progress...

Blogger has been out for about a week, sorry for the lack of postage.
Have been hanging here in Ohio to attend the Quilt National opening.
It's been a great experience, saw lots of friends and met some new ones- and the artwork is great!
I have a couple more pics to put up after they come out of the camera....

before I left, i was able to get a bit of work done on the latest-
headed back early tomorrow to get back to it!

Finally, a sneak peek at another cell piece-
this is gonna be fun!

textures

found on some old buildings in Colorado-
email me for larger files if you want to use them in your artwork-

but wait there's more

Because I love painting so much, and to give myself a little more elbow room, I make a silk background to use for the fish instead of the batik I had originally chosen.
This is really typical, I often change big as well as small things as I go-

the silk is so transparent when wet that it's hard to see, but it is there- lying directly on the styrofoam.

It got pinned on the wall and I stuck on a bunch of the critters I've been making- this is going to be a well populated sea!

 more components- a pile of seaweed from dryer sheets, and some cool rocks from heat treated interfacing.

 more tests- 2 types of leave in stabilizer (fail) and some lutradur on the right- it's pretty but a little stiff and brittle for me.  I expect my work to hold up to some handling and wear and tear, since it often gets sent to shows.  And, I wouldn't want to sell something that I wasn't convinced would hold together.
I may experiment with it further, but it has to pass my torture test!

Here's several types of interfacing heat treated- the one on the left is pretty cool, and I'll make some rocks from it.

Finally, here's a couple of critters I made from Hollytex.

Heading up to the SAQA conference in Denver, then onward to Quilt National in Ohio, so I may not get much making done in the next couple of weeks.....

more 'speriments

got out the heat gun today to torment some different materials-
which didn't faze any of them.
sooooo, I ended up putting 'em under the broiler.  Luckily there are fierce winds today that blew the smells out of the house.
the Hollytex, below, is cool- looks a lot like Tyvek.

the Yupo melted into a hard useless lump, and the Reemay, although easily melted with an iron by accident (grr), just laid there under the broiler.  So I attacked it with a propane torch.  still nothin'-*fail*

I worked hard to get some Evolon, heard it melted interestingly- but, after the heat gun, broiler, and torch, it looked like something retrieved from a shark's stomach.
*epic fail*

I should have some Lutradur around here somewhere, next victim!

what next?

working on new technology- this is going to take a while.
it involves working with new software, my un favorite, but it seems to be going smoothly so far.
this gorgeous piece of batik came in from equilter- perfect for the ocean-

here's some of the fish I'm working on- a few of my oddball favorites-

going to try to burn up some of my hard won evolon tomorrow- that will be fun!

Finishing the Meadow

Here are the little deer starting to get stitched out.

they are finished here-

the trees have been stitched in, just starting to add the leaves. 

They are all done- I wanted the contrast of the fresh new leaves against the dark hill.

all done!

more meadow

working on the facing now, almost done.
wanted to talk some more about working from photos today.
It's all about what you put into your work - the quality of the photos is immaterial, as long as you can interpret them with feeling.  In fact, I prefer pictures that have lots of room for improvement- if it's a perfect photograph it can be left as is.

 here's the original sky pic, taken from my front door.

 the truly awful deer pic got printed out on regular paper......I blocked out the basic lines with a sharpie, then inked over it all to create them from fabric.

it's hard to see, but this is a working sketch.  The basic layout is sewn together and partly quilted.
I laid in more elements with colored pencil- the trees on the left, pines on the right, and rivulet in the center.  When I had dinner at Florence's house in Grand Forks, she had a dried up streamlet across the road, and she and her husband made a hobby of feeding the deer vegetable scraps from the local grocery store.  Well, we didn't see any deer that night, but I put them in from another place as well as a trickle of water from another time.  Thanks for the wonderful supper Florence, this one's for you!

The meadow

I decided to make a quilt honoring British Columbia, and began with a few (bad) pictures I took when heading back to Spokane.   The original title was Leaving Grand Forks, but since I took so many liberties with the setting, it became the Meadow.


This is just out of GF, heading East.

ok, this is the best deer pic I got, the whole family was hanging out in the middle of the road, but by the time I could pull over & get out, they thought it prudent to hop back into the forest.  there were only a few other vehicles out there, but they were biiig logging trucks, so I didn't dare stop on the actual road.

I took this sky, which is from my house at dawn, and worked on it a bit with paintstick.

 Then I combined it with some color washed batiks and painted  some silk for the mountains.  The combo was messed around with to get the right proportion, photoed and printed out on plain paper so I could draw out some details.

The deer are stitched out, ready to be appliqueed- positioned in the right foreground.   They'll be removed and sewn on later, after the background is completed.

happy May day ?!

ok it's snowing.....
perfect day for working on this sky-