Archive for October, 2016

Catching Up

Friday, October 14th, 2016

Oh, it has been too long!  It’s been a busy time with a trip to Maine squeezed in there, adjusting to the new vision challenges, and trying to keep up with business stuff. In a week I should have my new glasses and hopefully better closeup vision.

I entered the Flinthills scene into the Topeka Art Guild’s annual judged “Kansas” show and it was awarded third place which was somewhat of a surprise as there was a lot of good stuff this year!  My entry to IQF in Houston, “After The Storm” has won something but I won’t know what until the awards ceremony Nov 1st. I haven’t been to Houston for several years so am looking forward to it!

Last evening one of my quilting groups, Fabric, Fiber and Friends met here at my studio for the reveal of our last project, a take off on that old whisper game where you whisper something in someone’s ear and they whisper it to someone else and by the time it gets back to the first person it has totally evolved into something different.  In this case each person was inspired by the piece before their’s and no one got to see everything together til last night.

I started, suggesting 12 x 12″ format because it is so doable in a month’s time.  I was contemplating the large KS FlintHills piece at the time but had not decided which season it would be (ended up it was summer) so I had pulled a lot of fabric for the decision making. The cattle in the snow seemed like the right scale and it was easy to choose a few complimentary commercial prints to complete my vision which is an imaginary Flint Hills landscape. I passed it on to Shawn who was inspired by my use of commercial prints. I see similarities in the colors, and the swirly sky and that it is a landscape with living creatures, in this case ducks with a decidedly oriental flair.

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When Randy got Shawn’s piece, he definitely saw those ducks and created this portrait all in commercial batiks, which surprised us because he is known for his amazing hand dyes! The eye is a black headed brad, a very cool idea, that was repeated by Jane in brown, in her rendition of a loon, beautifully done!  You can almost feel the cool damp air and hear the haunting call.

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Dixie carried on the watery theme and colors; you can almost imagine the loons nesting in those cattails! And Rosie ran with the cattails but changed the color scheme by using a vivid napkin as a backdrop for silloueted cattails enhanced by lovely hand quilting stitches!

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Barbara kept the watery theme and changed her sky color to reflect sunrise or sunset. She broke up the panel print to create a watercolor effect lakeside garden.  That was enough to inspire Karen to finally do the watercolor quilt she had always wanted to try.

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Everyone had a lot of fun with this project, and true to what we expected, the final message had no connection to the beginning one, but still connections were there, a progression of seasons, nature themes, the use of commercial prints, both piecing and applique, machine and hand quilting, and our love of color, both subtle and bright.

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