Hello Everyone,

It has been cold here in central New York, but the contrast of  today is delightful.  I  am just home from my walk for today.  It is beautiful with summer like temperatures an lots of fall color.  I enjoyed the crunch of  leaves, but  even more the falling ones.  There are many leaves drifting down on gentle breezes  so I played my favorite fall sport of catching as many as I could.  I stood for a long time under a golden Ginko, but was unsuccessful there.  They are just a little to solid and only drop down- no drifting there.  I did manege to get five however.  One very red Silver Maple leaf and four from Sugar Maples.  I had a grand time.( after checking on old posts I discovered that I talked of leaf catching last year in Nov.17 post)

This week has been a busy one out side the studio what with plays and meetings as I get back into the swing of fall activities.

Progress Report: Lauren’s Wedding Quilt  I worked away on this project but there is no real visible change.  All the blocks are in rows and ready for assembly.  I am creating the back greens and browns but in my usual scrap back method.   I will try to take more photos this week.

Slender Cuts
I started this method with the instructions I got from Marty in Idaho.   If you look back at the June 25 posting your will see that I have been struggling with  curved piecing for a while.  With the help Marty has given me the cuts are better and they are much flatter.  I like this method and now have about 20 pieces of various widths.  I guess I should stop fooling around and start something with these fellows. Composing in Purple
I decided to try a new approach to my compositions.  I pinned up  three different layouts using mostly the same units and then looking at the digital images selected the

stronger of the three an started the new work from that point.

I altered the work as I usually do- remembering what Dr Nichols always said about making “Visual decisions Visually”.   This is nearly assembled and I do not see too many changes before completion.

I hope you are all enjoying fall and the leaves.

Keep Creating

Carol

Hello,

This morning when I made my diary entry I realized today is 10-11-12.   I am not into numerology- but it did catch my eye when I had it written.  What did catch my eye happened today on my walk.  The sky was that  incredible deep blue that comes with the crispness of fall. The wind was busy pulling the leaves down  off the beech tree  and they swam like gold fish to the ground were they created a wonderful yellow carpet.  The colors plus one of my favorite sounds- the crunch and swish of those leaves as one walks through them- filled me with sensual joy today.  I do like this season.  I am working away on the wedding quilt commission and with a bit of concentrated effort this eve I will get the binding done and be able to finish the project on time.  I will admit that this has not been my favorite quilts.  I have a hard time with cream and black for a wedding quilt,but them it is not my choice.   I am just glad that she liked what I showed her last week when the client brought me the material that she wanted for the back.

 

 Progress  Report: Lace Layers  I was nearly finished with this piece before I went off to Idaho and I am glad as it made and easy transition back into getting to work.  When I came home I was so full of new ideas that I found it hard to get started on any one of them.   But finishing up this work made that a lot easier.  This is only a partial shot as it is twin sized and I really do not have a space to shoot anything that big.  The rest is more of the same idea

Two Spires     This quilt is done – at least I think it is.     I may need to live with it a while on the wall to make a final decision about that part of the process.   I am unsure about it and I can not tell what it is that is not working for me yet.

The detail shows the stitching and I am very happy with that part of this work.   I will let it hang on the wall for a while and perhaps I will walk in one morning and know what to do- or I can bring it to one of the group meeting and perhaps “new” eyes can see what it needs. The shot on the left is the  top  of  the spires and the other shot is of the left hand spire from about 10 inches back.

  Purple ???       I am not sure what to call this top.  I got inspired from the marbleized material with the  white, purple, blue and greens for this work.  It was again a easy and simple way to get back into the studio and back into doing something I really wanted to work on.    Goddesses
These images are drawings I did of primitive goddess that will become part of some future work  I need to get started on.  I have a show that is set to open in January and it is to feature goddess.  This is a start toward that.  All the drawings are based on images from the Marija  Gimbutas ” The Language of the Goddess” book.   It was a fun exercise.

Blocks  When I was with Marty a fellow quilter visited us and she showed us a quilt that used luminosity as  its main emphasis.   I am trying to recreate that idea with these blocks.  I need to now make two more cuts with reassembly in mind to pull this off.  So this is step one.   The colors that I have used here are the ones Lauren wants in her quilt so that is my second intention with this work.

I hope fall is filling you with a new sense of color as we approach the onset of winter.

Keep Creating

Carol

I am so sorry to admit that I had thought that this work was set up to publish while I was away.  It failed to do so- as a result I am publishing it today( Oct 4)

Hi to all,

I am enjoying my trip to the western part of the country.  Marty and I always have such a good time together.  I do not have access to my usual material so I am going to post some older photos of my trip to Arizona and New Mexico from earlier this summer.  I hope they inspire you.

The memories that looking at my photos bring to mind is how very stark all things appear.  The color that I enjoy where I live is all very muted here.  It has a sudle richness that makes me very aware of texture.The  tree root here really shows how nature adapts and uses color in such a different way.   I like the strong horizonal growth of this photo.  The fact that we could get very close to the petroglyphics was exciting to me as well.   I wish I knew how to read the message more clearly.

  The other thing I became aware of was how strong the contrasts often times were. The people who lived here must have felt a bit small in comparison to there landscape.    This shot shows two different sets on dwellings – the top is Anastazie and the bottom dwellings are Navaho- 2000 years later.

This shot shows the canyon stains with dwellings at the bottom.  I was struck by how much the stains looked like a New York City sky line.  Again note how high the canyon walls are.

This shot show how one section of the canyon looks against the high contrast of the sky.  It really make me feel small. The tree again shows the high constast of light and dark that is part of this area.  The tree lines become so strong when viewed this way.This shot from the rim shows Spider Woman’s Rock.   Note the high contrast in the shadows. The setting sun has a real impact on the color in the area too.   I think it brings up the differences in texture a lot.

Lastly I want to show this shot of the sky- it is so domainate in this part of the world and the clowds  take on a different grandure.  I had a grand time here in the south west .

Keep Crating and enjoy the wonders of the season where you are.

Hugs

Carol

Hello Friends,

I am home from my wonderful trip to Idaho with Marty.  At 2,000 feet in Sand Point-  fall is moving into that area and it is beautiful.  I love the soft color change of this maple planted in her yard.   There are lots more pines there too I did a lot of walking and just soaking you the differences in the landscape.   We got together with Dawn and compared our challenge results the day after we arrived.  Then  we made a  new challenge for next year and then  went shopping.  We all purchased three fabrics for the new  projects.  Went home and split the materials  and passed half yard pieces onto each other.   I will admit that I am anxious to start.    By the time we had done that cut up we were so excited we spent the afternoon doing little challenges that we just fused and  pinned up.    It was great fun to watch the other two gals work .   I sure enjoyed myself.    Marty also volunteers for her local library book sale.  We went a prepared for that event and picked up books from the free pile.  After getting her son to use his drill press to make wholes in the old books we added fixtures and created two lamps from the old volumes.  It was great fun.  The other big event of my visit was the day we spent driving along the west side of the lake.  It is all National Forest Land and so the road was primitive.  At 20 MPH it took a while to drive 120 mile loop.  It was glorious though and we had fun.  There was almost no traffic- we saw 8 All Tirane Vichials and 4 trucks coming in the opposite direction and only one truck passed us going our way.  Unfortunately my camera battery died so I did not take any images to share- but I have a lot of grand ones in my visual memory.

 

Progress Report  Because I did not work  in my studio this week I will just share the projects of  Dawn and Marty.    To refresh the memory the “rules” were: 1) Make three quilts using the fabric of all  three participants  had selected based on the color choices we made before we separated.   Those were: Dawn- Crimson: Marty- Deep Turquoise: Carol Blue Green  2)   The participants sent their fabric with some pieces pinned on the surface and they had to be used in these areas  3) Edge’s had to be irregular  4) extra fabric could be used. I was the only one with completed works- but then again I am the over achiever at most things.

   My Layout /Color Challenge:   This is my challenge and my lay out.  I did the exercise twice as I had the fabric and this one is the strongest of the two.

Dawn used lots of additional colors and expanded the surface a lot.  I like how Marty built up the Crimson square.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marty’s Layout /Color Challenge I found Marty’s Crimson to be the one I liked the best of all three.  She used it as the base fabric.  I must have flipped the fabric location when I started this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I like how Marty used the turquoise  from both Dawn’s collection and mine in here work here. Dawn again added more fabric and  she also did a little discharge on the surface of the Crimson.  She really pushed the envelope and I hope I can do that this year a bit more.

 

  DAWN’S Layout/ Color ?Challenge  This is Dawn’s color choice and layout.  This is the piece that I had fun with as I added the frapping to it and made it a lot larger than the others.

I really like Marty’s use of black here.   As the next image shows Marty also used Dawn’s Crimson to enhance and frame one of her wonderful hand dyed and stitched works.  Her stitches are so very small.

Dawn again added lots of additional color to her top.

Again she did a little discharging to lighten up  her back ground fabric.   It sure was a fun challenge and the next one will be the same.

I have two more shots of Marty’s work.  She did this wonderful Nebula quilt  that I think is wonderful.   The detail shows the small stitches she uses.

I like her use of beads too.   She dose splendid work.  Then we have the last shot as one morning I got up to a strange sound and when I looked out my bedroom window I saw  three Moose.    The calf trimmed the willow and was only about 20 feet from the house.  This is the only shot that is in clear focus .  The Cow never came far enough out of the woods to allow for any picture to show anything except a brown blob.  The Bull had a small rack  and several locals said that they had never even seen a Bull.   He too was too timid to allow for any photo to look like much.

I hope you are all enjoying fall.

 

Keep Creating       Carol

Hello Friends,

I am just home from my walk on this glorious autumn day.  Here the sun is shinning and the temperature is oh so wonderfully mild with a slight breeze.  One would not know it was Sept except for a few little signs like the grasshoppers that jump and fly way from my path as I walk along.  Some  wall nuts have fallen and their green/yellow husks stain the streets.  I find myself looking for the skeletons of nuts that some squirrels clean out to look like hollow eye alien heads- or perhaps they are strange buttons.     The golden rod is blooming as are a few blue purple bachelor buttons.  What colors! The passing yellow school buses add to the feeling of fall too.   I like to store up these of images for colorful memories when the world is all blues and whites of winter.   I must really do a good job of that this week as I left my camera in Maine between the cushions of a friends house.  She will ship it to me, but for the time being memory must do all the work.  The absence of my camera also means that I can not show what  my wonderful students did in the card making class.   I was so very pleased with all there efforts as  the cards were all as beautiful and unique as all the gals who were there.  I really like teaching when it is as open ended as that class can be.  They cut there own stamps from erasers and stamped them with dyes and inks.  They them mixed those images  with great papers and fabric scraps into wonderful cards to send to there friends.  One gal said she was not going to send all her creations, but frame two of them instead.  We all had fun and laughed  together.    My lecture titled  “Playing to your Strengths” on Sat was well received too.    I felt very pleased as I drove home -a  1009 mile trip round trip – to be able to drive into a newly completed garage.  We have been planning that project for years and I am sure I will be even more delighted in mid winter when I do not have to scrap off my car before I can drive away.   I feel ready to take on what ever Mother Nature throws at me this year.

Progress Report:   Tides Out

  I am showing this quilt because I do have a photo of it.  I took the quilt to my  art quilters meeting a week ago Tue and when it was up on the wall I suddenly realized that the bottom was not adding to the work at all.   Just weighting it down.   So when I got home I cut 9.5 inches off the bottom got rid of the sand and most of the second fence and refaced that area.  I gave the improved and  finished quilt to my hostess as a thank you  gift.  She was delighted as she knew it was the coast of Maine that was the inspiration.   I know that I work too quickly some times and it take time and fresh eyes to sometimes see the errors.

 

Line Work  The only other area I have been working on is a little challenge of my own to work through the elements and principles of design this year.  I  have been reading art and design books and this mouth I am playing with line in my quilt work.  I will take photos when I get my camera and post the progress.

I hope you are enjoying the wonders of fall and creating great things.

Hugs

Carol

 

Hello Friends,

I always see this weekend as a marker of the start of fall- even the official day is the 22.  I am posting this just a little early as I am off  to do a bit of teaching in Maine this week end.  I  will go back to my Thur posts next week and tell you more about the class at that time.    Summer has rushed by me with all its events and joys.  I did not get as much studio time as I would have liked, but that is the pattern for me at the moment.    The trip to the south west was wonderful.  I had a great time with my friends and took a ton of photos.  The colors and the textures were great.    I found the rusts,browns sage greens  and strong blues of the clear sky really fascinating.   Those influences fed directly into my two class  at Quilting by the Lake.    We experienced the joys of construction this summer  as  well  because we added a new garage to the back of our house.    I did finish both of the graduation quilts- but in the rush I forgot to take pictures of them.  The one for my grandson has already gotten rave reviews as he tells me it really adds color as well as warmth to his dorm room.

Progress Report :Slipping Through

   I have finally finished this quilt.   It has given me lots of challenges.  I had to start over after I discoverd that working this large made the openings for the “ribbons” to pass through saged with the weight of the fabric.  The solution was to put boneing in the quilt at the top and bottom of each whole.   I really wanted this quilt with its new direction for me to be an entry in a quit show so that aspect pushed me forward when I hit the blocks.  The “ribbons” created a problem too as I fused them to Tyntex this time instead of using batting inside.   I wanted them to stand higher off the surface and have more body.   I like the final effect even though it was a challenge for me

Pink Curves

      This was the first thing that I finished this summer.  I think I learned a lot about how to cut curves and I still have more to learn there.   I like the action of the reflective machine work and the hand work also added to the interest on the surface.   I will keep working with curves as I feel there is still lots of ways to use them and there is more to explore here.

 

 

 

 

 

Lace Layers
I started this work  before summer too.   I enjoyed adding the lace on top of the surfaces of yellow  this created strong texture- one of my real loves.   The black is such a great contrast with it’s wonderful detailed lines of yellow ans white that it too works to make the piece stronger.   I added some fancy machine stitches to the surface when I was adding the lace as well.

Canyon  de Chilly – White Tower

 This quilt was lots of fun with lots of new learning exeriences.  I started the work in Vsalerie Goodwin’s class at Quilting by the Lake.  She taught us how to sew on organza to build up layers.  The close up of the tower is a good example of that process in action.The organza was painted with fabric paints a to get the tones and shades I wanted on this part of the work.  Then it was sewn down to the background.   The class was about composition and she did a good job of helping me see how that could be used to my advantage and pointed out to me that I did not need to make my work look exactly like the real location.

Canyon Shadows- Petroglyphs 

  This quit came about because I had made the petroglyphic images for the first canyon piece – but when I got home I felt that adding them to the already too big and busy piece would only spoil it . I had also removed my organza map of the ruins from the first canyon piece as it had become a strong landscape in my mind without that part.  In this piece they serve as a strong transition to the sky section of the workThe organza does mute the colors of the stone I think.   I was fascinated by how  many petroglyphs this canyon held and how very strong the images were.  The figure on the left was done by and Anasazi Indian 2000 years before the one on the right that was created by a Navajo about 200 years ago. 

Tide’s Out

This quilt belongs to the challenge series as it started with the wrinkled silk that is the water portion on this work.    There is a place along the  east coast where the land has these board fences along the shore line and at one point the ocean juts into the land.  That is what I was trying to show here.  I enjoyed doing the machine drawing of the grasses along the fence on this quilt.   Using two types of green variegated thread really helped the process I think.

Excavations

This quilt is also one of the Exploration Challenges.  I was working from a book that talked about cutting and tearing into lower layers of the stacks of fabric.

I like all the texture in this work and the messiness of all the frayed edges only adds more interest to my eye.  I think I will try this idea again in the future and  work with a different more unified color pallet.

Shifting Gears

This quilt came out of the class with Judy Langiel.  I made the screen of the gears in her class and printed the fabric there.  I combined the gears with a photo transfer image of a  model A.  I am challenging myself to new colors and to trying to work with angles as opposed to rectangles and squares.

I hope everyone had a fun filled and creative summer and is now ready to shift gears into the delights of fall.

Keep Creating

Carol

Happy Salutes everyone.

So now summer really begins.  Like everyone else I am looking forward to lots of events!    The pleasant summer days pull me out of doors and off to do lots of other explorations.  There is graduation and weddings and plays to attend.   I have travel plans- to the far west of the US, to Pennsylvania, and to Indiana.  Then there is camp and art shows as well.  So I am going to take a summer recess and only post the first week of each mouth until Sept.   The school teacher in me see that as a time to restart.   There will be one other change.   Tomorrow I am meeting with my Computer Programmer and the Blog add will be changing.   Patty has graduated and she no longer needs to use the blog as a part of her educational material so I will be leaving her host and moving to one of my own.  That should make things easier and some what more understandable.   Her help has been invaluable to me and I will still need her assistance on occasion I am sure.  So enjoy your summer and get away from the computer a bit and enjoy the outside world.

Progress Report:   Circling Events

 

I finished several quilts this week and this is one.   I have really enjoyed these little explorations with pattern and and limited color.   The there are many textures in this one too, suede, metal , the glass beads and the pale rust fabric has a very distinctive weave that I like as well.      My idea was to make all of the finished work for sale and so I have included the price in the caption.

I have also been criticized for not making my photos bigger so I am slowly trying to expand the size of them  this week.  I would love feed back on this area.

  This detail shows the suede at the bottom.  The bead and the metal disk are setting on the woven textured fabric.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dandelion  This is my first attempt at enlarging the image for the blog.   I like this quilt as it makes me feel cheerful.   It is great to be posting it on the first day of summer too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Purple Power  I had thought that I was finished with this piece a few week ago. But when I looked again I decided the  buttons did not work for me.  Because I had finished

the quilting I really could not remove them from the surface.  This presented a new problem….. after a bit of looking and reflecting- I decided to cover the buttons.  I tried several fabrics and settled on this high furry stuff that some one had kindly given me.  I think it gives the work a nice little kick.

 

 

 

This close up also shows the woven ribbon  that adds another texture to the surface of this work.

Zane’s Graduation  Quilt  I am making progress on both of the graduation pieces but this one shows the most growth this week.  I have now completed two of the three rows of the tee shirts.   The green and white tees will be in the middle so this shot is of the center and the right side rows.  Zane likes browns and muted colors so I have used those colors between the blocks.  They are very narrow as there are so many tee shirts and they are so big that keeping the sashing thin is necessary to keep the size of the quilt limited to college dorm bed sizes.   Many of these tee shirts also had lists of the casts on the backs and I intend to place them on the back of the quilt in the proper location to go with the show represented on the front.  I know this will be a challenge for me to keep the placement correct-but I think it will be well worth the effort.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Curve Cuts   I started this last week and realized  when I re read the post that  I did not explain the steps at all.  To cut a curve that will fit exactally one needs to cut the two pieces of fabric at the same time.   So place face up one piece on top of the other. The second one must also be face up.  Then using your rotorey cutter cut both pieces at the same time doing your curves.

The second shot shows the two fabrics slightly shifted so you can see how the four pieces will fit against each other.   The pinks are on the bottom and will fit with the exact opposite megenta.

 

 

  This shot shows the two pieces sewn together.  They still need to have further pressing- but at this point I am still adding sections as the left one shows.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This last shot is of the parts pinned in one configeration.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blue Blocks  Here are my newest Blue Blocks for the year.  The really nice thing about this project is it travels well so I will not fall behind while I am away with my summer activites.

 

I hope everyone has a grand summer and I will see you again  in Aug.  I will post the new  Blog Add here however.

Keep creating

Carol