Black and White.

We have been given permission to post photos of the black and white challenge we entered. All the quilts will be in special exhibits in 2009. I am not sure yet exactly where they will be, but have been told that the quilts will tour for 2 years. In a way I will not be upset to see this one gone.. it gave me lots of headaches! Maybe someone will fall in love with it and have a burning desire to own it!

I am off to Baltimore for the next 5 days. I will try to take some nice pictures.

Dancing again

I am doing the happy dance again! Two of my pieces and a third for backup were just juried into another show. This one is a gallery so I hope some of them will sell as well. The pieces that got in are Through Rose Colored Glasses and Ball Game. Back up piece, if they have room to hang it, is Arizona Sunset. Yaaaaaaaaaaay. Now I have to put sleeves on them as they need them by Monday.

Textured

I have signed up for an online class called "Textured Surfaces". So far it is a fun class and I expect to learn all sorts of interesting stuff. It remains to be seen how I am going to incorporate these new techniques into my own style. So far we have painted several types of background materials with white household latex primer. I used white muslin, white duck cloth, Timtex, and a stretched canvas. To these I added Molding paste which I stamped or stenciled. On some other samples I glued on scrim (cheesecloth) and pieces of torn textured paper. We were suppose to use wallpaper samples but I could not find any. Another sample is a sandwich of Timtex and fabric to which textured yarns were added and couched and then expandable paint was applied. I had never used the expandable paint so I was very cautious in its application. I used a heat gun to puff it up. It is fun and the bonus was that some of the yarn fibers did funky things. I really liked the effect from the scrim.

Mulberry jeans

I had a busy day today. I started my online class "Textured Surfaces" which looks like it is going to be oodles of fun. I also performed surgery on my laptop. In hopes of getting 2 more years out of it, I put in 2 Gig of memory. Patient is alive and well.
In between all this I decided to dye a pair of white jeans purple. I picked out a color from the new sky colors we got from Carol and held my breath. The color matches the swatch!! I picked out a dusty mulberry color and I am pleased with the results. The downside is that the stitching is obviously not cotton. I still have to hem them so the rest I can live with. I have another pair to do but I haven't decided on a color yet.

Osage Oranges

While up at Nancy Crow's Barn I acquired some Osage Oranges, aka Hedge Apples. I had never seen these before. I finally got around to taking some photos before they rotted. Please excuse the lack of staging. I loved the texture on these.

Fun, fun, fun

I am back home, exhausted but happy from Nancy Crow's Barn taking Carol Soderlund's class, Color Mixing for Dyer's part 2. I had a blast! I learned all sorts of neat stuff that included monoprinting, silk screen printing, deconstructed silk screen printing, and dye painting both regular and thickened. We did printing and overpainting experiments, multiple color overdying, printing using a variety of resists, over rolling, under rolling, and stamping using thickened dyes. We even got a chance to do a shibori piece. Everyone in the class was just having a great time playing and we have a new color family to add to our "bible".

My next fun class will be an online class exploring textured surfaces.

Off to see the wizard

I am leaving tomorrow for Columbus, Ohio and Nancy Crow's Barn to take part 2 of Carol Soderlund's Color Mixing for Dyers class. I am jazzed. Of course I am not packed yet, but that is nothing new. I have a hefty schedule for the next 2 months when I return. I signed up for 2 online classes... Monoprinting with Susan Sorrell, and Textured Surfaces through Fiber and Form. At the end of November, I got lucky and got a spot in Jan Meyer-Newbury's Shibori class at the Newark Museum. I also get to see my daughter that trip... YAY! I am also taking a local workshop in Cyanotype. Not sure it is where I want to go but I always like to learn. In betweeen its back to focusing on new work. This is the year I have promised myself I need to get out there. I have some pieces I am going to enter into various places and I just have to hope I get some fat envelopes back.

Wedding photos are trickling in

Robin and Brett
These are still not the official photos... we only have proofs of those and of course they all have a watermark on them :-(.
Me and Ned (hubby to be)