These Christmas ornaments were made from my own foundation paper pieced designs this week using some of my favorite fabrics. My quilting patterns are designed in Adobe Illustrator and previously in MacDraw when I had a Mac Plus (my pattern collection goes way back). Foundation piecing is one of those techniques that people seem to either love or hate - there is no in between. Carol Doak is the queen of paper piecing if you are interested in learning more about this method and these types of patterns. To me they are a lot of fun to put together and you get extremely accurate piecing and points.
Posted by: Mary @ 7:07 pm
One of my favorite Robert Frost poems is “The Road Not Taken”. The poem can be seen in its entirety at Bartleby Quotes. At times we are faced with a decision and a choice as to which path to take in life. Sometimes it is a small decision and sometimes it is a huge one. Sometimes the choice is clear and other times it is arrived at with difficulty. This mixed media piece was created over the past week and illustrates my feelings about having two similar yet different paths appear at a moment in time. I started by cutting varying width strips of different scrapbook papers and glueing them down to a 12″x12″ cardstock base. After leaving this on my work table and letting it sit for a few days I decided to add marks with a blue pastel stick. Next I chose to cut random width and length strips of transparent velum and glue those down. Today I remembered the photos of boardwalks that I took this year at two different places in nature: the Cranberry Bog and the Audubon Center. After printing one photo from each place I arranged them carefully on the surface and added my favorite part of the quotation to finish the piece.
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
The theme for the challenge at Three Muses this week is round - what a great theme! Perhaps a day late and a dollar short but I brainstormed with pencil and paper and came up with an idea over lunch at work today. After settling on one particular idea I was able to visualize the piece. It is always exciting to be able to picture something in your mind before starting as well as to give yourself the freedom to change the piece as you work on it. Things don’t always turn out as planned but often they turn out better. If not you can always change tack and try something else. Remember that nothing is cast in stone. The clipart is from Dover Publications and the background started out as a vintage book page from Stampington which was then altered using multiple filters. This is a digital piece created using Gimp photo editing software which is open source software and comparable to Photoshop. This is also my first challenge piece from the MacBook that my wonderful kids gave me for my birthday to replace the 8 year old G4. What a surprise indeed!
