Is it a sign?

I found this on sale yesterday. Is it a sign?

It's not easy being green

As Françoise has remarked, lorikeet green is "very very... green..."  I've found some greens in my stash but I feel an urge to dye coming over me...

Spotted in New Zealand Quilter Magazine...

Come and see the Twelve by Twelve exhibition in New Zealand:

• 9 - 12 September 2010: Craft & Quilt Fair Hamilton, New Zealand
• 17-19 September 2010: Craft & Quilt Fair Christchurch, New Zealand

Lorikeets at Quilt Encounter

I'm currently teaching at Quilt Encounter, a fabulous 1-6 day retreat organised by the South Australian Quilters Guild. My slideshow presentation about the Twelve by Twelve project was well-received on Monday evening and the twelve art quilts from the Chocolate theme attracted many admiring comments.

Now there's a whole new group of people who will be the following our Colorplay challenge. I wonder if they will share their freshly dyed fabrics...

Am I done yet?

Found this in my stash of commercial fabrics today. What do you think?

Purple Yellow Website Update

The website has now been updated to display our latest complementary colorplay challenge - Purple Yellow. The individual artist galleries have also been updated. For example, here is Terri's Colorplay gallery so far. Due to limited internet access while I am travelling, I have not been able to update and check all of the navigation.  Undoubtedly there will be some glitches here and there. Please e-mail me and I will fix them when I have better internet access again.

You never know..

where you might find a 12x12 reference! I found this at the roadside fireworks stand while we were visiting Illinois.
I think it's so funny that the packaging really does include Kristin's color palette from our Kilauea challenge: red, orange, chartreuse, black and grays.

In fact, there was a whole box of "volcanic vortex" fireworks, each named for a different volcano. Ultimately, we chose Mt Etna.
When Claire was about three months old, Jeff was on a six-month deployment with the US Navy in Sicily. Baby Claire and I went to visit him and we enjoyed many wonderful Italian adventures including hiking up Mt Etna. (That was before digital cameras, otherwise, I'd include a photo.)

The Rainbow Connection

If I have to choose a single hue, like many redheads, I would say that my favourite colour is green.  However, I am drawn to many other colours in the spectrum and, as my logo for Serendipity Patchwork & Quilting indicates, am quite partial to rainbows.  I've been collecting rainbow images for a while but rainbows are strangely elusive (I don't live in Portland!). This rainbow photo was taken a couple of years ago from my studio:

I often look out my window for inspiration and choosing the next colourplay challenge was no exception. There is abundant bird life at Copacabana - kookaburras, galahs, herons, rosellas, corellas, wattle birds, fairy wrens, sea eagles, pelicans, black swans and more. One of the most common bird species in my neighbourhood is rainbow lorikeets - they squawk, swoop and soar across the valley and feed on the banksia flowers around the house. Like rainbows, they can be difficult to catch on the camera - they are constanly moving and hide in the foilage.  Glynis kindly made these feeding images available for me:

 

And I snapped this lorikeet with my new camera and prepared this palette for our next challenge - predominantly green with generous highlights of blue; orange-red and orange-yellow. Please don't feel limited to bird imagery - just enjoy those wonderful pure saturated colours.

Coincidentally, Kermit shares some of this palette (and Blondie doesn't seem to mind). Let the swooping and soaring begin!

Our Purple Patch

Pending the updating of the Twelve by Twelve website, and Helen's nomination of her "official" work for this challenge, here is an interim mosaic of the purple and yellow pieces. I am intrigued to see that so many of us incorporated linear elements in our compositions:

I have the next challenge all lined up and will announce it later today.

It's Complementary

Just as Karen announced our new theme, I looked at my first three Colorplay quilts and saw that I might have the beginnings of a simple/traditional block theme starting. The idea of opposites attracting immediately made me think of the "Robbing Peter to Pay Paul" block. In the traditional block, the two fabrics used for one block swap places for teh next block. Usually the block is a simple Drunkard's Path quarter circle in a square, or it's a square with a curved section cut out of each side.



I didn't want to just make a block, but I did want to reference the concept. After a false start, I realized that a simple rectangle in a rectangle could do the trick. It looks abstract and not immediately like a quilt block, and still each side is the opposite of the other.



One side is yellow, the other purple. One side is near solid, the other is highly patched. One side is matte cotton, the other is shiny, soft, rich, pattered silk. One side is machine quilted, the other is hand quilted. One side is stitched vertically, the other horizontally. I might even add beading to the edge of the purple side, but I've been traveling and haven't had a chance to find and add the right ones.

All the fabrics came from my stash (who knew I had so many purple silks?) and the perfect buttery yellow foil to the purples was a napkin of all things! As I cut and arranged my pieces, I missed the drawn thread edge of the original napkin. So, I added it back in with a little purple silk peeking through. Sure, it means that the sides aren't strictly opposite, but it complements the couched gold cord on the opposite side nicely.

Lollipop Forest

Thankfully, this challenge came together like a dream, because my family has definetly been plotting against me getting anything accomplished over the last two months. This was our first year in public school, so I had no idea how crazy the end of the year activities can be. Then throw in birthdays, vacation bible school, two camping trips and a spur of the momment trip to Portland to buy an Airstream trailer (I wish there had been time to see you Gerrie and Terry), and I feel like I'm at a carnival desperately keeping all the rides going. I never realized how easy it was when they were little. Now, all I want is a little time alone to create. Luckily, I was able to find it a few minutes at a time.

I've had the idea for these quilts in my mind for months, based on some mini quilts I created for Art-O-Mat. I wanted to put them together to create something larger than 2"x3". I started with a plain white piece of fabric and quilted it like crazy with circles and spirals. I would get lost in the process and the whirl of the machine would block out the chaos of the family. Next I brought out the paints and painted the circles purple and the spirals yellow. The paint was very watery so the colors blended wonderfully. I then added fabric paper circles and free motions stitching. The edges are finished with deep purple yarn, couched with gold thread. I just love the energy of the contrasting colors and rich texture, and the swirling circles are very much my life right now.

I had lots of quilted and painted fabric created for this project just waiting to be played with, so I quickly threw together this flower quilt. Our summer has been slow coming in the Pacific Northwest, so it is a reminder that summer blooms are on the way!

Sunset

Last January, the Portland Art Museum had a show titled China Design Now, an exhibit of the varied design and architecture of modern China. In the show were some objects that were covered in organza pojagi pockets which overlapped. I was so taken by the whimsical nature of these objects. I filed it away as a future project.

For this piece, I painted silk organza with yellow and purple paint — the piece that I posted earlier. I cut 2 and half inch strips which I sewed together and then cut again into squares which I turned into the pockets. Each side of these pockets is different. Each one is like a beautiful miniature composition. I arranged them in an overlapping composition and stitched them to the background which had been previously finished with a pillowcase backing. This will all be explained on my personal blog later today.

My only nagging feeling about this is finishing the top. I felt I needed to do something. I ended up sewing a line of purple and gold beads as a finish. I would like to have come up with something more elegant.

Here is a detail:

The Pointy End

The challenge for me this time was very much around finding some free time to make a quilt! My first thought was heartsease. My second thought was Johnny-jump-ups (same thing). Then, pansies. Eventually I moved on to irises. Finally I decided there would be no flowers in my quilt.
I sat.Stared around the room. Nothing. The problem, I thought, is that I really DON'T like violet and yellow together. Time to think more broadly about that purple...maybe lavender, maybe amethyst...
Wait! Up on the top shelf of the dresser! There are two little cups that I bought in a thrift shop a few weeks ago.I bought them because I love the colours together.
Here they are...



A whole heap of photos later, I had a tightly cropped image that I liked and some printed copies for a pattern.




And then, the quilt. Abstracted almost to obscurity :D and not as successful as I had hoped. Maybe next time.

#2

Those of us here in the United States have probably used the #2 pencil for most of our lives.  It's the ubiquitous yellow wooden pencil with soft dark lead that we were given in school.  Most of us carried them in our backpacks and pencil boxes, and we bought a new supply every September.  It's the pencil we were required to use for standardized "fill in the box" test forms, and they were required when I took the bar exam.  I have such strong associations triggered by this simple object -- most of them good -- so this piece celebrates the #2 pencil.

(By the way, is it the same in other countries?  Is the yellow pencil the same, called by another name?  Do you have an equivalent writing instrument that you associate with school?)

The background piece is hand-dyed fabric -- the first of the summer season!  The scribbled squares were "art parts" I had from an old project, drawn with acrylic paint and a tjanting tool and then washed with acrylic paint.  The purple just happened to match the background fabric rather perfectly, and they are fused onto the background.  I had fun drawing and painting the pencil shapes on white fabric -- they are fused as well.  I quilted it and faced it with a simple facing.

I didn't have an immediate purple/yellow idea, I must confess, and a lot of time passed while I contemplated the possibilities for this challenge.  Finally, I started thinking about yellow things, and purple things, without dwelling on purple and yellow together.  Once I thought about the #2 pencil, I knew I had my concept.  Re-discovering those scribbled squares in a basket made me very happy!

My grandmother's garden

I used two pictures taken in my garden as the inspiration for this piece, a picture of a lilac tree and one of simple little daisies growing in the grass. The fabrics are hand dyed and screen printed.
I especially like this lilac tree because it's a grandbaby of a tree which stood in my grandmother's garden when I was a little girl. I remember that this beautiful garden was full of vegetables, fruits, simple flowers and unpretentious shrubs and trees.After quilting, I started embroidering flowers by hand here and there in the quilt, but I finally unpicked them because they just didn't really add anything. After all, I prefer to keep it simple, as it is now.I've posted more detail pictures on my blog...