Archive for September, 2011

One of our regular stops is now the Mingei Museum in Balboa Park. They have the best exhibits! The “Bold Expressions” exhibit is African-American Quilts from the collection of Corrine Riley. They reminded my of the Gee’s Bend quilt exhibit I saw in Houston about 8 years ago. They’re utilitarian, basic, practical, and a simple beauty in their creation.

“The exhibition showcases more than fifty quilts made throughout the American South between 1910 and the 1970s. Stunning color combinations and distinctively free patterns epitomize an artistic vision that is unique to the American folk art tradition. African American quilts, made entirely by women, are celebrated for their bold improvisation and modern take on traditional quilting patterns, such as the House Top or Log Cabin, Star of Bethlehem and Pine Burr. Many of the quilts are made from materials that were readily available to the makers, including flour sacks, old blue jeans and work clothes and fabric remnants. This early form of recycling and reuse was a necessity that became the foundation for unique expression. The exhibition will also explore a variety of construction techniques and quilting.” (from the exhibit)

I took a lot of pictures, as some techniques really struck a chord with me.

I liked the color and secondary designs that were apparent in this one.

What struck me with this quilt was how much the ties became part of the overall design. I’ve always looked at the ties as something toat should not be obvious, but I did like what they did to this quilt.

Look at all those little pieces pieced together…..I love seeing remnants of shirting fabrics.

Once again with this quilt, I love the secondary design from the quilt ties.

Prairie points – tiny tiny prairie points!!

Love the backing fabric on this one.

Also in the museum was Maneki Neko – Japan’s Beckoning Cats.

“Made in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, each cat is unique. Most are made of clay, but some are wood, metal, ceramic and papier mâché….Since the Edo period (1603-1868) a fabricated cat with a paw upraised in the Japanese gesture of beckoning has been considered a good luck charm, drawing good fortune to individuals and businesses.  Maneki neko are common sights in local Japanese and Chinese restaurant windows, where they silently beckon to potential customers.” (from the exhibit)

Something I had no idea about, but I began to get a sense of where the “Hello Kitty” craze might have come from. I fell in love with this piece of furniture – absolutely scrumptious!

A third exhibit we saw was “In Their Own Words,” classic and contemporary Native American Art. Billy Soza Warsoldier has some amazing wolf paintings – you just get lost in the palette knife work – such a large amount of paint, and every stroke adds to the finished piece.

The Gallery shop here is one of the BEST I have ever been in. I settled for a picture of the cats on a great piece of furniture. I could spend a small fortune on books in this store!

Next time – the Visions Museum…..oh my!

Busy week at the marbling ranch….getting ready for a marbling session tomorrow – lots of leaves for our holiday baskets, new fat quarters, and some ribbon coming. In the meantime, here are some goodies available now in our various shops.

On Ebay this week: some great remnants. These are hand-marbled Kaufman cotton remnants,  fifteen (15) pieces, in  assorted colors and designs.  Sizes are 3×6, 1×9, 8×9, 5×8, 4×15, and 6×17 inches.  All pretreated, heatset,  and preshrunk – ready to go for your project. Perfect for art projects,  scrap booking, quilt blocks, doll clothes,  book marks, embellishment,  accessorizing.

On Etsy this week, a really gorgeous piece of hand-marbled crepe.

Hand-marbled silk crepe fabric in a contemporary wave pattern. Size 10 by 28 inches. Edges are serged solely to prevent raveling. There is so much movement to this piece, and the colors are summer-bright. You can use this for a center medallion, for applique flowers – nice and bright for a basket design! Fabric is pretreated and heat-set – ready to go for your project. Also perfect for ATCs and small art works.

Also on Etsy, a unique table runner, made of a batik that is machine quilted, edges serged, and then woven in strips for this look.

And on Cafe Press this week: our best-selling journal. One of our most favorite Digital Marbling (TN) pieces on the front of a journal. With the increase in personal journals, you owe yourself a great design!

Go ahead and browse – you never know what you’ll find! Start shopping early.

Don’t forget our coming Holiday baskets – perfect for the artist or crafter who needs some unusual goodies. More on this next week.

I am making a serious effort to finish any new piece I start – and that includes backing, signature, binding, hanging system, and anything else – oh, pictures. I started three smaller pieces since retiring the end of May, and I am happy to report that as of yesterday each one is complete. Absolutely positively complete. I still have a huge cubby filled with UFOs, but I am certainly making progress. In fact, I spent last night working on the start of thread painting for the newest piece for my Quilt University class. More pics on that later – it’s looking pretty cool….but I need to buy more thread…oh the problems we have….

In the meantime, here’s the finished version of my rhythm piece. This started as a piece of hand-marbled green silk that I attempted to quilt about eight years ago. It wasn’t working. But my skills are improving tremendously, and as a result of one earlier class, I wanted to see if I could accept the movement in the piece with the wave design. Here’s “Rhythm of the Wave,” complete with a few added seed beads.

Here’s a closeup:

Overall I accomplished what I wanted to with this piece. It will go up in the Etsy shop in the next few days.

Also completed is my “Explosion” piece, based on a new marbling pattern we tried. My goal here was to accent the movement from the center of the piece outward, which I did with lots of diagonal stitching. Again, I’m pleased with the results. This wil also go up in my Etsy store.

And finally, a piece I completed for a show coming up in Tucson – there will be more details on the show once it opens. This piece is a look at the devastation of oil spills. What starts as a beautiful garden is stlowly destroyed by the effects of oil – called “Insidious Oil.”

Here’s the statement:

As a trained historian, I always see the past and the future in environmental events. As a fiber artist, I feel challenged to take an ancient medium and create a piece that speaks to the environment.

Oil is an insidious liquid. We need it for so much of our daily lives, and yet it can be so destructive. The discovery of oil in our past has enabled us to have the current future. But an oil spill destroys for decades, from wildlife to the water table. This piece of fabric has been marbled, using a centuries-old process of floating paint on water. The beauty of the design reflects the joy we find in a garden, a flower bed, a landscape, or the wildlife that calls a piece of land home. But oil can run away and destroy that which is so beautiful. In a spill the oil creeps through the cracks, crevices, the waterways, looking for a new resting place. It works into the land or water and remains for decades, fouling the life around it, destroying the very fabric or life, much as the black threads do to this marbled garden.

As always, I am interested in your comments. I’ll post more on the art show once it opens and I have pictures from the reception.

To start us off this week comes a post from Dumb Little Man on productivity – stating that multi-tasking is a myth. I tend to agree, now that I’m older and can’t do what I used to….Number 6? Exercising regularly…….

Tips for pricing your goods – a series of articles from Handmadeology.

Another “shoot-out” from JPG magazine – some really gorgeous eye candy.

Fairy Chimneys by Aileen G

A new blog I discovered – Delete Apathy – with photos of Hurricane Irene.

“Delete Apathy is a venue for creative people to change the political climate of environmental and social policy. We hope to form a pattern for activism in your backyard. Delete Apathy is our signature for various events and includes choreographed dances, musical compositions, and other fine arts, planned for major universities and institutions.”

I drove Highway 12 on the Outer Banks for many years. Just one of the places I’ve been or have friends.

Highway 12, The Outer Banks

For zentangle lovers, some of you may have struggled with Paradox. I did, until I started being slower, more deliberate, and turned my tile more often. Well, from CZT Margaret Bremner comes a wonderful tutorial on Paradox.

From Joan Beiriger’s blog comes a post on licensing for calendars…something that has been on my mind as I organize my various collections.

And along with this is Joan’s article with a list of over 50 US art licensing agencies. Some great info here.

A little bit of fun with this video – could you see the pranks you could play??

From the OMG file and Cool Hunting – they always spotlight really cool gadgets and new products. Can you find the one that prompted me to go OMG?

And from Kate Harper Designs comes a cool video on typography – extremely interesting, as is everything on her blog.

Send me your cool stuff – it’s amazing what’s out there, and let’s share what we find.

Oy, sometimes ya just need to be hit with the proverbial two-by-four….For YEARS we have worked on product with our marbled fabrics, and we have also tried lots of different venues for arts and craft shows. Some product has worked, which has been good. The art and craft show circuit – not at all. We invariably lose money. We take framed work, digital work, fabrics, digital cards…..nothing sells because most people don’t have a clue what to do with the fabric.

Now we’re working on putting together our gift baskets for the holiday season. We know that we can keep these going year round by keeping the hand-crafted bowls a fairly neutral color, as well as adding in some seasonal items. It dawned on us, as we threw away the latest offer for a holiday craft show, that all we could really bring was the baskets.

Well, duh. The baskets all along could have been the seller. All in one place, items for that family member that can be hard to buy for. Shrink-wrapped. Lots of goodies. No worry or muss. No explaining how to use the fabrics.

And then….as we’re talking about maybe choosing a couple of shows for next year, it occurs to us we could offer the gift baskets in two sizes, small and large.

Duh.

All these years, staring us in the face, and we never saw it.

Sometimes we work so hard and miss the obvious. Right now I’m pretty irritated with us for this having taken so long. But on the other hand, now we have a great new product that should work long-term and give us a lot to build on for more stuff in the baskets. Who knows what else we might have missed along the way?

Suggestions?

This trip to San Deigo has been postponed twice, so we were REALLY glad to finally get there and see water again. Anything with water was our main destination. That and the fact that I am fascinated with texture. I’m thinking that is probably because I have no depth perception, and the vision just keep getting worse. So when I see texture I am absolutely fascinated by it.

As in this picture of water lilies in the reflecting pool at Balboa Park. I have never seen the pads with such striations to them. They were really gorgeous, and the only lily pads in the whole pond that had the multi-colored leaves. This would make a great quilt….

Water was the most important element to this trip, and we had a motel right across from one of the MANY marinas. Plus, as soon as we checked in, we headed to the point of land where Cabrillo landed, Point Loma.

I did not adjust any of these photos – my camera really captured the wonderful colors and weather. This is looking southeast from Point Loma, with the naval base on Coronado in the foreground and the skyline of San Diego barely visible. That water had some of the best shades of blue I’ve seen since floating back from Lanai in 1996.

Love the different colors of all the various flora and fauna.

The wonderful beaches of Coronado.

Look at these trees! This is at Embarcadero Park, at the base of the aircraft carrier Midway.

The memorial to the work of Bob Hope and all his USO tours – quite moving, especially at sunset and in this setting.

At the park at Seaport Village, looking south towards the Coronado Bridge, just at sunset.

Looking west to Coronado as the sun starts down below the persistent cloud bank.

I waited two years to get these pictures of these palms at the Prado Restaurant in Balboa Park – the first time we were there – no camera with us! The only touch-up in this photo was removing the security camera – the detail is just too gorgeous – this is part of the facade for the San Diego Museum of art.

Which leaves us ready for…

The Mingei and Visions Museums……

Ah, vacation! We are slowly starting to get some traveling in since I retired. We have plans for September – Santa Fe and Taos, October – Austin, and November back again to San Diego. There’s a wonderful restaurant at Balboa Park, Prado, with wonderful food and fabulous service. You’re looking at our dessert: a chocolate martini (OMG, amazing….) and mango/raspberry/lemon sorbet with carmelized coconut. Lunch was in between the stop at the Mingei and then the Botanical building.

We are hoping  for a long travel trip next spring to the Maritime provinces. But in the meantime we are busy making art and organizing ourselves. One of my projects, as readers of the blog know, is organizing my China slides. I’ve got some pictures that are kind of miscellaneous – they are of some very interesting moments or things that struck me in my early-30-first-time-oversees mind.

Bicycles – lots and lots of bicycles, the major form of transportation. I look at these shots and then compare them with China today, and you have nothing but cars.

I should probably call these my transportation series. I took a lot of pics of people getting around – this was, 33 yeas ago, a third-world country.

Some things never change across cultures. We just need “the basics.”

Thirty-three years ago the Chinese people were wearing masks for protection, something we have just begun to adapt.

Lots more bicycles. I love the parking lots set aside for the bikes.

Every morning, regardless of where we went, people were out exercising.

Everywhere we went we were objects of curiosity. These wonderful people had not ween Westerners in a number of years, due to the Cultural Revolution. We were advised to bring only clothes that were blues and grays. The only place we saw color was in the children. When we stopped over in Tokyo on our way home, I was assaulted by all the color – the first time I had experienced something like that. If you see pictures of modern China, clothes look very Western. To suddenly come back to a culture that used – and celebrated – color was quite the change!

An absolutely amazing trip, even 33 years later. I watched “The Red Violin: a couple of weeks ago, and one of the stages for the violin was during the Cultural Revolution. Having seen the pictures and video from the time, and having talked to people who went “to the countryside,” the movie was a stab in the gut, to see it portrayed so realistically.

To someone who had never traveled overseas, it was the trip of a life time.