More flowers and a morning visitor

I love the spidery petals of bachelor buttons (although I definitely do not like spiders).


Someone else loves them too. While I was moving in for a close shot, this bee zoomed in and claimed territorial rights.


Out on my walk today, I decided to take a few shots of the lowly daisy. And yes, another bee said, This is mine. Now I am very familiar with this flower, yet until I saw it close up on the computer screen, I'd never noticed that the center has that spiral thing going on that sunflowers do.


Not about to go unnoticed is the orange hawkweed, such a vibrant splash of color.



And here's my visitor. There's a herd of deer that feed across the field from me near the tree line. I know they wander close to the house even though I don't catch them, but this morning this lone fella was chomping on dandelions and nibbling on the plum trees along the backyard fence. Pretty flighty though - he saw me as I moved past the kitchen window and moved along himself.

The lake, by the way, reached flood stage this morning. While it doesn't effect me, it may top over my landlord's waterfront property. I took some pictures this morning that you can see here.

A few works from All in the Family Exhibit

The "All in the Family" exhibit will be coming down at the end of the week, so I thought I should share a few more of the pieces that caught my eye. Well, you must admit that the thing above would catch anyone's attention. It is a stoneware glass lamp by Elizabeth Gardner called "There is more here than meets the eye." What a fun piece and I can just imagine the type of modern design home it would look fabulous in.


This is a felted wool piece called "Two Tall Pines" by Shauna Lyman. I find I am often drawn to the soft vague images of this art form, but have no desire to try it myself.


Finally, this was the talk of the exhibit - a grandmother's rendering of Garden Flowers, done during the Great Depression when there was no money for art supplies. That didn't stop Perina Wiley from making art though. She had crayons and she had brown paper bags, so that is what she used. Have to remember that the next time I want to complain about being short on funds for art supplies.

Another Leaf Quilt

The clouds simply won't leave us for long, won't quit sending down their liquid content. But they do part from time to time, enough to let me get gorgeous shots of the flowers seemingly unconcerned with the lack of uninhibited supplies of sunshine. In a way, it's a good thing as it makes it easier to stay inside and work. Am making progress on my 5th and last piece for the upcoming Artwalk - another one using leaf stamped charm squares.

This should look familiar; I made this pairing of charms and background while searching for fabric to complement the large red maple leaf print (see this post). I had worried from the start that the stitching I'd done to pull out the leaf print wasn't doing the best job. Now I decided to add quilting with a dark brown rayon thread and that's exactly what it needed to make the leaves show up. Here you can see the difference between the upper leaf with the added brown stitching and the lower leaf waiting to receive the same treatment.


It's important to know your strengths and equally important to acknowledge your weaknesses so that you can devise strategies to deal with them. I can draw and free motion quilt willow leaves, ivy, other simple leaf shapes, but for some reason, my brain cannot conjure up an image of a maple leaf and make it come out my hands. Even with one in front of me, I struggle to draw the shape. So why fight it when I can trace shapes from someone else's renderings? I bought this fabric ages ago when I was still making clothes. I can't remember what I thought I'd make, nor what the fabric content is (I'd love to think it is a rayon, but I fear it is merely a nice polyester). It has a variety of sizes and shapes of maple leaves just right for the quilting I want to add in the background. It occurred to me that I could trace the shapes onto freezer paper and cut them out, then iron them in place and quilt around them. Problem solved.


Here they are adhered to the top, waiting for me to decide what color thread I should use. I plan to couch that dark brown chenille around the edge of each square and am wondering if I should quilt the leaf shapes in dark brown too? Something tells me they would stand out more than I'd like, but I won't know until I stitch some samples.

And then the Azaleas come...

Two sides of an Iris

Bold and in your face

Soft and muted

Jockeying for Space Postcard

"Jockeying for Space"
Fabric Postcard 4 x 6
Sheila Mahanke Barnes 2011

I had the chance to play with fabric postcards again over the weekend. I've made several with triangles like this, calling them Jockeying for Position. But this one, because it has a tighter feel to the arrangement, is more in line with the larger Jockeying for Space, and so that is what this one is called. It also differs from the other ones in its addition of narrower triangles.


I'd meant to use up the triangles that had been trimmed from another project last year, and got as far as getting out the paint wipe cloth that would be the background. I stalled while thinking too hard about which parts of that cloth would work best with which triangles. I allowed myself to get overwhelmed and ended up putting the project away. This time, one of the goals was to work quickly and definitely not spend too much time picking out spots on the background and arranging the triangles. I considered the lighter side, realized I could cut a strip off and sub-cut it into postcard-size backgrounds and be done with it. Now I have multiple backgrounds ready to go.


The arrangement of the triangles fell into place with only a few rounds of "jockeying" and thought. The ironic thing is, this orientation is the one I designed to. It was only when I was ready to square it up that I thought to check the other orientations, deciding I like the portrait orientation shown at the top. But frankly, it looks pretty good no matter which way it is turned.

Technical Integrity

"Though I don't believe in a standard of craft as an absolute criteria in bookmaking, the ignorance (or ignoring) of basic structural principles can undermine a book which might otherwise be engaging and successful."

Johanna Drucker
The Century of Artists' Books, copyright 1994/2004

I probably do get more hung-up on the technical execution of a design than is always necessary, but I believe it has its importance. (And it ties into my general aesthetic of precision and formality.) Surely you've seen quilts that had so much going for them design-wise but were so poorly put together as to distract and detract from the overall impact. I think Drucker has put it so well here, and it is an important lesson all artists must consider.

No pictures today - it is another dark and dreary day, and the peonies are keeping the hoods of their parkas up...

And just like that...

One day a tight little bud, the next exploding to three times its size into full bloom. No wonder the petals are creased and wrinkled. An eye-catching splash of color the intensity of which I forget from year to year. And then there's that wonderful bit inside.

Thinking about it...

Spring has been oh so slow to come, but coming it is.

Lilacs

Apple Blossoms

You might want to click on that last one for a larger view - the veining visible in the petals is pretty amazing.

Growth

I'm nearly done with the quilting on my stack n whack quilt; I think I need to add some quilting to the large diamonds and then it will be ready to bind. It took a long time doing all the straight-line quilting with a walking foot, and I found myself thinking about how different my aesthetic is from the majority of longarm quilters. My knee-jerk response to how should a quilt be quilted is with stitch in the ditch, lines and grids. That's partly because of my traditional background and my love of antique quilts, but also because it is easy to do either by machine or by hand and less intimidating to me than free motion quilting.. I didn't have to ponder long about how to fill the green corner triangles on the star blocks, for instance - channel quilting could be done without marking and makes sense with the other quilting. However, straight line quilting is much more difficult for a longarm quilter than swirling lines or feathers, so you can bet those triangles would have sported something like that had I sent this out to be quilted.


After many hours, all that straight stitching was finally done and today I was ready to lower the feeddogs and quilt like a longarm quilter. I even got brave and changed from the monofiliment thread to some teal Oliver Twist hand-dyed cotton thread to help accentuate the patterns of the kaleidoscope centers of the stars. I really enjoy this type of free motion quilting - no marking required, just work around the pattern in the fabric design - nothing too exposed so I don't have to worry so much about my less than perfect stitching.

As you may recall, I've been working on this project off and on for at least 6 years, and I've discovered a positive to pulling out an old project: It can show you just how much you have grown. The kaleidoscope centers were the first things I did, and I remember staring at them for months as they hung on the design wall, totally intimidated by the thought of free motion quilting them. I remember having no idea how to approach it, and little confidence in my ability to do it well once I did. I just knew I'd wreck those beautiful designs. Fast forward to now, and the answer to how to quilt them was obvious, my confidence in my ability to do so not an issue. The only thing I pondered at all was thread choice, and that not for long. I could see that the teal thread would help define the motifs, make them stand out in a way they could not unquilted. That was a really good feeling, to have this concrete evidence of progress in an area that I normally feel I'm weakest.

Nothing much new under the sun

I always have to remind myself that just because something is new to me, doesn't mean it hasn't been done before. (In spite of that saying, nothing new under the sun, there had to be a first time for everything so I can be gullible.) Here I was, all enthralled with the Newspaper Blackout thing which appeared so original to me (see previous post) only to stumble upon a variation of it dating back to the 1960's. I have been reading The Century of Artists' Books by Johanna Drucker, and yesterday arrived at the chapter on altered books. Above is a page from Tom Phillips A Humument, in which he transforms a Victorian novel by William H. Mallock through inking/painting out unwanted text. He soon saw that he could incorporate imagery as well and link the preserved text with the empty white spaces between type. (Click on the photo for a larger view.)

I was particularly interested in what the author had to say about this method of altering a book, because it mirrors what I was experiencing as I worked with those newspaper obituaries: "Let free of the responsibility of making a new invention the book artist is able to allow associative processes free reign, to let the work happen..." I've always had an easier time working with something other than a blank surface, so it should be no surprise that this has piqued my interest.

Newspaper Blackout

I admit I've been drawn to some odd things lately. The latest surprise fascination is with something called Newspaper Blackout as done by Austin Kleon. He uses the technique to write poetry, but I played with it a bit yesterday to reduce obituaries to an essence. Why obituaries? I spent some time with a friend Saturday who is over 80 and admitted that the first thing she reads in the newspaper is the obits. I told her she needed to find something else to read first, obits second.


So obituaries were on my mind when I perused the paper yesterday, and I've been thinking about trying this blackout thing. This seemed a good place to start, not to compose poetry, but to distill these already capsulized accounts of a person's life to an essence.


I carefully read the first one, taking in all the details (which were actually quite entertaining) before going back to search for my few chosen words. I just drew lines through the rest of the text, saving the total blacking out for later.


After the first few, I found I was skimming for words that would make sense together, not really reading the content as presented. My mind was engaged in a puzzle and becoming totally absorbed in the process. I soon realized how similar this was to some of the drawing on the right side of the brain exercises. Forget about what the thing is that you are looking at. Focus on bits and pieces that on their own are merely a line, a curve, a negative space, a disembodied word.


And then, when I returned to do more thorough blacking out, I realized how relaxing this process was; I really zoned out fully concentrated on the movement of the pen back and forth. I wasn't using a proper pen, I don't think, just an old felt-tip pen that was running out of ink on me, so the coverage wasn't very even. That's when I saw I could create a pattern in the blackout by making my shading lines in different directions.


There are other ways to vary the blacking out, I discovered. Yes, creativity abounds even in this lowly exercise. All in all, I could see that this could make a great warm-up exercise to any creative project. It disengages the left brain, it makes the brain work to see beyond the obvious, and it takes one out of time. And by using obituaries, I glimpsed into strangers' lives and what may or may not have been the most important about them. And it beats the reason my 80 year old friend spends time with the obits.

You may need to click on the pictures for the larger view to see the words I chose. Also, these were all done with the same pen. The variety in shading and color is due to the way I adjusted the scans.