Hello,

It is a snowed like crazy yesterday and  I just could not stay in doors.   I had a good time waking in the deep snow.  The going was slow as there was about 10 inches of new snow on the ground and it was falling very thick and fast.  I walked a block from home and looked back- I could not see the house.   I did enjoy the way the fire plug  and several small pine trees seemed to be wearing pointed snow hats.  I helped push a gal out of her driveway and the snow plow did pass by before I got home form my  short  walk.    It is getting difficult to find joy in this long winter.  But I console myself by remembering that this too will pass.   The QuEGs group meant on Tuesday.  There were only four of us but it was still a good time.    Sally is doing some amazing stuff with her embroidery machine.  She programed and stitched all of these  bags herself.  She said she wanted to test thread and needles.     There was also a Diva meeting on Tuesday evening and again it was very stimulating.   There is so much variety going on in the group it is hard to keep up.   Cheri is exploring painting on canvas and really starting to make it her own thing now I think.  She not only adds hand dyed fabric on top in a collage like process she is also doing lots of hand stitching on top too. 

Lori is doing a wonderful job mixing machine work with hand embroidery on silk.   This piece will be a real WOW when it is done.    There are two folks exploring book making processes at the moment.  Liese  is working on a book with individual hand made fabric pages- she is not sure how it will go together at this  point.   Several pages are sun prints. One is marbaleized, and some are collaged.   It is an engineering problem now.   The other book worker is Alice.   She is using an accordion book format for her works.  One book is titled “We Love the Sky”  and sun rise to moon rise are represented in her book as one continuing diorama .   This image is of rain and storm followed by the rainbow.    Her second work is  titled ” We Love the Woods” and it too is in the diorama layout.   I love how she mixes her painted parts with commercal  fabrics and images.   I find her trees really strong.    Sandy is busy doing wonderful hooking projects.  She has two works that are both landscapes that work as a set or stand alone.   Her mix of sliced wool and yarn do wonderful things  together is powerful.    The work in small but this style works for her busy life at the moment.    Anne went to a work shop in Vermont with Cynthia Corbin  called  Emerging Styles.   She came home with a wonderful pile of great started projects.    She discovered how important light is to her way of creating and that has pushed her into a new direction.  I can hardly wait to see how this develops.    Noel likes to use silk in her work and although this is an older piece it shows her wonderful handling of this some what difficult material.  She does not fuse the silk to any thing either and that allows her to distort the material in the manner this shows.   Ruth is still working away on her African symbols project.      She is ready to begin quilting on this work now.  I think it is very strong graphically.   Needless to say I am all excited  by all these wonderful works and ready to charge forward.    I am so very fortuniate to belong to two powerful groups of creative folks.

Progress Report: Golden Path   This quilt really seemed to come together without much in put by me.  I had all the stripped sections left over from another project and they were in the bottom of a box.  When I came across the red, gold, and blue fabric last week it just seemed to pull the other fabrics with it.   The big gold and white chunks of fabric are from the printing day I did a few weeks ago.     I looked at the surface of this quilt a long time before I started quilting it.  I decided to emphasize the square shapes in the center using a Greek Key pattern.  I started quilting in the center making first one key and then another connected to the first using variegated yellow thread.     I then stared outside the second squared area and built a second set of units.    I continued to build until I had about a dozen keys and by then I had worked for an hour on the project.  So I stopped.  Before I began work the next day I looked critically at the work.  It needed a bit of punch so I added a row of gold thread in an outline pattern all the way around all the created units.  Thus the name – Golden Path- as it just leads one around the center units.  I then  switched back to the yellow and repeated the same procedure as the day before.  I then added as second out line of gold and retuned to the yellow keys to the out side of the quilt.   I am pleased with the results.

Rounding Up Green   I am quilting away on this quilt now.  I am using the same idea as I applied to  Golden Path only I am using spirals.  I create one and then from it I spiral out and create a smaller one next to  the first and keep building the pattern out from the center of the work.  I will not add a row of gold thread however.  It is working without that addition.

Maya’s Tee Shirt Quilt    I continue to work away on Maya’s quilt.  I now have three rows completed.  It is getting bit difficult  to handle on the pin wall.   I still have two rows to construct and then it will be time to start a back.   

Scarp Happy   I have been working on putting together scraps for about a mouth now.  I decided to give myself a break for that and build a top out of the work.   I cut the pieces into long 2.5″ widths and then added those pieces to 4.5″ centers.    There are blocks with an Egyptian print center and blocks with a red print center .  I am now ready to start creating rows for the top of this quilt.

New work-purple and  pink      I think the cold and whiteness of the weather is effecting my  leaning toward spring colors at the moment.   This one is just starting to come together.  I am going to  try to work in the 18″ X 24 ” format again.  This is my first return to that format.

 New work spring

I pulled out the fabric for this project yesterday during the storm in the morning.  Again I think this is my attempt to think about spring instead of the cold all around me.

New work Foundations IX

This is a close up of the new work on the next Foundations piece.  It too will be on a smaller format.  All the green thread is unraveled silk thread from a woven section of fabric.   The solid green and blue are silk papers.

Daily’s   I do my Daily’s when I watch the news in the evening.  I have been following that practice for a while now and my attitude about the news is much more mellow.

Keep Creating

Carol