Sunday Night Painting

A couple of free hours this evening was a perfect time to do some painting - first trying out a new wooden stamp, and then adding some screen printing to a work in progress.

The idea for this stamped design is to make 2-sided ornaments with peltex in the center - more later.

Above left is a work in progress called "I Can Fly".  On the right is a close-up of screen printed text.  The background of this piece is rusted fabric.  There are still more ideas in the works for this piece.

Color Challenge

An art quilt group I belong to issued a color challenge last spring - create an 18 x 24 quilt based on the colors of a fish.  We picked from envelopes with paint chips representing each fish; I got "cowfish", which had 4 colors: turquoise, gold. rust and dark brown. This is the finished quilt. It started with a fat quarter turquoise sunprint, then I added stenciling and printing with a textured brayer. The sunprint was done in summer of 2010.  Since the colors fit this challenge, I added the dark brown by adding the wavy strips and borders.  Because the background reminds me of things celestial, this is called "Cowfish Cosmos".

VCQ Charity Project

Last weekend, the Virginia Consortium of Quilters met in Blackstone, VA to work on our new charity project: pillowcases for foster children in Virginia.  In one day, we completed 186 pillowcases, and sent home another 110 to be finished.  Working with an organization called First Care, the finished pillowcases were divided up to go to organizations in 5 different areas of the state for distribution to foster children.  We had a great time and wonderful sense of accomplishment putting these together; the prints and colors are all so happy, we hope they bring lots of smiles to the children who receive them.

  

Postcard Close-up

I finally found a way to keep a picture in landscape view.  By opening it in photoshop elements and saving it as a png file instead of jpg, it maintained the landscape orientation.  Here's a close-up of the postcards in the previous post.  This photo was a really lucky shot.  The mother bird kept flying in with worms to feed the babies, and flying off again.  It took many hours to get this one shot!

Postcard Revealed

Here's the set of postcards that I previewed with a snippet a few days ago. The theme of this exchange is 6 degrees of separation from the word "seed"; in other words, start with seed, and take 6 "steps" in any direction for what is depicted on the card. My progression was seed, sapling, tree, branches, nest, bird. I'm curious to see what direction the other participants take! Techniques: a gelatin print background and screen printed birds; the print of the birds is done with a thermofax screen made from a photo I took.

I've been trying to add another image of a single card, but blogger keeps turning my horizontal picture to vertical orientation and I can't find a way to turn it back.  Anyone know how to fix that?

Weekend Projects

Next weekend is the quarterly meeting of Virginia Consortium of Quilters, our statewide quilitng guild. We are devoting the workshop time to our new charity project, pillowcases for foster kids in Virginia. So I took some time to collect and cut some fabric combinations so they are ready to begin sewing.

Another project I worked on this weekend was finishing a set of postcards for a swap. This swap group is a small group of VCQ members who create cards based on a theme twice a year. We've been doing this for about 5 years. We started with a larger group and a quarterly exchange, but when that got to be too much, those of us left settled on twice a year, which is just right. The current swap is "seed" - with 6 degrees of separation. In other words, the card is based on an object/idea 6 steps away from seed. Below is a sneak peek of my card - I'll share the whole image after they arrive at swappers mailboxes!