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.

Say It Right

One of those things you never ever think about, until you do:

Opinion
Size
Age
Shape
Color
Origin
Material
Purpose
NOUN

AKA OSACOMP

That's why it's:

The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog

and not:

The Brown Quick Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog

This is the agreed-upon order that we use adjectives in the English language. If you do it any differently you'll sound strange, maybe even crazy. If you're writing the sentence yourself and you re-read it, the word that's in the wrong place will stand out as quite odd and you'll rearrange the words until it's *right*.

It's pretty wild. when you start thinking about it.

I think it'd make a great quilt series.

I'd use one of the OSACOMP words either in each piece, or as part of the pieces' title and then present it as a whole with the quilts having to be shown in a certain order and then see if anyone got it or not. This of course assumes someone wants to show 8 quilts all in a row with something obscure yet obvious tying them together. This likely won't get much beyond this point, so don't worry. But I'm still putting it in the "Quilt Series Ideas" tag just in case.

Shadows

I'm thinking of starting a new series of quilts based on the pictures of shadows I've been taking lately.

What I'm envisioning is using monochrome colors. So like this one could be shades of green.

And this one, I'd edit into a black and white picture to get the color out of it.

 Something like this.

This one could be done in shades of brown.

Filing this post under Quilt Series Ideas

Sunsets Are Series

 I was just looking at these pictures I took recently of a really spectacular sunset in Santa Barbara.  And realized that they really are a series.

 Just struck by that, the sun does this (twice!) every day for us, and it's always different.  Never the same twice.

Just like any good artist, endlessly pushing for innovation while working in a series.

There are just so many variables for our human perception of the sun's daily series work. We really are lucky aren't we?

Shoreline Series

 Looking through my pictures from our recent trip to Lake Tahoe made me start thinking about working in a series.

 From one spot on the deserted beach I took this series of photos while waiting for my family to meet me (they bicycling which I couldn't do because of my still healing finger). 
Each of these pictures is so similar when looked at in thumbnail size, the orangey shore contrasting with that blue sky and darker blue water, and the darkness of indistinct mountains.  But when seen at normal size like I'm showing you here, all those differences come out and catch my interest and imagination and make me want to turn them into quilts or paintings or collages or..... 
This makes me finally get why working in a series is so satisfying to so many people.  I've been feeling that pull lately, and maybe this epiphany will help me get over the hump to actually working on it and giving it a try.

 All those different views possible from the same spot, the same day, the same camera, the same media, the same person making the image.

Until people show up and introduce even more variables! 
Well, at least they were the people I was waiting for, my two sons who were of course immediately set upon digging a hole and changing the whole view.