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Archive for February, 2007

In the Desert

Tuesday, February 20th, 2007

Mr C and I left Portland on last Friday morning. After a long day of driving, we were met with this gorgeous sunset as we arrived in Sonoma County, where we used to live.

sonomasunset.jpg

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On Saturday, I got to spend a few hours with my good friends, Pat, Janet and Diane. I had my camera with me, but we were having so much fun at Janet’s house, eating a great lunch provided by Diane and Pat, I for got to take pictures. Diane blogged about it here, but she didn’t take any pictures, either.

On Sunday, after going to church at our old church home, we headed for the desert. Another long day of driving later, we arrived at the home of Steve’s brother, Mike and his wife, Ann. After a nice dinner of grilled steak and salad, we found our way to our little apartment home for the next week and a half.

We awoke to warm sunshine. Here some shots I took outside from the patio.

Desert sky.

desertsky.jpg

Palm trees.

desertpalmtrees.jpg

Bird on a wire:

birdonawire.jpg

After breakfast, we went in to Palm Springs, to partake in some of the Modernism Week activities. We had a fabulous lunch at an authentic Mexican restaurant. We then did a driving tour of some of the very interesting midcentury modern architecture in the city. We then took a tour of the Frey House II. It is currently owned by the Palm Springs Art Museum. The director lives there and it is not open for visitors very often. The house is way up on a mountain side and is built in to the boulders. there is actually a boulder inside the house!

Here is a photo of the house from the desert floor.

freyhouse.jpg

Here are some views of Palm Springs from the Frey House.

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Next post, I will show some photo of the house and the resident cat, that I wanted to take home with me. If you would like to see my photos of the trip so far, you can go to my desert flickr set.

I can only get on line at my sil’s house so I am limited to the amount of time I can be on line, reading blogs and commenting. I am trying to read all the faves, but don’t have time to comment!! It is wonderful to be in the desert where it is much warmer and the sun comes up earlier and sets later than in Portland. I am finishing Fragment’s/ I have the binding done on two sides. I think I can finish it tomorrow. Mr C is helping his brother put a new window in one of the rental units.

Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained

Thursday, February 15th, 2007

Last night when I went to bed, I had an epiphany about what I wanted to do to Fragments. There are small bits of turquoise in some of the fabric and in the beads. I felt I needed more of the turquoise because it is a complement to the corals in the piece. I decided to screen print some images in turquoise directly on the piece. (Nothing ventured, nothing gained!)

I was also rummaging around in a box of embellishments that I received from my guild in Santa Rosa, as a president’s gift. I found this roll of silk ribbon which is sort of falling apart. I really love it, but I didn’t know how I colud use it. Fragments, of course!! Falling apart is good.

oldsilkribbon.jpg

I have a screen that I made that is just simple lines. So I screenprinted with the lines crossing to mimic the satin stitching.

Here is Fragments, now, ready for the binding.

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Here are a couple of closeups. I love how the rose shape in the ribbon fragments mimics the monoprint shapes.

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Terry and I went out to lunch and then went shopping at Fibers in Motion where I had a nice gift certificate from my art quilt group in Santa Rosa. I had never spent it. I bought lots of Kaffe fabrics with violet in them to make a quilt for my great niece Viola Berlin. Some of these are not Kaffe, but complement them.

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I also found these nice geometics for my stash.

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I have to finish packing. Maggie is in the kennel. We are leaving early in the morning. We will spend the week-end in Santa Rosa catching up with old friends. Then on Sunday we head for some warm sunshine in the California desert. I am taking everything I need (I hope) to make the Kaffe quilt in my spare time. We will have a little apartment. I will be checking in to let you know what fun things we are up to.

I can’t get the spell checker to work, so hope I have not made any glaring errors.

A Fragment of My Imagination

Wednesday, February 14th, 2007

I spent the morning dealing with the new blog and website issues. Andrew of Gloderworks uploaded the most recent version of WordPress. It has more features that make me happy. Uploading photos is a breeze.

I also sent Breaking Barriers off to the Quilter’s Hall of fame in Marion, Indiana. I put it in one of the Fed Ex tubes and we walked up to the Fed Ex place with Maggie. It was a typical Portland winter day — breezy and drizzly. By the time we got home, it was raining quite hard.

This afternoon I went back to work on Fragments. I did some more stitching and played with some embellishment ideas. The premise for this quilt is to represent the vestiges and ephemera that we leave behind as we move from place to place.

Here is my latest version. I think it might be close to being finished. I am going to bind it with fabric that matches each section so that it flows out to the edges.

Fragments

Here is a close-up of the bead, ribbon and copper mesh fragments.

Fragments closeup
Tomorrow, I am going to take Terry out to lunch. Then we will go to Fibers in Motion where I plan to buy some fabric to make a baby quilt for my neice’s baby, Viola Berlin.

It is a Done Deal!

Tuesday, February 13th, 2007

I have a website and a new blog. It happened so fast, I didn’t know what hit me. The website is not offically live until tomorrow morning, but if you have visited my blog, you got a sneak peak. I feel so grown up!
My blog is now hosted by WordPress. This is my third venue. I started with Blogspot in February 2005. Then I moved to Typepad. I just realized that I missed my blogiversary. It was on February 3rd.

The cool thing about WordPress is that all of my blog entries have been moved here. So it is very easy to search all of my blog posts for the past two years to find something that I want to reference.

It appears that posting photos is not as easy as it was in Typepad. I have to have a url so that means putting them in to Flickr first, I guess. So, just to see if I can, I am going to try posting an old photo. This is a photo of Tobermary, Scotland, on the Isle of Mull. It was taken in 2003 when we were on a hiking trip of the Scottish Highlands.
Tobermory

I did it! It was a lot more work that browsing my desktop.
I spent all day on my website so Fragments is waiting for me to come back, tomorrow.

I just noticed that there is no spell check so bear with me. I think there is a later version with spelcheck so I have to get my web designer to update this. I don’t like not having control over this.

Fragment Progress

Monday, February 12th, 2007

Yesterday, I couldn’t wait to get down to the studio to work on Fragments. So after church, walking the dog and lunch, I went to work. I could only work until 4:30 because I had to make pizza for Sunday night supper with M & M and their mom and dad. I made the adults a yummy over loaded pizza with chicken sausage and lots of veggies. M & M had individual pesto and cheese pizzas.

Back to Fragments. I finished the machine quilting on it yesterday. That made the different sections look a little more integrated. Today, I started thinking about additional elements to embellish the piece. I did printed some more text. I found some beads and some old lace that I smudged with paint.

Fragmentembellishments

I also cut up some copper mesh into pieces and sponge painted it with blue-green, green and black to give an aged verdigris look.

Fragementscoppermeshpaint

Here is a closeup of some of these elements pinned to the piece for auditioning.

Fragmentcoppermeshcloseup

And here is a look at the whole piece with the audition pieces. I have additional things to do with it. I want to use that old lace some how. You can also see the satin stitched embellishment that I have added. I may add some of that to the lower section. You can click on any of the photos for a larger view.

Fragmentsupdate2

I am anxious to get back to this tomorrow, but right now I must stop blogging and give Heroes my complete attention.