This weekend I decided to take a ride to Hammonassett Beach and visit Meigs point at the far end of the state park. It’s winter here and there was a stiff offshore breeze on top of the cold temperature, but the bright sunlight made it seem warm. There is nothing like the sound of waves rolling in on the rocky shore to clear your mind and bring peace. I’ve been climbing on beach rocks since I was a child and doing that always brings back that sense of mystery and awe of the natural world. Here are a few photos from this wonderful place. When I have time, hopefully this weekend, I’ll post more of these beach photos on Flickr.
Posted by: Mary @ 9:40 pm
Tonight driving home from work felt like the luge in slow motion with the coating of ice on the roads. It took me almost 2 hours to get home and I spun out a few times but I made it somewhat shaken but safe and sound. After quickly shoveling the sidewalk and back walkway at home I had homemade chicken soup and then settled in to watch the Olympics. Yesterday I started an abstract sketch of a skater in motion in my art journal and was able to finish coloring it with my markers tonight. It feels like the drawing might need something more but I wanted to keep it fresh and simple as a sketch. Am really enjoying Creative Every Day on Twitter #ced2010. Seeing what everyone is doing is very inspirational and motivating me to be creative every day. Thank you everyone!
We are in the midst of a major snow storm here in Connecticut and I couldn’t resist making a snow angel after shoveling the back walk. A storm that lasts 24 hours like this one lets you pause and reflect about things. There is a quiet and peacefulness that settles over everything and it is very special.
It is Sunday night and this is what I have completed this past week for the Vision Journaling Workshop. First there is an ATC card and a companion collage in my sketchbook illustrating the word balance. I used my new fineliner Staedtler markers to make the balance ATC card. The collage is just a picture cut out from a magazine on top of scrapbook paper - very simple. Gluestick is your friend 
There are several other words for which I want to create ATC cards and corresponding collages when there is more time. Next there is a small wooden box that I found at Joann Fabrics to keep the ATC cards in. This is followed by ATC cards made for week 2 core values and week 1 relaxation. For the core values I used scrapbook paper and markers and for relaxation I used watercolor paints and gel pens. It is interesting and fun creating a design in a small format (2.5″ x 3.5″) and the cards look nice in the wooden box out on the coffee table. I have used a corner round pounch on most of the ATC cards and like the effect. Each lesson with creative prompts is very helpful in getting you to focus on what is important in your life.
After seeing the quilt we made to benefit the Lupus Foundation at the Heart of the Valley Quilt Guild Saturday Sew-In in January, I decided to start a new quilt using my own version of the pattern for my Aunt Ethel. In order to make it scrappy I am cutting each large square from a different floral fabric from my collection. the corner square fabric is a medium gold with stars and the retangles are a cream on cream pale floral fabric. So far I have 16 blocks assembled into one 4×4 unit here. After putting together a total of 6 sections I will design a border and then machine quilt it.
There has been a lot going on this past week which is a good thing. I met some big deadlines at work on Friday and another big project is close to being finished. Hence the offbeat picture of my command control center at work. I emptied my kitchen and moved everything into the living room this past week and the ceiling is finally being repaired after the Niagara Falls incident a year ago. This is too big a job for me to do by myself so I was able to hire someone who is very talented and wonderful to work with. He is giving me assistant jobs to do like scraping off two layers of wallpaper with a chisel he let me borrow and washing the walls with bleach. He is going to paint the cupboards, wainscoting and walls as well. Repainting my home has been a long time coming and I am just doing one room at a time when I can. I did my bedroom all by myself this fall and only fell off the ladder a few times
On the creative side, I am working on my ATC cards to go with the core values I did last week for the True North Arts Vision Journaling class, I bought background fabric at Joann’s to go with my stash of floral fabrics for a bed quilt for my aunt Ethel, and my new Staedtler triplus fineliner markers and 9 sheets of different colored Canson mi-Tientes paper came from Blick Art Materials. I also managed a trip to Borders to use a gift card from Christmas and chose Somerset Publications Art Journaling and Art Quilting Studio. And I picked up the first lesson of a free year long online scrapbooking class The Street Where You Live by Jane Howden at Get It Scrapped. In the supermarket today there was a sign at the deli counter that said “49 days ’til spring” and the below zero windchill factor weather seems to have passed today.
Week 2 in the Vision Journaling Workshop involved a process to elucidate your core values. I did not follow the initial directions and started this at work, which turned out to be a good thing as it was a major mid-day de-stressor and led me to focus on what is important to me. I also have a long commute and do a lot of thinking in the car with new age music in the CD player so ideas come to me easily that way, even when doing 75 on the interstate (in the slow lane just keeping up with traffic and everyone is still passing me). I struggled with this exercise somewhat as it was hard to narrow things down to just 10 items and my initial lists were very long. In the car on the ride home Friday night I visualized exactly what I wanted to do - get my yet unchosen 10 words into the computer with a pastel box behind each word on a page that I could print and cut out and then add the words to a paper collage. And I still want to do that as well as make ATC cards… later.
When I started on this with InDesign yesterday and the 2002 Land of Forever CD playing, my graphic design gene led me down a different path. After working through the exercises I had 29 words and could not choose only 10 words so I finally settled on 12 that truly resonated with me. I typed my words in, first the whole list and then the list of 12. On the next page I took the 12 words, made boxes behind them, and chose different pantone colors. Then an idea came… I thought why not make a background with all the words repeated over and over, faded color and leading (line spacing) spread out. What next? Why not adjust the colored boxes the way I would have cut them and place them randomly around the background and do this piece digitally? The stark white background did appeal to my minimalist senses but I added a color screened back as a transparency and was pleased with the results. I have included the 4 page PDF to show my thought process. Once I get started it seems that one idea leads to another.
Posted by: Mary @ 12:26 pm
I am taking the True North Arts Vision Journaling Workshop with Kathryn Antyr and am finding it very helpful in facilitating my creative journey. At this point I have created the journal collage for the first week which is pictured below and have started on making the ATCs to go with it. I wrote out a list of intentions for the ATC cards on my lunch break at work and keep a notebook handy there to record creative thoughts that come. This whole vision journaling process has given me more awareness of things that I am struggling with and how to address these things.
- The cat jumped up on my work space, sniffed the flame of the candle and ran away, startled but uninjured.
- I am just not comfortable with candles anyway due to the fire danger and need to honor my own feelings.
- I am having problems locating my tools and supplies (where are my markers, where is the spray bottle, etc).
- My creative supplies are still scattered around and I need to take the time to go through everything and reorganize.
- It is an effort to carve out a block of time, create a work space, and get focused on one thing, but I am doing it.
- Once I get started I am fine and lose myself in the process. The dining room table seems to be the best place to create.
Posted by: Mary @ 9:46 pm
This past weekend I finished a quilt that forms a Shafts of Light Diptych with a quilt created ten years ago, in the year 2000. The original quilt was done as a challenge for the Greater Hartford Quilt Guild retreat that year. The challenge was to interpret the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem, Voices of the Night/Prelude, in the form of a quilted object. This theme manifested itself to me as a visualization of abstract beams of light penetrating through the forest. I drew my design on an 18″x24″ newsprint pad (I probably sketched thumbnails first but don’t remember after 10 years) and when satisfied with the angles and layout made a paper pattern using drawing paper. The design or layout of the second quilt is a mirror image of the first quilt but with different fabric choices. It is a rare occasion for me to make a second version of anything as all my work is one of a kind.
The fabrics in both cases were chosen intuitively which is how I usually work. The only plan I did have before choosing colors was the placement of darks, mediums, and lights. Value changes have more of an impact than color because it is differences in value or shading that give a piece contrast and definition. I tend to buy fat quarters (18″x22″ or half a yard cut in half) as that gives me a lot more variety and depth in my pieces. To make a piece like this I drag out all of my fabric and go through it and choose the ones that interest me and that might work until I have a pile of fabric. This is my palette. When I shop for fabric, which isn’t often these days as I have enough on hand, I do that intuitively too, and not with a specific project in mind but with the feeling that I am adding to my palette.
These two quilts are paper pieced which is a method where the pieces of fabric are pinned or held to the wrong side of the paper pattern sections and then you flip it over and sew on the lines on the top of the paper with the fabric underneath the paper. I love to design my own paper piecing patterns and have a collection of those. The only tricky part is that everything is reversed or mirror imaged which can lead to some interesting mistakes. You can find good information about paper piecing on the Carol Doak web site if you are interested. Both pieces are free motion machine quilted and the first quilt (on the right) has beads sewn onto the surface which was done after the quilting was completed. I learned to free motion quilt in several workshops a long while ago and I have taught free motion quilting. There are some excellent books out now that describe the process and the best advice I can give you is to loosely hand baste (so the pins don’t get in the way) a small whole cloth sampler (18″x18″ to 24″x24″) using cotton batting the first time (it doesn’t slip around), drop your feed dogs, put your free motion foot on your sewing machine, relax, and just doodle and play with it until you feel comfortable doing it on a real quilt.
This circles piece in my sketchbook is an example of what you can do when you choose or discover a theme and let yourself run with it over a period of time. Last summer I started a couple of journal page quilts that included circles cut from cereal box cardboard templates made with a compass and then set them aside after completing one of them. Near the end of the summer I was google surfing and found this inspirational pastels tutorial from Dirty Footprints Studio which must have registered in the back of my mind. While Christmas shopping in December I found myself in the art supplies aisle looking for a gift for my niece and I spotted the C-Thru plastic circles template. That was an “aha” moment for me as I remembered that the pastels tutorial used a circles template. This tool has been fun to experiment with and I feel that I have just scratched the surface. My first circles piece was done with pencil outline and colored pencil lightly applied and this piece was done with a Rapidograph ink pen outline and colored pencil with more pressure on the application of colored pencil to deepen the colors.
The Creative Every Day Challenge is inspiring and motivating me to create art. The saying “Not every piece is a work of art” on the sketchbook page is not a criticism of my work. It means that when you just let things flow and see what happens without the intention of creating a work of art you end up creating art that is meaningful. Sometimes when you plan things out and have wonderful intentions of creating a specific piece of art the end result does not always resonate with you. For me it has to do with the shift from left brain to right brain thinking (Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards) and letting my muse and intuitive thought process speak through me.
Here is the circles piece in process on my coffee table. The C-Thru circles template (T-800) is on top of one of the pencil boxes.
Posted by: Mary @ 9:54 pm
After reading about vision boards and dream boards yesterday, I decided to put together a dream board of my own to celebrate the New Year. Jamie Ridler Studios shows Full Moon Dreamboards which resonated with me and are on the wavelength of what I had envisioned last night. There is great info about creating vision boards on Christine Kane’s Blog. My word for 2010 is create, with the intent of creating new work in mixed media, quilting, drawing, painting, photography, scrapbooking, book arts, and anything else that inspires me. The following words are important to me and are listed on an index card on the dream board:
Organize
Play
Learn
Grow
Live
Love
Be Yourself
Connect
Visualize
Here is what tihe dining room table looked like when I was getting ready to prep the board. Looks like I have some cleaning up to do around here later as stuff seems to have spread out everywhere. This was a very empowering exercise and helped me to focus on what is important to me in the coming year.
Happy New Year!
Mary
Here is the photo memory wall quilt that I gave my daughter Marianne for Christmas. It was started in a workshop at the quilt retreat and finished at home. Printed Treasures inkjet printable fabric sheets are washable and colorfast and were used to print these photos with excellent results. A few years ago I made a photo bed quilt for her brother Joe with computer and monitor blocks that I had designed. Screen shots of video game scenes were printed using a different brand of inkjet printable fabric sheets and the colors washed out when I washed the quilt. It was very upsetting to have this happen but now I am going to redo the screen shots for his quilt with Printed Treasures brand fabric sheets and applique the retangles down over the washed out scenes.
Later on tonight I will be going to an early midnight mass with my daughter. After a flurry of activity in the kitchen it is quiet in the house at the moment and I just wanted to take the time to express thanks for all the good things in my life. I am thankful for my children, my family, and my friends old and new for just being there. I am thankful for the roof over my head, good food to eat, my health, and a job to occupy my days well and pay the bills. I am thankful for the technology that makes it easy to keep in touch with people and expand your social network. And I am grateful for the creative community that exists and is growing here, spreading beyond geographic limitations and boundaries to inspire all to create, share and connect with one another. It’s awesome! Happy Holidays to all and may the spirit of the peace of Christmas be with you even if you don’t observe this particular holiday. Happy New Year and joy in creating.
It has been a busy month and I am behind in posting to my blog. Here is the quilt I made for my Aunt Ethel for Christmas. I decided to bring it to her a few weeks early for her birthday and she just loved it. It is a lap quilt approximately 45″ by 60″ which is the perfect size for living in a convalescent type situation. It was started at the quilt retreat in a Quilt Bus class with Kris Driessen from a pattern by Phoebe Moon called Stars in My Window. The design was square so I added strips on either end to make it rectangular. The fabrics are mostly florals and vintage late eighties and early nineties from stash.
Happy Thanskgiving everyone. Just wanted to share an inspirational YouTube Video on art journaling with you today.
This weekend I bought myself a circles template and used it to create an interlocking circles design in my sketchbook with a mechanical pencil. The resultant shapes were then randomly filled in with my colored pencils. This was a fun exercise and the design reminds me of molecular structure. My Rapidograph pen was clogged (I have a .3 and a .5) but I was able to successfully clean it today and can try using the technical pen with the circle template next time. I love my Rapidograph pens even though they require special care.
Last weekend I went on a 3 day quilt retreat at YMCA Camp Hazen in Chester, CT put on by the Heart of the Valley Quilters of Portland, CT. About 55 women attended the event and it was a wonderful and refreshing respite from daily life. We talked, sewed, laughed, and ate our way through the long rainy weekend, inside the rustic lodge on the edge of a lake. Everyone brought their own projects to work on and their sewing machines and power strips and tons of fabric. There were workshops with different teachers and I have taught at previous retreats as well. The photo memory quilt workshop I took with Debbie Sierpinski was such a creative class and the results were spectacular. I also took a Stars in My window pattern workshop with Kris Driessen of the Quiltbug in NY. I will post photos of both quilts after Christmas as they are both going to be Christmas gifts and I need to machine quilt both of them by then. Here I am at the retreat.
The valances got finished tonight and now I have pictures of the finished quilt as well as the valances. This gives me a real sense of accomplishment to be finishing things. It also motivates me to continue on with self directed creative work. I am starting to get ideas about designing new quilts for the walls and need to put some sketches down on paper. Some of my best thinking occurs while driving and I have been doing a lot of that lately. Pages of loosely drawn thumbnail sketches are a great way to sort out and compare a lot of different ideas. Usually I use either a sketchbook or computer paper. If the design lends itself to the computer I still sketch on paper first. The touch of hand to paper with pen or pencil activates a different part of your brain and thought process than hand to mouse. Working in a variety of ways keeps your work fresh and your wellspring of creativity overflowing. This is my 50th blog post.
This is the color palette chosen for painting my bedroom in my it’s about time redecorating scheme. It has been a major project for me the past 2 weeks, from emptying the room to prepping the walls to painting the walls and then the trim, followed by putting everything back in the room. The room is finished and looks fresh, light and airy, while my knees are recovering from all that lifting and climbing up and down on the ladder. The walls are Hosta Flower, a pale lavender, and the trim is Swiss Coffee, a creamy off white. The paint is by Behr from Home Depot and the Behr web site has some great tools for choosing a color palette. I took my paint swatches to Joann Fabrics and picked out the fabric shown in the background of the photo for new valances. I plan on designing and creating a series of new quilts for the walls. Possible themes being considered are mountain, ocean, desert, and sky for the four different walls, with a diptych on the longest wall. I have not yet decided on the overall look or theme and may mix new and old pieces to show transition and change. Last night I finished machine quilting the last border of my fall leaves quilt for my bed, shown below, and just need to finish it off with the binding - a rich green batik seems to work best to unify the piece. The colder fall weather with a dusting of snow the other night on my way home from work motivated me to make the final push to get this quilt, 6 years in the making, finished and onto my bed.
This morning on my way to work I was able to capture a photo of the swan family. Each day I drive by the swan pond hoping to catch a glimpse of them. The swan couple built and tended a nest in the reeds at the edge of the pond last spring and I could see one swan sitting on the nest and one swan feeding in the pond. Sometime late in May I noticed both swans out in the water with little grey balls of fluff between them which was a thrilling sight. Another time I saw them gracefully crossing the pond in a straight line, the grey cygnets having grown larger. Many times I would either not see them or just catch a glimpse of white as I drove by. The three surviving cygnets are nearly full grown now and their color is starting to lighten. It has been a very special and incredible experience for me to watch the swan family grow. It has filled me with awe and wonder for nature in this place that is an industrial park and a by-pass road for an interstate highway.
