Bopping to Cleveland and back

Sunday morning Carlos and I jumped in the car and headed to Cleveland Ohio so I could tape a segment for the second season of Quilting Arts TV. What a blast we had!

We arrived early enough to meet up with Rayna Gillman, Claire Fenton and Shelly Stokes for dinner and had a great time. Claire was excited about the snow and the rest of us were glad that there wasn't much of it.

Carlos and I decided to visit the museum district after we checked in at the studio on Monday morning since we had the day to ourselves. The Cleveland Museum of Art was closed for renovations (until 2011!!) and the Museum of Contemporary Art is closed on Mondays so we headed to the Museum of Natural History (along with several hundred school children who had the very same great idea). The first sight as you walk in the door is of a juvenile tyrannosaur named Jane. How cool, that almost beats Tarzan's Jane for namesakes. Later in the afternoon I headed back to the studio and hung out with Rayna, Claire and Judy Coates Perez.

This morning I taped my segment with Pokey and it was great fun! Pokey is so perfect as host of the show, -- entirely capable, unflappable and professional, and at the same time enthusiastic, genuine and completely adorable. All around it was a wonderful experience with a terrific group of people. The second season will start airing this summer on PBS.



As soon as I was done, we snapped a pic in front of the studio, hopped in the car and headed for home.


Oh, here's a question for anyone in the blogosphere: All along Route 80 in Pennsylvania (which is like 3 weeks long - Rayna's observation and I agree) some of the exit sign posts have small, cryptic signs attached to them stating "Red Detour Route" or "Green Detour Route" (or black or yellow). What is this about? What do we detour from or to? Why are there different colored detours and how do you know which one to take, and when? Curious, I am.

Illustration Friday - plain

cotton fabric, hand-dyed wool felt, acrylic ink, stamped letters and acrylic paint on 6" x 6" stretched canvas

I printed the pear (yes, a real pear!) with a matte acrylic paint and the leaf with a metallic acrylic paint for the contrast in sheen.

Working on these small canvases has been an interesting experiment and I like the direction I'm heading in. There's something to this journaling thing...

Illustration Friday - stitch

cotton fabric, bamboo batting, acrylic ink, cotton and linen thread, stamped letters and acrylic paint on 6" x 6" stretched canvas

The moth is sketched with thread onto a cotton fabric printed with a halftone of one of my ink drawings (it's really pale and doesn't show up much in the photo, or irl for that matter). I missed last week's IF due to a big deadline but really, how could I not do "stitch"?? Even with more deadlines looming.

White

Every month at the SAQA meetings held at the Country Quilter we pick a word to use as a creativity prompt. This month's word is "white". Yesterday southern New England woke up to a fizzled blizzard that coated the tree branches with fluffy snow. I couldn't resist taking pictures when I should have been shoveling. Good inspiration for "white"! As soon as I can get around the other side of some big deadlines I'll get started.

Workshop News - Project Patchwork

Is everyone loving Project Runway this season as much as I am? And who wouldn't love a challenge where you're set loose in a chocolate store for 5 minutes??

I've been teaching a workshop called Project Patchwork for the last couple of years that is the art quilter/textile artist's answer to the fun on PR. This summer I'll be teaching it at A Quilter's Affair in Sisters, Oregon. These are the workshops that run the week before the big outdoor quilt show in Sisters. The workshop is offered twice on two different days, with different challenges each day. If you'd like a peek at the results from one of the previous classes, click here. We're going to have a blast!

I'll also be teaching workshops there on Discovering Found Objects, working with paper, wire, metal, ephemera, etc, and on Outer Limits - really, really unusual edge finishing techniques for art quilts. That workshop covers a minimum of 20 (twenty!) different edges, everything from beads to yarn to paper to plastic and lots of variations on fabric binding.

For more Project Runway fun, check out the Project Rungay blog. Those boys nail it every time. It's nearly as much fun as the show!

And now that I've photographed that chocolate I can eat it...

The Quilt Show update

The episode that I taped for The Quilt Show in La Veta, Colorado last summer will start airing on April 14th this year. It's episode 208, "Principally Speaking – A Firm Foundation for Fabulous Designs".

Alex and Ricky were wonderful to work with and the taping was fun. Photo by Gregory Case.

For more of Greg's pictures of the taping that day go to the Quilt Show website, click the Slide Show, then Page 5 for September 2007.

Couture

The fiber postcard group that I belong to, Postmark'd Art, does several large, through-the-mail swaps each year and now we're also creating a card each month in response to a word prompt. The word for January is Fashion.



A non-sequitur, appropos of nothing - I read alot, usually 2 to 3 books a week. I just finished one that my daughter lent me and I highly recommend it, Look Me In The Eye by John Elder Robison. It's an excellent memoir of someone living with Asperger's Syndrome. For a really good fictional novel of a boy with Asperger's, read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightime by Mark Haddon. I read this when it was first published in 2003, but it's definitely on my re-read list.

A rectangle, a square, a triangle and a stamp

I needed to make some fiber postcards in the theme of "Houses" and boiled my design down to the basic shapes - rectangle, square and triangle. I had already carved a stamp in the shape of a window for a different project, so that came in handy for printing. Then I played with composition. Here are four of the ten I made today. Of course, none of these would pass building codes...









The seals I stamped in magenta ink are from fellow Nature Printing Society member Fred Mullett's Red Pearl stamp site.

Illustration Friday - soar

cotton fabric, printed mulberry paper, origami paper, acrylic paint, and hand-carved stamped flowers on 6" x 6" stretched canvas