I’m back, for a day or two; today was the last full day of work for the Trinity Artists Among Us show. Today, we dismantled the show and then checked out unsold art to the artists and purchased art to the new owners. I got home at 7pm and went out for Mexican food with Mr C – as I really wanted a margarita.

I am a bit exhausted and looking forward to some time away with my STASH friends on a retreat near Sisters. We are leaving on Wednesday. Tomorrow, I have to take my computer to the Apple Store to be shipped to the Apple Dr. My track pad seems to have a mind of it’s own. I will see if I can remember how to blog from my iPad.

That lovely jar up there is called A Prayer Jar. I fell in love with it when it arrived at the show. Mr C bought it for me for Mother’s Day. I am very lucky!

Here are some photos from the show. A view of the show with some fiber art. The pieces with the oak trees are by Karen Miller, a superb Katazome artist.

I really liked these screen printed pieces.

This painting really spoke to me – that is truly my color scheme!!

A grouping of metal sculpture.

And I M Bookman, created from books and stuff.

I love how dramatic the walls of Kempton Hall look with paintings from floor to ceiling on the beautiful wood paneling.

I decided I needed to get back into the studio so I managed to make one green 3 X 3 tonight.

The Artists Among Us 2012 exhibit is almost ready for prime time. We have achieved our goal of a show that looks like a gallery with a curated show. Allan Oliver, one of the co-chairs, owned a gallery in North Portland and has created a beautiful display of art. This year, we have only one of a kind original art — no production work like jewelry and clothing. The exhibit is less cluttered and the exhibited art has more room to breath.

There are a few fiber artists in the mix. Here are some of their displays:

Lynda Christianson – Eugene.

Terry Grant, Portland.

Diane English, Eugene

Karen Miller, Corvallis.

And, my display.

These are paintings by Terry Grant’s very talented son-in-law, Carlos Molina.

We have lots of new artists in the show this year who have brought a vibrancy and more modern look. These paintings are the work of William Hernandez.

Our featured artist is Michael Manwaring. He has an assortment of paintings, sketches and sculptures. That green man is gigantic and is on a platform above his display.

Yesterday, I finished the program and assembled and folded 200 copies for our gala opening. I still have to finish name tags for volunteers. Thankfully, Mr C made a quick recovery and I seem to be fine!!

I managed to get caught up on my 3 X 3s. Here they are:

Tonight is the artist/volunteer reception with a training for sales volunteers before the reception. Tomorrow night is our gala opening reception. If you are in the Portland area, I hope you will come by on Saturday or Sunday.

After spending the morning at Trinity taking care of some exhibit details, I came home and just vegged for a bit. It felt good to be free of deadlines for the moment. I still have to do the program for the Friday night gala and name tags for the volunteers, but I have some time.

I did some much needed house hold tasks, cooked a real meal and took Scooter for a walk. Mr C was at Trinity helping to hang the show and came home feeling sick. He has a temperature of 100° and has gone to bed early. I hope I don’t get the bug. I have had enough, don’t you think? He is sleeping in the guest room as a precaution.

Tonight, I spent some time in my studio making some 3X3′s, since I was behind. The one up there was done a few days ago. Here are the pieces I did tonight.

I am going to fold my third load of laundry and get to bed early. I have been waking up with the sun — I am not used to the light early in the morning. I hope to get some photos of the exhibit tomorrow, if the hanging is complete. Keep your fingers crossed that I don’t get sick, me and my laptop and Filemaker are key to the sales happening smoothly at the exhibit. I am sure someone else could do it, but I sure hope it is me.

My umpteen weeks of work on a Filemaker database for the Artists Among Us exhibit came to fruition today. We checked in art form 55+ artists today, without a hitch.Well, maybe one or two changes in prices which means reprinting labels. I am exhausted but very happy. Our trio that has been organizing and making plans for several months are very happy with how things are moving along. Tomorrow, we start installing the show.

I managed to put together the three little pieces above. I re-purposed this larger quilt that never really worked. So I cut it up and mounted the work on 8 X 8 gallery frames.

I painted the edges purple.

I also have Prairie Fields in the show. It looks nice with these little pieces.

I have to be back at Trinity at 9 in the morning. I am pretty much involved with the show for the rest of the week. I will try to check in periodically. Here is a cute trio of sculptures from found objects. Mr C really likes The Bookman.

By the way, we are having glorious weather for a change!!

May is going to fly by for me. I hope I can make all my deadlines.

Above is the last of the purple 3 X 3s with some hand stitching. Here is the whole month together.

I will be playing with green in May. I put away all my purple fabrics and scraps and starting looking for greens. I have a dearth of green fabrics. I had loads of purple because I don’t use it much in my work. I use greens quite a bit. Also, many of my greens fit into the yellow green category, which I will use later.

Here is my first green offering.

I hope you all went over to the Twelve by Twelve blog and checked out all of the cool map quilts. A great variety of ideas and creative takes on the theme.

Or, at least it is where I am. I was almost the last person to post my map quilt on the Twelve by Twelve blog – a first for me. I had to add the red arrow and photograph it this morning. I ran out of time last night.

This is my version of a topographical map of the area of NW Oregon where I live. I am not one of those people that walks around knowing where N, S E and W are in my environment. When we lived in California, I used visual cues. I knew that the brown hills were on the east side and the green mountains were on the west (ocean) side. In fact, I prefer a list of visual aids to get myself someplace. I do like the blue dot and the blue line on the Mapquest App. They seem to help me navigate a map.

So, I originally planned to make a map with pretty pictures or the blue dot and line. Life intervened and I had to come up with something that would not require a lot of right brain activity.

I found this map on line.

I enlarged it to 2o+ inches in length and cropped it to 12+inches. I printed it on freezer paper and cut it apart to make pattern pieces.

I was going to hand dye some silks for this, but again, I had to punt and used batiks from my stash and I think it was a better decision!!

Here are the pieces fused to the background fabric.

The brown areas are the highly populated areas. The blue is the Willamette and the Columbia and the green areas are the heavily forested areas.

When I was done quilting, I thought the background batik was too light, so I used a colored pencil to darken it a bit.

Here is a detail shot with the arrow showing about where I live. Now, I can look at my map and remember which direction has the Pacific Ocean.

I will post my last purple 3 X 3 and the first green 3 X 3 for May later.

Look at little miss personality!! She is starting to smile and react to Mark and Jayme, showing a delightful personality.

And, oh, how I love this photo of Daddy and his little girl. I may have to make a trip to SF, soon!

When last I checked in, Thursday, I think. I thought I was making good progress with the Filemaker data base for our art show. Unfortunately, on Friday, I found some major bugs in our system. One major problem was that the scanner was not connecting to the database properly. I create bar codes for each piece of art. When someone brings it to the sales table to buy, we want to scan the bar code on the art and have the artwork detail open up to show that it has been sold. It was not working and my consultant and I were both tired and cranky by Friday afternoon. I felt so defeated and dissolved in tears — total melt down. Mr C calmed me down and asked if he could take a look at what was happening. Every bar code begins with 12 for this year, and he figured out that the software was only reading the first number and would open up the first work of art no matter which bar code was scanned. If I pasted a whole bar code into the the slot, it would work perfectly. I e-mailed this bit of info to my guru who fixed it and two hours later, it was working perfectly. I went to bed, a happy woman.

The other problem is with the gallery labels, but I think I can fix that by doing a data merge instead of using the labels generated by Filemaker. Last week was a very difficult week for me as I had to be in left brain mode most of the time and it is not my best MO!!

I took some bits of time to work on my map for the Tuesday reveal and to make some 3 x 3s. Tomorrow will be dedicated to machine quilting my map piece.

Here are two more purples:

Only one more purple day. What will may be — green or orange?