Wandering Wednesday: Bridges of The Bay

 

Last week I got the chance to hang out with friend Jaye for a couple days. These are some of the pictures I took on our journeys around the Bay Area. First up a stormy morning drive over the Golden Gate. Not so golden looking in the overcast. You can still see the orange-nesss of the closest to the viewer verticals. The history of the specific paint color: GGB International Orange is so interesting. And there's even an equivalent Pantone color: Pantone 180 (CYMK 19.4%, 77.9%, 79.6%, 3.6%). Sadly, this wasn't included in our Pantone postcard box.

A nice but very cloudy and windy view of the northern part of the San Francisco Bay from the Marin Rod and Gun Club building. Very nice location, which is literally right off the same freeway exit as San Quentin prison. We were meeting with the long arm quilter that friend Jaye works with. She's now the first female president of this 92 year old outdoor sporting club. Not many quilters can claim this sort of day job, very interesting!  Looking at this picture I always forget about all the little teeny island bits scattered about in the bay. It's amazing that they're not all inhabited. Some of the bigger ones are of course, like say, Alcatraz, another famous prison. 

The half mile long fishing pier that the club members get to fish off of. I've never tried pier fishing, I bet it's really fun.

A view of the Richmond San Rafael bridge that we were about to drive over. On a blue sky day, this would be a really gorgeous picture/view, but I like the drama of the sky about to open up with much-needed rain. As a native Californian, I always need to remind my self that to stay out of drought conditions, we almost always need the rain, however inconvenient it might be in the moment.

I've always loved the linear designs made by the trusses and supports of different types of bridges. Also, it's worth mentioning that it's very nice that someone else is driving so that I can safely take a picture. It might be fun to pull out all the bridge pictures I've taken over the years and do an abstract quilt series based on them.  Putting this is in the quilt series ideas bucket. It's probably already in there, so here it is again.

As mentioned previously, we visited Bay Quilts, they had a very famous Hollis Chatelain quilt from 2000 installed about the thread choices, Blue Man. It was very fun to see this one in person, it's hand-dye painted and really gorgeously stitched. There was also an installation of a great group of quilts by Ileana Soto, which are up through the end of January. I honestly wish Bay Quilts was my LQS, could I convince DH that we need to move to the East Bay for that reason? Probably not.

And then finally, after a great BAM meeting, we went and had some dinner in downtown Redwood City I took this picture across an intersection because I love the frescoes, or maybe they're just painted or tiled. I have no idea how old they are, or if they have a story, but it's such a great and striking design. Guess that means I'm putting this in the maybe someday quilt design bucket and the inspired by building motifs quilt series bucket as well.