It's of my son Joel with his son, Niam on the beach at Anna Maria Island.  Gloomy day, grey skies and water as you can see.  I love this photo though, so I wanted to do something with it.  I decided to print it off on paper, create a fabric background, and do a little personal editing.   It's about 5 by 7 inches when completed now. Added a little stitching and color with inktense pencils, and a sailboat, a favorite of "Grandma", as something Niam's moving toward.  He wasn't walking yet at the time of the photo.  So, here's the final product. 

Look what I bought! Old Doll Quilt

                                         I went to the Anna Maria Island Historical Days Celebration last Saturday and found this sweet doll quilt for sale at one of the antique booths.  It's about 8 by 10 inches, made of 180 tiny squares, each between one half and three quarter inches square.  It seems like these are 1930's fabrics to me.  It feels like cotton batting that has migrated and lumped in certain spots, the back view shows the hand quilting. I can't decide for sure if the blocks were pieced by hand or machine.  Anyway, it was such a treasure I decided to buy it for 22 dollars, and frame it.  I just wanted  a safe home for somebody's hard work.  Now, it has one.......MINE!

Ringling Art Museum in Sarasota Florida

Today we visited the Grandma Moses Exhibit at the Ringling Museum.  The weather had cooled considerably and many others had the same idea of how to spend the day.  Besides the art exhibit, personal items of Grandma Moses were on display, including paint brushes, her pin cushion, and even her rocking chair!  Below are some photos of interesting sites I saw at the museum, it has a lovely environment and the outdoor areas are peaceful and beautiful. The only bright colored patchwork type photo is a closeup of the mosaic jacket on a large statue at the visitor's entrance.

Windchimes as Inspiration

                                 I purchased these windchimes you see hanging in the first photo just about a week ago.  I loved the colors, and they are very thin shapes, so they only make a delicate noise, sort of tinny sounding.  They are hanging on our deck and the palm trees are in the background through the screens.  Anyway, today I decided to make a few painted fabric pieces using the windchimes as an inspiration.  I got the idea for contrasting light and dark backgrounds from looking at the windchimes in another photo I took, where parts of them were against the darker background of the neighbor's house, and parts were in the sunlight.  I played around a lot with acrylic paints, making circles and square shapes, and overpainting and underpainting to end up with these samples.  I was also trying to put into practice some design principles I've been reading about.  I think quilting them with interesting patterns may make these pieces even more interesting.  Just sharing where my fabric adventures took me today.   CP                   

Dyeing Fabrics Today

                      Today is Monday and I decided to finally use the fabric dyeing packets I purchased sometime last summer......you know how the mood strikes you to get something, then when it arrives, you're no longer in the mood.  I had a great time!  I ended up with ten different solid colors, some are fat quarter size, some larger.  I used red, yellow, green, and blue dyes, and as you can tell by the colors, I mixed some of the together to create other colors.  The first photo is of the wet fabrics hanging in my shower entry, and the second photo is all the fabrics now dried, ironed, and stacked.  I'm planning a great quilt for them......stay tuned!  Chris

Winning at an Anna Maria Art Gallery

Guess what? Anna Maria had an Art Walk last evening.....several art galleries were open in the evening, and each was offering a raffle for a prize.  I won this praying mantis painting at one of the galleries!!!  That's amazing because not only do I rarely win anything, this was the only gallery at which I actually signed up for the raffle.......I do not see the name of the artist on this piece.  It appears to be watercolors on tissue paper or some other very thin paper.  Anyway, was I ever surprised to receive the call about winning this morning.  Here's a picture of what I won.  Maybe this is a sign of good things ahead..........or maybe I was just lucky!

Walnut Dyeing of Fabric

                     This afternoon I took a bike ride around the lakes in our town and afterwards stopped to sit and enjoy the view when I noticed a bunch of walnuts lying on the ground.  I don't know what possessed me, but I decided to take them home and see how they would dye white fabric. The first photo is of the walnuts in a plastic bucket.  I boiled water and poured it over the walnuts, and inserted two pieces of white fabric.  After about a half hour there was not noticeable difference in the color of the fabric, so I left it in for three hours.  The picture above shows the color change between the original white fabric and the walnut dyed fabric.  More walnuts and darkers hulls probably would have made the color change more intense.  Just my Thursday afternoon experiment! 

Monoprint Attempt 2

Here's my second attempt at monoprinting..... I used different shapes, stencilled them with fabric paint unto the plexiglass, then printed them onto white fabric.  It seems I ended up with a lot of overlapping colors which gives this sample a nice effect.

Monoprints

                       The first photo is a monoprint made on white cotton.  I liked the organic lines, but it needed color.  Tonight I used acrylic paints to paint in different sections and arrived at the second photo.... much better, don't you think?

Quilt featured in LaPorte Herald Argus

heraldargus.com/archives/ha/sections.cgi?prcss=display&id=383329 - 30k - Cached       This site will take you to the article about my quilt "Secrets" that was in our local newspaper, LaPorte Herald Argus in LaPorte, Indiana.   This piece was in the Images exhibit at Lowell, Massachusetts this August, and I was contacted by a reporter from the newspaper about this exhibition. Thanks for looking!  Chris