Back to School Portrait

     Summer vanished. People came and went; and people returned to stay. In the meantime I had to pay for summers as a teen, playing golf and swimming in sunny Texas without using the lifeguard's zinc protection on the nose. It was the 50's, of course, minus the vast information about sunscreen protection we have today.

Click to enlarge.

Linda says, ALWAYS WEAR SUNSCREEN!

      So this August I had some Mohs minimal surgery to make repairs, to stem possible damage to my nose. The reason I sewed the experience is that I have a quilt challenge topic of "GREEN" from an art quilt group, Material Mavens. All I could think of was money and grass, but nothing personal. I usually like an emotional connection, as in a journal notation, to create a piece of art. When I hit the surgeon's office, there were GREEN SCRUBS all around with purple accessories. I was excited to finally have a topic! 

       I have used this excellent surgeon in the past. But before beauty there are some ghastly appearances such as swollen jowls and purples. I won't show the big bandages that I craft out of brown tape every morn to cover the wounds. I had neat stitches down one side and a circle to heal by itself on the other. If I added the tape you couldn't see what I am illustrating. I believe in humor to deal with most problems.

        When Material Mavens post GREEN quilts on September 15, I will have more details on the crafting of the piece, and I just thought of some additional graphics to add to this 12" x 12" quilt.

A Crafty Summer Week: Batman Pillowcase, bracelet, and Reveal Day

    The kids have moved back, 20 minutes away, and are now settled in, very happy. When the girls created sundresses, David preferred a Batman shirt. So far, he is getting a Batman pillowcase. It is a one or two hour job if you follow the fabulous instructions on YouTube.

     I Googled How to Make a Sausage Pillowcase. This is the best explanation I have found for this amusing task. I look forward to making some more for the girls and friends for trips. The size fabrics I bought were: body, 23" x 45"; header, 13" x 45" and accent 2" x 45". When I got home I realized my fabrics were only 42" but everything worked out fine! Click to enlarge the photos.

      That same week, The Beadsprouts learned a new bracelet pattern. It is a lot of fun and easy once you get started. I haven't found any instructions on line. Hannah found it a breeze, but I make a silly mistake every time I pick it up again. I'll make some more and try to come up with instructions. The blue and white bracelets are Nita and Luly's inspiration!

       Also, Material Mavens had their Reveal Day. The theme was CELL. I have already posted on how I used Klimt's CELLS, but you might be interested in further information I added on the connection of science and art back at the end of the 19th C Vienna as well as view about 12 quilts with the challenge topic CELL.

Back to Painting...a new start

     Friday before last, Joe and I drove into the MFA to see the colorful quilted 6" x 8" flags sent in from six continents to celebrate Boston. Ahead of me, I had the quilt challenge of "CELL" by my Material Maven international art quilt group. Synergistically, Joe and I had just returned from a stop at the Neue Gallerie in NYC where we viewed "Adele Bloch-Bauer" which is always on permanent display. I happened on a movie of Klimt's life via Netflix and found an unread book in my library titled The Kiss about a Klimt painting. As it turns out, Klimt viewed a lot of cells under microscope which appeared in many paintings. The power of Klimt's paintings inspired me to pick up the brush again.

       Just at the hero and heroine in a romance novel are at odds before they fall in love, I had never liked Klimt's paintings as much as my other favorite painters. Absorbed in his work, I became semi-obsessed.

 
       At Costco, I saw a painting kit, a little more challenging than paint by numbers, and I painted Klimt's "Tree of Life" to get a feel for his cells or signets (an excuse to be a child again). I found some ideas for getting the grands to create their own trees at YouTube. Back into painting, I set up two portable easels to oil paint (alkyds) the grandchildren from photos. I prefer painting from life, but distance is a problem. Whereas I once painted 9 am to 9 pm, after two hours, I had had enough. The next day I realized I needed my BIG easel so I could brace my arm and Joe got me a tall stool. Painting became fun again.  I am looking forward to painting less traditional portraits inspired by Klimt, my teachers at the SMFA Boston and art history...now that I rediscovered my old, but bigger, easel.



       Here are the first day and the second day...MORE TO GO on both. Hannah begins to look like herself, I think; but Erika's is a major miss. But I won't give up! Try, try again, now that I am comfortable. I will save those portable easels for painting landscapes in the open aire, also inspired by Klimt and art history. Click photos to enlarge.

Time "FLU" while stitching!

    Since a child I have loved an excuse, like rare rain in Amarillo, to stay inside to color! This week it was the flu. A chance to stay home to stitch, watch movies and read. I stitched a lot (MM spoiler alert).

    Yes, Erika (and family) came to visit over Passover/Easter week. It was only reasonable that they check out their new house. We thought the children's flu had passed. While here, granddaughter and Joe went out to hang eggs in her carefully chosen spots. But much of the time she still needed to rest. We didn't rest so much and caught the flu. Life was slow the last two weeks, but stitch I did. 

    I had an assignment to quilt "canyon." Probably only I would express it literally, but when the Palo Duro Canyon is just outside my home town and is second in size to the Grand Canyon....and Georgia O'Keefe painted her time spent there, you want people to know about it. I could quilt nothing else. But I still have a month before "Reveal Day" at Material Mavens to think of something else and do it better. I could add a flying crow from Georgia's painting. I painted muslin with Jacquard fabric paints and quilted with #8 embroidery thread.

    Today I realized I better get started on the Katie quilt for Project Hope.http://www.prohope.org/ This year the topic is bugs and nature, so I made one block. I have been wanting to make a 36 square 12" block. It made me so happy, I want to do more.  Click photos to enlarge.

Communication: a group posting

      Our 12" x 12" quilt group Material Mavens had Reveal Day today. Our topic the past month was Communication. Below find my posting, but you can go to the MM site to see all contributions of the 15 members of the group.  All quilts should be up by midnight. It is fun to see how many versions of Communication are created. The new topic is also listed. Canyon will be challenging, but I have some ideas. At the MM site, I wrote the following:

      The same day “communication" was announced as our theme, I strangely happened to applique birch trees in doubles. The branches started reaching out to touch to communicate. My brain said they stood for both our virtual and our face-to-face lives. We live two lives in one. However trite the image, my brain refused to entertain any other expression of the topic.

      Today we have circles of friendship and families we see regularly, but just as important and real are the virtual friendships, families and lives we enjoy only via the Internet. It has been said that 4 out of 5 Internet users have developed new lives online in virtual worlds. It is interesting to think how communication differentiates these worlds. Presence, with its diverse elements, communicates as much as words in the physical world, while in the virtual world, communication is both focused and limited by the shared interests.  Communication is never easy, face-to-face, but may be more difficult online; thus, the emergence of emoji, the Japanese term for the picture characters or emoticons that we use to clarify or stand for our facial expressions in real life. ☺ But that is another quilt!

A teaser: Are the communicating birches virtual or real? That is the paradox in all representational art.      Note: This quilt is mounted to stretched canvas in a manner demonstrated in my February 13, 2013 blog posting on Linda Drawing Time.

Family Holiday: Interwoven for Material Mavens

     My Material Mavens journal quilt group has a new theme and posts on Reveal Day, the 15th of every other month. I like to have a personal connection the the subject of these 12" x 12" quilts. This topic "interwoven" was challenging.

      When thinking of what is interwoven, I thought of my family since it was December. The mixing of traditions and family personalities kept leaping to mind. The simultaneous  reading of Middlemarch, with all its interwoven themes, just accentuated the chosen topic.

        I remembered Celtic designs with their intricately intertwining patterns, and researched them on the Internet and in books. Rather than quilting patterns, I was looking for something wilder but still a controlled image.Since there were no fabrics with such designs and appliqueing would take me a year, I decided to enlarge to our 12” x 12” using squares and then paint the piece on muslin. Red and green holiday Jacquard Textile Colors mixed lightly with water left soft the white piece of fabric on which I drew. When the paint was dry, I accentuated the lines of the image with a Sharpie Rub a Dub laundry marking pen that does not bleed but gives a consistent wide mark. I stitched over all the lines with invisible thread to quilt to the batting. I added a red and green backing fabric that came up and over the edge, mitered at the corners. Finally, almost, I attached cheap red carnival beads all around.

       Next, a friend suggested I mount my Family Holiday to a 12” x 12” pre-stretched canvas. I found canvas on sale at Michael’s and the shallowness was perfect for a quilt. I usually like deeper for a painting. I cut a 15” x 15” piece of the backing fabric and lightly centered the quilt and  basted or stitched all around the back edges of the art by hand. I put the quilt, attached to the new backing, face down and dabbed Aleene’s fast- drying tacky glue to the back edges of the 15” x 15” and secured those outer edges to the wood. The result was a painting ready to display...but one with the floating softness of a quilt.

         

Square spiral: a Reveal Day posting

     If you were asked to design a spiral quilt block, what would you come up with. Below is my offering at Material Mavens. After you try to draw the pattern and color it (it is tricky), I recommend your visit to see, enlarge the photos, and read the explanations given by 12 participants in this international journal quilt group. For my 12" x 12" offering, I wrote:

     Because I am often in a spiral, I felt confident to work with this theme for September. I have earrings galore which have spiral designs. I often feel like a dancer in a spiral; and I like the zany and untraditional that the symbol connotes.

     At a recent quilt show, I obsessed over a seemingly simple spiral block quilt that did not seem to interest others. I casually tried to sketch how to compose the mildly tricky block; so I was pleased to have an excuse to work with the block in detail. All I needed was the two colors of fabrics.

     At the NH Mancuso quilt show, in the last vendor booth which I visited,  there were batik spirals fabrics perfect for the job. I chose colors opposite on the color wheel to hint at, somewhat like yin and yang, the good and the bad spirals in life or the world today. I set the small erratic fabric spirals inside the larger architectural spiral of achieved calm. The back of the quilt is a hand-dyed spiral of a same color which I found in my stash.

The Theme is Daydreams

    The international journal quilt I belong to, Material Mavens, has Reveal Day today. We reveal a new topic every two months on the 15th. The topic this time is DayDreams. Visit the group of twelve quilters to see interesting and more complex interpretations!

     I do not daydream. I dusk dream. When I hit the pillow in the evening, at a time I should be sleeping, I start to plan my paintings. I wonder how to celebrate 50 years of marriage, imagine new projects to enjoy with my grandchildren, and think about friends near and far. The quiet period, with nothing to disturb my dusk dreaming, along with my being a night person, can be productive.

     This quilt started out as a nightwalk on a beach in Maine or the Vineyard, but the sand became stars at night. I love the coast...walking and picking up shells. But stars at night with an assortment of pillows, topics dreamed on the pillows from that week in June one day about a month ago (baking, painting plans, quilt shows, friendly spider Charlotte near my computer), are reflected in this piece. I REALLY wanted to portray the bear who made it all the way to the ocean on Cape Cod and was taken 100 miles back into Western Massachusetts, but again made it 100 miles back to a tall Brookline tree before he was downed. He had big daydreams and the admiration of many. Mine should be bigger!

Fast Fabric Postcard: for Nancy

     Birthdays always sneak up on me. But I now have a method for the world's fastest fabric greeting card. I made this last night "watching" Henry Louis Gate's Finding Your Roots program on PBS. Maybe the birthday card will get to Nancy by May10th!

      Cut 3 pieces of fabric 4" x 6." One is the decorative top piece, the second in the sandwich is the batting for which I used felt. If you want to "quilt" the top piece to the batting, do it now. Then there is the back piece that must say "Postcard."

       For extra protection, sew these three pieces near the edge to secure them. I didn't. Cut and iron Wonder Under to two strips of fabric 1" x 6" and two strips 1" x  4". Fold these strips in half lengthwise and remove the backing of the WU.  Place these strips of fabric tight and flat along the edges of the fabric and iron them in place. Follow the instructions on the Wonder Under and cut the strips a little long to trim to fit. To secure the bonded fabric, I went around the edge of the card both to iron and add a decorative machine stitch. To quilt further, I stitched other stars from that same decorative stitch at different spots on the postcard. Click to enlarge photos.

        I then stamped Postcard to the backside and addressed the card with Fabrico pen which I heat set. (Here, addresses are covered with fabric scraps.) I pressed the stamp on carefully. It probably needs less postage since it is flat and the size of a postcard, but since I ask for hand-cancelling, I pay full letter price.
       
         P.S. Last week I Googled the National Geographic DNA Genographic project to get my kit and it arrived yesterday. Now to find time to gather my DNA to mail it in to find where in the world I came from thousands of years ago. Should be fun. On the 15th, Material Mavens reveal their "mystery" quilts and I will show the one I just finished at that time.

      

     

Elements: a Material Mavens 12 x 12 quilt

     The Material Mavens publish a 12 x 12 inch quilt the 15th day of every other month on their Reveal Day, each member's dealing with the same theme. This time the theme is Elements. I wrote:

     In ancient thought, Fire, Earth, Water and Air and sometimes Spirit (something beyond the physical world) are the classical elements, the root units from which the world is formed. Hopefully the elements work in harmony!

    Today these early descriptions are used in writing and graphics, paintings, tarot and astrology. In my stash, I found fabric to represent each physical elements and separated them by curvy quilting. The gold represents the spiritual.

     I cut gold fabric to which I had ironed Wonder Under. I punched a hole in the center of the square piece of fabric and cut a spiral from the center all the way around and back again. I fused the spiral  on the front and what was left on the reverse of the 12 x 12. I squeezed puff paint to edge the activating spiral, sprinkled gold beads atop and on the bottom, and used a hair dryer to secure.  

Hearty Beating: a journal quilt

Click to see naughty errant heart waves.

   

      I belong to an international 12 x 12 quilt group, The Material Mavens. Every two months we have a new theme chosen by one of the members. It was my turn and I chose "surprise," having no idea what to do. Not one idea came to me. I do love surprises. One should have them at every gathering, dinner party or meetings up...even in blogs and journal quilts. Today was REVEAL day when all show their quilts on the theme.

     Life intervened to save the day, somewhat. I had some wild times with my heart and some good news as well, each happening, positive and negative, a complete surprise to me. I won't bore you with details, but the loud colors, the brash conflicts and softness in the quilt show the two extremes. Previously, in times of Afib thinking, I had quilted and beaded tiny rectangular heart quilts; and this assignment gave me an opportunity to display them. Across the center of the 12 x 12, I sewed some fusible thread in an EKG chart similar to an irregular reading and placed foil over the stitching to iron the iridescent waves.

     The 12 x 12 quilt content is purposefully irregular and needs some balance and resolution but the topic has none. so that is appropriate for my "Surprise" journal quilt. The backing comes over the sides of the front to make the binding or edge.

Harmony on the Homefront: a Material Mavens quilt

    My friend, Alice, founded an international 12" x 12" art quilt group blog, Material Mavens. I had given her a book for her birthday about a similar group which lit a fire in her. She is quite the organizer.

     Our first challenge was to make a quilt about "harmony." On September 15, we all revealed our quilts and a new theme was chosen for the next two months.

Home Harmony

        My journal quilt design developed this way:  Three things happened at once. My accuquilt cutter arrived. Joe and I were babysitting the grandchildren while their parents moved their home to another state.  I needed to think "harmony."

       I was excited to try the cutting machine and placed an inexpensive blended roll of batiks into the chopper to get numerous triangles and many squares of two sizes. In creating the quilt, I limited myself to what was available in this particular stash of batiks.

       Off and on, the children concentrated to make houses of squares and rectangles. They had "house" on the mind and organized a tabletop of multi-colored homes (small square and triangle on big square as in the center).  Harmony, however imperfect (I put the house on in the wrong direction) prevailed in several directions. This two-sided quilt is an homage to that time, the youngsters' design, and my new helper, the fabric cutting machine.

Lettering Headers: fabric penmanship

click to enlarge

      The Material Mavens, my talented Texas 12" x 12" quilt group, was inspired by Jamie Fingal Designs' lettering at her blog. We wrote her for advice. The generous quilter she is, Jamie sent advice. Each in our group has been given a letter to fashion for our moniker at our MM blog. I drew the L.

      Listening to President Obama's wonderful Jobs Act talk to Congress, I cut and ironed away. I was assigned an L which I found on my computer software. I printed it, traced and cut it out a little bit bigger to fit onto a 4" x 5" piece of fabric. At first it looked too skinny. I traced the letter onto the back of freezer paper and cut out the letter.

      I didn't know what colors to choose among my fabrics but I thought a more solid pattern should be the letter. Something wider in design would be the background. It is good I made two choices since I now see one of mine resembles Andrea's lined fabric background.  On the piece of letter fabric I ironed Wonder Under to the back, ironed on the freezer paper L, and then cut out the letter to iron on the chosen background.

      I now see Jamie uses different colors for background and letter. I must learn to prepare more thoroughly, but I got the letters made and will send them off in the mail to Alice in Texas where she will assemble all our letters to spell out Material Mavens.  Be sure to visit Jamie's blog Twisted Sister!