Tuesday we celebrated the Vernal equinox.  Here it was glorious and continues to be the wonderful sunny blue sky days  that fill me with delight.  I have only really noticed the longer days because I am getting up in the light and it is still light at dinner time.    Going out of doors with out a coat or jacket is very freeing.    The air is filled with bird song.   I find myself labeling them and looking into the branches.  The spring warmth  has cause the plants to open there leaves.  The willows greens contrast against the pines and the silver maples rust colored buds are spilling pollen out across the sidewalk.    There are many flowers up.  I have  the usual spring plants like crocus and snow drops  and in addition there  are daffodils open and even violets are blooming.  I know violets use to appear near the end of April as my Mom often put them on my birthday cakes.   With all this new growth around me I have been pushing out lots of work too.  The fact that I had four full days in the studio with out any interruptions did not hurt ether.   I seem to be more awake somehow and the ideas are really flowing.   I am collecting them in the idea/sketchbook for the times when I am a little on the depleted side.    I am enjoying  all  and I hope you are celebrating the wonders of Spring too.

Progress Report    Cycling Circuits

Golden Rounds a Paper  Quilt and Adventure Challenge

This work is coming along nicely.  I am all done with the beading step now.   I painted some inner facing to put behind the big openings I had cut into the quilt.  I think I need to live with this work for a while now because it seems a bit busy to me.   I find that time gives me fresh eyes and I an usually spot the problem. 

Fireworks  

This quilt was a lot of fun to work on.  It is not a part of any old series unless one thinks of fooling around is a series.  Several years ago I taught a friend how to use Angelina and there where some   examples that I could not bring myself to toss.   The little felt squares where an experiment too.   They worked together in this quilt.  

I had a good time quilting this work with metallic  thread in an explosion type of pattern.

Blue Frogs- Adventure Challenge

This quilt is done I think.  I like the contrast in the two sizes of cording and how it makes the same Frog Knots appear so very differently due to scale. This quilt is my second exploration of the frog idea from Lois Erison’s book and that is why it is an Adventure Challenge quilt. 

 

 

  New Work: Angle Balance

This is an example of how ideas spring one from another.  I have had this intense purple fabric for a while and was having a difficult time using it.  When I saw how well it worked with the Angelina in the Fireworks piece I just kept on playing.

 There is a possible third quilt using the fabric and the Angelina together.

Knot Know- Adventure Challenge and  DMC #7

I am reaching the end of the fabric from the DMC challenge.  I still have some crimson of Dawn’s  remaining and some green f from Marty, but I do not see any more work in this without a lot of supplementary fabric so I do not feel is stays within the spirit of  the project.     I put it in the Adventure Challenge category because I was still playing with knot idea from the Ericson’s book.    These knots are all my own inventions because I now understand how they are built.  So I tried my own hand at creating some of them.

  The big glass beads that I used in this work are from the stash of my Mothers stuff that I am slowly sifting through.  They were a part of a necklace on a leather thong.   This is a case where my personal goal to learn something new and  apply the concept in my own  way really came to pass.   I am delighted.

 

Wrinkle Work – Adventure Challenge 

  This is a pure play start here.  In the Louis Ericson book Design&Sew It Yourself  on page 74 she talks about using wrinkled fabric.  The book says to use natural fibers so I pulled some silk out of my stash.  The next step is to wet the fabric and then tie it into a bundle and allow to dry.  When you carefully unroll the dry fabric you do not smooth out the wrinkles, but stitch them down on a base fabric.   It was a fun experiment but I do not see any direct application of what I created at this time.

Shards-  Special Features Quilt

    This top was created from remainders of the Twinkle series .  I had thought I could use it as the background for Blue Frogs. But is just did not work.   I think it will work however with the pottery shards that my Mother collected from area where my brother was a Dentist for the Indian Health Service.  I call it a Special Features quilt because the pieces have been setting in the dark of a drawer sense I brought them home from my Moms house when we emptied it after her death 12 years ago.      I went to my book   American Indian Art  by Norman Feder were I found this great pot image.   I intend to adapt the incised pot designs to become the quilting pattern for the quilt.  Watch for the development of this idea.   The squared area will be good locations for the shards.

Mini 5

This is one more of the framed mini quilts that came from the cut up  work I did a few weeks ago.

There will be no post next week as I am off to the Identity:Contest and Reflection Conference  put on by the Studio Art Quilt Association and the Surface Design Association in Philadelphia.   I am excited about this as I have never been to a conference by either of these organizations and I am a member of both of them.  I have also managed to get tickets to the Van Goth Up Close show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.   It will be  a stimulating week for me.

Keep Creating and I will see you in two weeks on the  5th of March.

Hugs

Carol