Wrapping Up #INKtober

What can I say about my choice of theme for this year's #INKtober other than it didn't go as well as I thought it might? At the midway point I commented that I'd be taking a different tact and working on seeing why some faces held at least a hint of the real person while others could have been anyone. This one in particular put me in mind of those police sketch artist renderings made while a witness tries to remember what someone looked like. Instead, this is supposed to be the actor who plays Chief Inspector Barnaby on Midsomer Murders, but even I can't see him in this.

 

The technique from the Sketchbook Skool class suggested starting with an eyebrow and without lifting pen, sweeping down the nose and back up to complete the other eyebrow. Actual eyes and mouth added next and the shape of the face/head last. Now I tried focusing on the eyes first before adding eyebrows and nose, then the mouth. Sometimes it worked better, but not always. Some mouths were ok, others ruined the whole face, or should I say, made my person now not look like him or herself.

I did more pausing of the tv, more comparison after completion to determine what made one successful and another not (yes, still having roller coaster results), and rued decisions to go back over some areas in the hopes of improving them. This page not too bad, except for the lower left one - it was the mouth again that made him look like someone else.

In the end, I came to at least one conclusion. Nearly every face has the same components - eyes, nose, mouth, eyebrows, ears. It's the shape of each and the positioning of each that gives us our recognizable faces. Distinctive hair styles or beards or no hair at all also adds to a person being instantly identifiable. I know that sounds obvious, but it took me awhile to catch onto it in a discernible way. But the more different faces I drew, the more similar they began to look, at least when I messed them up. No wonder we so often run into strangers we think we must know, or be told we have a doppelganger out there in the world. And perhaps that is the most usable thing I learned with this exercise, that I could create any face at all by putting together these elements in their variety of sizes and shapes, slants and arcs, not just try to faithfully copy those that already exist. Again, perhaps pretty obvious, but now I am more aware of it. It's a step towards caricature and illustration and perhaps adding people to my creative toolbox.

Peace Nearing the End

I did the last of the quilting on the Peace quilt Friday, which left me with this tangle of tails to be pulled to the back. I got to it yesterday, while listening to an hour-long webinar. But alas! There are more tails here than can be dealt with in a single hour. Perhaps not an entire hour webinar more, but close! I'm pleased with the quilting lines I chose, including that last thought to quilt concentric circles around and behind the Chinese character. Not much more now to do!

Changing Seasons

This was Thursday. Those geraniums have borne show-stopping blooms all summer. As the weather has cooled, they have gotten bigger and brighter. I took this picture because I knew what was coming.

This was Friday, the next day. As predicted, our temperatures dropped into the 30's and in came a storm. And yet, the geraniums had just enough protection on the back deck to carry on unscathed.

The leaves have hardly started falling from many trees, although I must admit, the birch out back was dropping them like snowfall itself on Thursday, prompting me to gather some up for the gellie printing session I have yet to embark on. This is a chokecherry tree out front, decorated by the neighbor kids with ghosts and witches, some of which blew off.

The neighbors won't do much lounging in those chaises nor riding of that motorcycle what with the deep freeze settling in for the next 5 days. The 3 or 4 inches of snow we got throughout the day isn't going anywhere soon.

The kids have been going half days to school and may have gotten out a tad earlier as the snow started around ten. Plenty of time to build a snowman from the heavy wet snow, complete with covid mask.

There have been power outages but luckily, not for me. Always a danger of branches and trees buckling under the weight of an early snow when leaves still cling. No more snow predicted for the immediate future but today it has been the winds instead, barreling out of the north, our Canadian neighbor sending icy blasts. Windchill is around 18 degrees and while I did get out yesterday to walk through the snow, today I opted to say inside. The geraniums are looking a little worse for wear. Hot chocolate is on the agenda.

Peace and People

I've finished all the horizontal quilting on the light green section and have just the area around the Chinese character to quilt. I knew there'd be a lot of tails to pull to the back and tie off, something that I really don't mind doing. What I DO mind is then having to bury those tails, a truly tedious job. Thus my decision not to layer this quilt with its backing, knowing that the felt would provide a smooth enough surface not to get caught up in the feeddogs and that I could fuse the backing on once all the quilting was done. Although the process of pulling thread tails to the back and knotting can be almost meditative, it is not fast. This section here took a little more than an hour and a half to complete.

As for my #INKtober daily drawing of people I am watching on tv, I am less than impressed with my progress. When I should be getting better with each day, I seem to be getting worse. At the halfway point, I've gone from faces that have some resemblance to their owners to several days of ones looking nothing like the person I'm drawing. 

A head too long, the next too short, foreheads often encroached upon by a hairline too soon. I'm particularly struggling with mouths, unable to remember any tip I may have read about how to approach them.

Noses are going out of whack too lately. Throwing in a few profiles hasn't helped as much as I'd hoped. I'm beginning to think part of my problem lies in using a ballpoint pen. When I did this exercise before for the Sketchbook Skool class, I was using more of a felt pen with a bold line. I felt I was getting the hang of it as I added faces to my page and likenesses became more, well, like my subjects. I'll keep at it, as I always do, and hope I can start to see where I've gone astray, or more properly, how I can fix what's causing me to draw so off. On the upside, I'm getting pretty good at drawing suit lapels and ties!

A Little Sun, A Little Paint

We have had the loveliest few days of summer-like weather, temps in the 70's and lots of sunshine to set off the turning leaves. It has pried me out of my routine and sent me to a couple of my favorite places to get in my walks. Yesterday I was feeling particularly energetic and motivated to grab a sketchbook I seem to only work in about this time of the year since I started sketching in it and head for city beach.

After the usual walk taking me past a few people still working on their tans, a few actually in the water and others just out strolling like me or resting on benches, I got the concertina sketchbook with my city beach view sketched in and started adding more watercolor to it. Below you can see how far I got on a similar visit last September. I was thinking that I'd work on sky and water this time, but instead started adding color to more trees and working on the mountains behind them. Mostly getting familiar with the brush again, mixing colors, falling short of what I'd hoped the color would be. Really a first pass though, with some small darker strokes to add emulating the trees on those slopes. And a slightly sinking feeling of how much more I have to do on this - there's a back side you know!

Better . . .

. . . oh so much better, to be able to actually see the quilting lines emerge as one sews, not the drudgery of the stitching in the ditch. All the dark areas are done and I'm ready to switch to the lighter green thread to quilt the green areas. You can see my test piece near the bottom and a short run of that lighter thread.

In the meantime, it has become October, with leaves now turning. I pulled a few of these mountain ash ones to sketch, then use in some gelli-plate printing. Close inspection shows the stems and veins remain a bright green.

Quick sketch with ballpoint pen

As October approached, I also had to make a decision about participating in INKtober, that international challenge to draw anything each day of October using ink. I'm still feeling snowed under with projects I'm trying to get to and/or complete which I think is why my daily drawing practice totally went by the wayside. The past years I've participated, I would find myself spending at least an hour, often more, on each day's sketch. I just didn't want to do that this year. But as I paged through my sketchbook, looking at what I'd done, I was impressed and pleased with each year's theme and the sketches that resulted. My personality traits just wouldn't allow me to let it go, but I did come to a compromise that would help me practice an urban sketching technique while watching my tv shows, and thus I wouldn't have to carve out separate time for drawing. I don't know how many of these quick sketches captured while the subjects talked and moved about I'll share as for now they are not particularly good. Even going with the idea that they are not supposed to be true portraits but more like caricatures and this is practice for when I get brave and try sketching people in public is not making me feel better about some of them (and yes, I sometimes cheated mid-sketch and hit the pause button). Then again, after they have sat for awhile, I may feel better about them. Just like the zentangles from one year; I remember getting pretty frustrated and not liking so many of them, yet when I got to those pages in the sketchbook, they all looked really good to me. Ahhh, such is the critical eye! 

Drudgery

I've been finding it difficult to be excited about working on the Peace quilt this last week or so, being faced with a first step of quilting along all those satin stitched applique edges. Essentially, doing stitch in the ditch which has taken nearly as long to do as the satin stitching but relatively invisible. Not only can you not see the stitching which is done with the same thread, but you can't see any texture either, only if you flip it over to see the back. But I finally got this additional grunt work done and have decided to quilt the straight lines in the "border" area next, spacing them by using the outer edge of my walking foot as guide. That makes the lines about 3/8" apart which I find a pleasing distance. I do like the green twist thread but found myself second-guessing using it, almost giving in to using the brown twist of the satin stitching. I think once I quilt the light side of the quilt in the light green twist thread though, the dark green on the other side will make sense.

 

 

In the meantime, I'm plotting my next project. My god daughter had told me before she got pregnant the first time that she was going to have 3 kids, and even had a schedule of when she'd have them. True to her word, daughters one and two arrived on time and now child three (gender unknown) is due around Christmas. Talk about family planning! I've been saving this Kaffe Strip Quilt idea since I first saw it and thought it would be a perfect design for the last child, following a theme of using rectangular strips in the first two baby quilts (see here and here). Now that I know when child three is due, I'm motivated to start figuring out dimensions of individual pieces to size this down a bit and make it my own.

Blogging

Where I landed 14 years ago

Today marks 14 years since I moved back to my native Idaho, a decision I've never regretted. I chronicled my reconnaissance trip to find a place to live, then the drive out and finally the settling in as I unpacked and explored my new surroundings all on the blog, a record more robust than snapshots in a photo album with brief descriptions, or a written journal. A blog is really the best of both and easier to share.

Recently, one of my favorite bloggers, Austin Kleon, noted that he'd been doing this for fifteen years, which prompted me to double check my own blogging history. I was a little surprised to find that come November, I too will have been blogging for 15 years. I honestly wish I'd started sooner so that more of my Wisconsin experience and the quilts I designed there were recorded here, instead of having to dig out the photo albums. As I read through Austin's post, I agreed with all his reasons for blogging, all the advantages of it, and I particularly liked that he summed it up in three reasons to keep blogging which you can read here. They are my reasons too.

Then I spotted a new post by another blogger I follow, Terry Grant, who was also marking 15 years of blogging. I do remember a number of us from the Yahoo Alternative Quilts Group branching out to start our individual blogs at the about the same time. That group is long gone, a bit sadly, as more and more of us ventured into the blogosphere. And many of those initial blogs have gone quiet or totally disappeared. Yet people like Terry and me continue because, as she notes, memory is not always trustworthy, nor is one person's memory of an event the same as another's. She, like I, uses her blog as a "backup memory" for the important things and now lets the "little everyday things" show up on Facebook.

So happy anniversary to the 15 year club! May we continue to enjoy this platform and store our memories and accomplishments and ups and downs here. And thanks to the readers that check in and comment. You are a big part of my creative journey.

  

Snapshots

I hope I don't regret this.

I'd finally finished up the long slog of satin stitching, reminiscing as I did about the days when this kind of applique was popular and there were a few quilters submitting absolute masterpieces using this method to shows both big and small. I remember getting up close to one of them to marvel at intricacies involved in covering all those individual applique pieces' edges perfectly, carefully turning corners and tight curves and diminishing the width of the satin stitch to nothing where called for. I even bought Harriet Hargrave's Mastering Machine Applique to study. It's a two-sided book; turned one way it takes you through how to do mock hand applique as well as securing those pieces with straight stitch, blanket stitch and a few others. Flip the book over and now you have a book dedicated just to satin stitch. I did pick up some good tips and even used some of them. But now, on this piece, I really didn't care about perfectly turned corners so much. Just get it done! And now I was ready to layer it over a piece of eco-felt (I was lucky to find a piece big enough on hand) using spray baste. I pulled out my can of 505 Spray Baste, gave it a shake and heard nothing! I was so sure I had a nearly full can so spent some time rummaging around to be sure it wasn't hiding somewhere but no. Can a product like this dissipate if not used within a certain time frame?

Soooo - options? I didn't want to safety pin the sandwich because past experience tells me this fabric is gonna show holes when the pins come out. Head out to the quilt shop to pick up a new can? Maybe, but that was going to upset my rhythm here, odd as that may sound. Wonder if this Krylon product that I'd bought to aide in mounting some of my framed pieces would work on fabric. Reading the can, "acid free" jumped out at me - always a must - and under the list of things it will work on was . . . yes - fabric! But it is just a light tack product and and and - I have questions about how well things will hold while under the machine. On the plus side, I found the positioning of the top over the sprayed felt much easier to do than over the gummier 505.

P.S - I really like the look of that brown thread in the satin stitching.

I've also really liked the look of the clouds lately, so feathery with a few curls here and there. But now, this has begun . . .

There have been a few wildfires within an hour of me but after the Labor Day windstorm out of Canada blew through, these have been difficult to get contained and major fires sprung up in neighboring eastern Washington. That unusual north easterly wind is unusual for us but kept the smoke mostly out of our area. Now the winds are shifting back to the usual direction from the west and bring with it the smoke from not just those Washington fires but the terrible ones up and down western Oregon that also cropped up over Labor Day. And of course, California is sending its smoke along too. They are predicting that our air quality will be as bad as it can get, just as bad as for people close to the actual fires, by Sunday. Face it, the west coast is very much on fire, crews stretched thin, 500,000 people in Oregon alone having to evacuate and many will have nothing to go home to. We skated all summer, these three states that make  up what we call the Pacific Northwest, but the skating is over. Send rain . . . 

 

It's Not Much . . .

. . . but after sitting on my work table for months, I finally put a cover on an extra signature left over from my Secret Belgium Binding book. Again I make the connection between quilting and bookbinding in that there will always be some scraps left over from a project, too good to toss, too few to quite know what to do with them. And then when you do decide what to do, there will be time spent auditioning what to add, part of you excited that you've found a use for something else that's been lying about, and part of you fussing over choosing just the right addition. 

That's probably why that signature had sat for so long. I was pretty sure about using one of the eco-printed papers but knew I had half a dozen to choose from. Each one having a best side and a less exciting side and how would each look when folded over the signature. And should I use this one or save it for a different project? I fret too much over these things but in the end, am usually pleased with the results and glad that I took the time.

The other thing holding me up a bit was knowing I'd have a decision to make about the thread for sewing the little book together, another thing that shouldn't be as big a deal as I make it. But beyond choosing a weight and color, other considerations included whether to end with tails tied off on the inside or outside, and if outside, what little flair could I add in the way of twisting or braiding or adding beads? Argh, I've never been good at decision making, which has always left me wondering why I took to quilting where it is ALL about making decisions. In the end, I decided just to tie off inside and use a heavier quilting thread that was variegated in the appropriate colors. To my disappointment, the thread was not as heavy as I remembered, and even doubled, it didn't show as I'd anticipated. Well, I decided not to worry about it, just stitch this up so I could get it in the mail to a friend. But yes, there were moments afterward of slight remorse that I'd not searched through other thread choices including perle cottons and embroidery floss. I DO have a wealth of resources to choose from!

The important thing though is that it is finally done and off my table and out of my head. On to other things cluttering up my studio and my mind.

A Slow Week

Not much doing here this week, except that I did have a birthday. The summer lazies are definitely keeping me out of the studio. I made my way down to city beach, a favorite place for me to spend time normally, but I've been avoiding it, worried about crowds and virus spread. But couldn't resist this particular day, finding none of the crowding I feared. As I've noticed other summers, I caught bits of conversations in foreign languages and the nearby restaurant looked to be doing a good business. As you can imagine, businesses wondered just what the tourist season that they depend on might be like. While personally I worried about outsiders bringing in covid to make our relatively low case numbers spike, the town really can't survive without them.

 

Another reason to avoid city beach was the messy goose poop which was everywhere the last time I was here. Many things have been tried over the years to make these geese go elsewhere but they've discovered this is a good place to winter over rather than fly south. There was quite a kerfuffle when it was decided that, not for the first time, they would need to be captured and relocated. A group complained that the geese were being stressed and injured in the process, but I didn't agree. They are not endangered by any means and they really do cause health issues for those visiting the park and swimming where the geese swim. I was relieved to see all the walkways pristine and no geese in sight. Just the ever present gulls who stroll about as if they own the place.

 

A lovely light breeze brought out the sailboats and made for a pleasant walk. Any haze you see against the mountains in the background is from, believe it or not, the fires in California a thousand miles away. Strangely though, it has not messed with our air quality, apparently sent so high on its way here that the particles get dispersed.

As for the birthday, with all the negative things in the news and on line, I made a point to have a quiet day, with my biggest treat being a huckleberry milkshake and a beef brisket barbecue sandwich from a food truck in the neighborhood. Had a lovely chat on the phone with one of my brothers too. But perhaps the best part of my birthday was receiving this card from a good friend. I extend its greeting to all of you.

 

Roadside Attractions and a Quotation

I see deer behind my place fairly often but I rarely see one on my daily walks that take me along sidewalks and across a heavily traveled main cutoff road. I've been taking this maintenance road that runs between it and McNearney Park, dog park on one side and a narrow wooded area between it and houses on the other side. I nearly walked by this one less than a half block from the street, my eyes somewhat concentrated on the ground before me, and perhaps that is what it hoped I would do. Stopping stock still upon seeing it so close, we began a rather long stare-down. It was as if it was thinking, "If I don't move, she won't see me," while I was beginning to wonder if it really saw me. Surely when I reach into my pocket for my phone (which apologies, has a terrible camera capability), it will bolt into the underbrush, but no, just that steady gaze while a snapped away.

 

At one point it did turn its head at a sound coming from the other side of the trees, but then turned back to me. I tried a few steps forward to see if it would move. It was unconcerned. But eventually it tired of me, I suppose, and started picking its way through the bushes beside the road. That's when I got the second surprise - it had a black-tipped tail. The skittish deer I'm used to seeing, the ones that must be responding to my movement off the couch as they bound away before I can get to the patio door for a closer look, are whitetail deer, distinguishable by their fat fluffy tails that have white hair on the underside. When they spook, that tail goes up, showing like a white flag in warning to their buddies.

 

Naturally, I thought this was a black-tailed deer but decided I'd better look it up. And sure enough, it actually is not, but a mule deer of which the black-tailed deer is a sub-species. It really did have huge ears like a mule that should have tipped me off. As it emerged from the brush, it still was not concerned about me being there, following along as it slowly ambled up the road.

 

Eventually, it decided it didn't appreciate being stalked like this and made its way back into the wooded area. I love being able to have these encounters without making my way outside of town.

 

So that's some fauna. How about some roadside flora? I do love Queen Anne's Lace (sometimes known as wild carrot) that thrives in the ditches and along the shoulders of rural areas. If you look closely at ones that have not opened up, they are an amazing complex bundle.

 

And then they open big and flat, often with that black spot in the middle. For the longest time I thought that was just a bug, but no, it is on all of them, a part of the flower.

 

This flower is not wild or a weed but part of the landscaping in the park. Don't know the name but I've been taken with the shape of the petals, how they pinch in a bit where they join the center the way some dimensional applique flowers do. Apologies again for the limitations of my phone's camera to get a clear shot.

And now for the quotation. I was watching the documentary "Good Work: Masters of the Building Arts" (which I highly recommend you watch) and about fell off my chair when the featured stained glass artisan, Dieter Goldkuhle, made this comment when talking about the warehouse where he buys his glass:

"It's fatal to go there because I always end up with so much more glass than I initially wanted to buy. And it just begs me, "Purchase me"."

He goes on to say he brings them home and puts them in his bins, and from time to time he will just get out pieces to hold to the light and marvel in the colors and patterns. "It's that intimate" he says of his relationship to the glass he buys.

He may as well have been any one of us talking about going to a quilt shop or any other type of art store where we buy our supplies. "Fatal" he calls it, to walk through those doors and start looking and touching and trying to block out the siren calls begging us to gather up so much more than we need and bring it home. I found it rather comforting to hear this older, much experienced man talk this way, as I picked myself up off the floor. I doubt I will ever cross the threshold of another quilt shop without thinking, "This is gonna be fatal!"

Goldilocks Returns

Just like my ample fabric stash, I have an ample thread stash. Seriously, I have a lot of spools of threads of different thicknesses and fiber content and colors and values. And yet, when it comes time to find that perfect thread for the project at hand, the perfect one I have in mind is not in my collection. Too dark, too light, too shiny, too matte, it shades too much toward green or too much toward purple. Rarely do I find the thread that is just right. Even with stitching out samples, the thread I thought would work suddenly changes its characteristics on the quilt. Suffice it to say, choosing thread is not one of my favorite parts of quilting.

And the differences between the threads are often subtle, so subtle that most people would not understand why I am dithering over my choices. Chalk it up to experience, to quilts in my collection that still make me cringe at a thread choice that wasn't quite right. I persevere to get as close to right as I can. Clicking on the picture should help you see my test of threads as well as width of satin stitch and tension. The top one was too reddish brown and too shiny - sorry that it does not show up well but you can see the spool of it here. The black was, well, black, and this fabric really isn't black. It has a lot of reddish brown undertones in its darkness. Maybe a grey would work, but my darkest grey was way too light. I rooted around some more in my thread rack and by chance noticed several spools of dark brown twist that looked slightly different from the one I had tested. It turned out to be a much better match due to the fact that the twist included a strand of black with the strand of brown while the other one was just browns. That black toned it down and it was not as shiny either. It still wasn't exactly what I had in mind but I decided it was close enough. And it was a big spool, no worries about running out.

 

I was right in my suspicion that the Misty Fuse would be stabilizer enough so I got to satin stitching around all those raw edges of applique. I was nearly done with the long sections when I ran out of bobbin thread, and lucky thing that I did. When I pulled the top out of the machine, I noticed that my stitching now looked black instead of brown. A trick of the light? No, there's definitely a change of color. What happened here? I have my suspicions but have not had time to test them out yet. Just glad I only stitched about 8 inches this way.

 

In the meantime, I decided it was time to get my thoughts about quilting out of my mind and into something visual I could study. I scanned the pattern photo of the quilt, changed the colors closer to "my" colors in Paint Shop Pro software and started adding quilting lines. Very rough, not to scale of course, but it gives me a general idea of how my ideas will actually look. This is my first idea, simple, straightforward and not detracting from the design. Probably done in the dark green twist thread which would show up on both light and dark fabrics, although maybe more than I would like on the light side.

 

In the meantime, I'd been going back over that mark making exercise with circles and realized one of them could be adapted here if I turned half of the lines vertical, ending around the big circle encompassing the Chinese character. I didn't want to make all the lines vertical because of the bars in the upper left. And I didn't think I wanted to continue lines through the circle.

 

But I'd also wondered about treating the area outside of the applique frame like a separate border. Any thoughts or preferences? All input welcome. 

Mask Tie Solution

Remember the first mask I made, the one with carefully picked hand-dyed fabric from my stash and sporting ties rather than ear loops? The one that I struggled with and was never happy with the results? Well, I'm not one to just toss something, so all this time since, my mind has wandered back to it now and then, wondering how I might make the ties work better for me. My mind really got clicking when I ran across the hair ties I'd tried on the no-sew mask, thinking I could loop the tie ends through one giving me a pull on version like regular dust masks. But on a recent trip to Wal-mart, I may have found an even better solution, albeit a bit pricey one. Instead of having to pull the elasticized ties over my head, this Pony-Connect separates for an easy clip together.

I haven't trimmed the tie ends yet as I'm still working on getting the length right, but I think I like the way this is working and the fact that I don't have to do any sewing to attach tie to elastic.

To my delight, this solution made the mask magically fit with no gaps, something I'd not been able to get it to do when tying the individual ties. No getting around the fact that it messes with my hairdo but I think I will be able to find a use for this.

In the meantime, I don't think I've shown a picture of me wearing this mask, one I toss in the car when I'm running errands. I took this pic on my most recent grocery run to send to friend Sherrie who is collecting such pics for a future post on her blog - see this post. If you are so inclined, I'm sure she'd enjoy seeing how you, my readers, are showing off their masks.