Passion for Purple

I'm starting off on another bullseye project with Jaye and Adrienne. We've done Seeing Red, and Feeling Blue (Jaye and I did a Black background bullseye too), so now we're onto Passion for Purple. These are the squares that I cut out of my stash.

We've started off with forty 10"squares of purples that we had in our vast fabric collections (so far only a few doubles have appeared!).

Then we swap them around and put three decreasingly smaller circles on them.

At the end we slash them up into four pieces, keep two out of the four, and each other participant gets one of the pieces of each block. Then we each play with the blocks and come up with something fabulous. Really fun to do. Great to collaborate with friends, see what fabrics they have that you don't, and to make something you wouldn't be able to otherwise!

This is my Seeing Red:We decided to cut the blocks up into triangles, which made for some really fun setting possibilities.And here is the only picture I could find of Feeling Blue (sorry about that lamp and chair in the way! Sheesh I need to photograph this one officially. Here you can see that we did squares instead of circles. I liked it, but it was a very different feel than the circular bullseye design...

Graphic Letters

 The plumber is here to replace our hot water heater, the power is still out but the sun is out charging up our battery, and the internet has remained up and running, so I'm happy as can be.

I'm working on finishing up the words on the second SJSA block.

Tne block maker asked for graphic letters in black and red. I knew it had to be mostly red as the background fabric has that awesome black diamond shaped pattern. And I just happened to have a small length of red satin ribbon.

I think the first word turned out pretty well. My DH says the first T looks a little like a J because of the background fabric so I may extend that down a teeny bit. It needs to read ProTect not ProJect.

I traced around the block letters with a Sewline marker to give myself the right spacing and to fit the letters in the space. Just a little glue stick to hold the ribbon sections down and then a slow zig zag  and tah-dah. 

The next two words are also done in red ribbon, of a slightly different width and color but with similar zig stitching. 

I think using the red really helps it pop out past that visually strong background fabric.

I'm happy with how the two blocks worked out and I hope the blockmakers, if they ever the finished quilt, will like what I did with their blocks.

While I had my box of ribbon out, I decided to put away the ribbons that I'd cleaned up out of my scrap basket and worktable area. 

I had these out and hanging around (literally) because I liked seeing these, because they're all so interesting and beautiful like little art pieces, so I hadn't put them away in the box. Hopefully I won't forget about them...

White Balance Challenges in the End of Days

I'm sure you've seen the orange or red sky pictures from the West Coast yesterday because we're on fire right now. This terrifying/hilarious combination of Pantone insignia and the name they gave the color of the sky made me sad and laugh at the same time. 

I struggled mightily yesterday to take my own accurate pictures of the apocalyptic sky that I was seeing with my iPhone.  This 3 second long picture captures how the light looked out on my deck the best. All other color was muted and almost gone, there wasn't a lot of green available to see. It was boggling the camera because it's so weighted towards automatically messing with the white balance. It was so dark out that it kept switching over to night shooting mode. 

The skylight at the top of our stairs was a glowing rectangle of orange red which doesn't come through well in this picture. Eerie is a word. Discombobulating also works. 

This is how an unedited picture was turning out, and it just didn't capture the orange-ness or the darkness at all.

The next two pictures are my attempts to adjust the color to what my eyes were seeing. It was somewhere in-between these two. It varied a lot during the day, sometimes getting quite a bit darker. We had all the lights on inside, that's how little light was getting through. 

Now, I'm a person who really loves orange, and this is too much for me. It's like the whole world is early decorating for Halloween or to celebrate the SF Giants. I miss my blue skies, or my foggy skies, it's too much. Will it be like this every year now? It's hard to imagine it getting better because the climate has indeed changed. We're hotter, we're drier, and we're just going to keep burning, year after year.

What can I possibly do besides take pictures? 

Fire Drill Fridays - the Greenpeace supported, Jane Fonda protest movement

Listen to Jane be interviewed about Fire Drill Fridays and her new book about why she's working so hard on the issue What Can I Do? on this episode of the great podcast, Hysteria

I'm going to be reading Naomi Klein's book On Fire - The (Burning) Case for the Green New Deal

In case you didn't see this video, check it out:

At Home Quilt Show

 I was taking pictures of the stuff in our house the other day for an insurance review and snapped all these pictures of some of my quilts that I have up on the wall for display right now. They've all been up there for a while, so it might be time to switch some around. This first one is Variegated Exit/Entrance, made is made with my dyed and discharged fabrics.

 Gray Street, which is a whole cloth quilt, one piece of potato starch discharge, quilted with the lyrics to the song of the same name.

 Senses of Flowers, collage quilt.

 Seeing Red 3, one of a series of bullseye block swap quilts I did with friends Jaye and Adrienne.

 As Above, So Below,  made of all plaid wovens.

J & J Bullseye, the first in a series of bullseye block swaps I did with friend Jaye, here's the one she made. I really like the setting I came up with this one.

Closeup On Bullseyes

Here are some closeups of one of the quilts I have hanging up at home right now. It just caught my eye the other day and I snapped all of these.

This is the first in a series of collaborative bullseye quilts that I've done with Jaye Lapachet (aka ArtQuiltmaker). It is from 2001 and is named J&J Bullseye. I'm sorry to say I don't have a full quilt picture to post here.

Here is how Jaye's whole finished quilt looks. The quilt block comes from the book Quilts from Aunt Amy.

We of course, used completely different settings for our quilts, plus we cut the block up on the diagonal instead of just in even square quarters.

If I recall our rules were pretty simple with this first one, to use mostly black and black/white print for backgrounds and a good mix of colors for the circles.

In the later quilts, another quilting friend Adrienne Acoba joined us and we made Seeing Red, Feeling Blue and Passion for Purple we were a bit more specific on which colors could be included.

But I still really love this first one a lot, something about that niceand varied black background.

Feeling Blue

I spent a few hours getting the 8" squares cut and folded in quarters, ironed and ready to put on the 10" blue backgrounds. 36 of them from Jaye, then when I'm done sewing on the 8" squares, they go to Adrienne for her to apply 6" squares, then back to Jaye for 4" squares, she'll cut them in quarters and we each get the equivalent of 12 blocks, 48 pieces, 144 total. We each started with 36 blue background squares, so there will be a lot to play with at the end of this swap. This is for a new bullseye project. Last year it was "Seeing Red". This year it is "Feeling Blue" I love working with Jaye and Adrienne on these, they both have great fabric stashes, and wonderful color sense.

Table Runners and Micro Loans

A work colleague of my husband's gave him this to pass on to me.  It's a really beautiful table runner, woven in Bangladesh where he's from.  The colors are so vibrant, and happen to be the colors we used at our wedding (I've always loved purple and red together). I love the combination of the concentric circles, checks and stripes, a great design with a lot of punch no matter what colors it's woven in.
He was telling my husband about all the new co-ops and things being organized so the craftspeople get paid better wages and how the micro-lending idea is exploding there and making things a whole lot better for people.  That's really good to hear isn't it? I just made my first loan via the website Kiva, to a Guatemalan women's weaving co-op and am looking forward to seeing how it works.

Black and White vs. Colour

For the self portrait challenge this month it is all black and white all the time.
Which do you like better? The black and white version or the colour version? This is me petting a cactus (kidding!) in Sedona at Dara's old house back in 2005. The only black thing in the color photo is my pants, and the only white things are my shoes and the stepping stone. But there are soooo many other colours in this photo, the purple of the cactus, the green of the house, the grass, the scrub, the mountain tops, the orange of my top, the red of the cliffs, the pink of the sidewalk and the cactus and the cliffs. It is interesting to me to see the impact colour has on this image. It also has a big impact on how I store my memories, I can really remember the cactus now that I see it in living color. I can almost feel those prickly sharp spines near my hand again. But if it was just seeing a black white version of the photo, I don't think that visceral memory would be available to me now, in this present.
So I admit it, I'm a colour addict. I need colour. It feeds me. In a very deep way. This month is going to be very challenging.

First Old Town Blocks

 

I felt my interest in getting back to work on the Old Town Mystery greatly revived after seeing friend Jaye's absolutely gorgeous finished quilt top in person. 

Jaye was so nice and gave me a little pep talk and reminded me of some useful block assembly tips so I got down to it and got my first block constructed.

Hey, wow! Just like that, the first block is done.

I laid out the next one to work on, and was happy to see how different it looks from the first one.

Here are the two finished blocks up on the design wall along with the pieced sashing and of course, one last surprise for me in the instructions to cut out 16 red cornerstones. I really like the look of it so far. 

Memo to me: I'm going to have to work hard on keeping the dark blues in the sashing away from the dark reds though. Rearrange this layout before sewing together.

Wandering Wednesday - Scott Creek Beach

 

We actually wandered! After an errand in Santa Cruz this weekend instead of driving straight home, we went up highway one. 

There was enough wind that the clouds were different in nearly every picture.

The fields of sour grass were beautiful.

The colors of the creek flowing into the sea were changeable and kind of hypnotic.

It was a fairly clear day between rain showers so it was very fresh but not overly windy. 

There was a lot of stuff washed up on the shore as per usual, and this delicate crab shell was only complete on one-side.

This red claw from a crab was really eye-catching.

This was my first view with my own eyes of the devastation from the CZU fire on the coast side of our mountains. Looked like an eraser wiped it all out, just awful. We didn't drive back through Bonny Doon like we usually do because I was too freaked out about seeing the damage up close. I'm just not ready yet.

A Robotic Mother's Day

It was left to me to choose our outing for Mother's Day. I almost chose going to the San Francisco Giant's game, but only my mom and I really enjoy baseball. All the menfolks who would be accompanying us would undoubtedly appreciate something else.

So I started looking up museums, and nothing in SF was too intriguing (although I'm psyched to see that Frida Kahlo and Dale Chiluly will have major shows this summer), and I thought to look at the San Jose Museum of Art. They were advertising an exhibit of Robot art, and hey Target was sponsoring the weekend, so it was free. Mom (and I) love a freebie, so that was the choice. Plus, less gas required than a drive up to SF.
The boys glommed onto the lego station and made some cool robot creations. You can see in the background behind Alex the gigantic robot banner. Photos weren't allowed but I got a special okay from the guard to take pics of the boys' robots. There were even some embroidered robots, but most were of harder material. The museum is trying a new thing and offer an iTouch to check out and take a video tour of the exhibit. It was cool, had interviews with the curator and the artist, showed more of the artists' work, etc. I thought it was a great innovation.

Then it was time for lunch at the yummy museum cafe. It was such a nice day we sat outside and waited. And twirled our number, that would be number twenty three. Paninni sandwiches all around.Here is Alex and my mom at the museum entrance. Note she is wearing the Mother's Day badge I made for her back in 1978 when the junior high school acquired one of those badge maker thingies. I was obsessed with that thing and spent a lot of my money to make them. 50cents apiece!That's my dad in the red shirt, I was far away on the museum steps using the zoom to capture him, as well as Zach and Marc. But somehow he sensed the camera. And froze. And started grinning. The other two were oblivious because they were distracted by the Happy Birthday Buddha celebration going on in the nearby plaza. The people were very nice and explained stuff to us, as all of the signs were in Chinese, it was a lovely display of Buddha related artwork, with flowers.
Zach doesn't go anywhere without this little guitar. Here he is practicing busking in front of the Fairmont.
One of the unsettling things about downtown San Jose is the flight path of the landing airplanes for the nearby airport. It goes right overhead, and since the airport is so close, the planes come in very low. I always think that the planes look like they're about to crash into the tall hotel buildings. Yikes!
Some city sculpture we found interesting. Alex tried really hard to tip them over (dont' they look tip-able?!) but they didn't budge. Somewhere in here we went to Ben & Jerry's and got tanked up on high-calorie delicious ice cream. But I was too sticky and sugar buzzed to take any pictures. But I did discover that there is an ice cream in this world that is too chocolatey for me, their Chocolate Therapy. Huh, how about that!
And on the way home, we had to stop at Guitar Showcase as Zach had broken a string on his guitar. It has a huge selection of guitars (duh!), keyboards, and drums. We were there for an hour fooling around on all the instruments, and watching him play $2,000 guitars. eeeek!

So, that was my Mother's Day, fun going out with the family, seeing art, eating good food and just being together. Perfect. Hope yours was good as well!