52 Figments, January completed

52 Figments: Week 4: You just won an Oscar! Knowing millions of people around the world are watching you, who would you want to thank? My answer is: "My family for their unwavering support."

52 Figments: Week 4: You are your own Superhero! Create a self-portrait of your most fabulous self.
Polar Bear fierceness and focus, sweetness of candy, superb scent and protection of roses, ability to fly, explosive power of volcano and ocean, a magic wand (of course!), and a silvery third eye that sees ALL.

Simple Still Life January

Watercolor pencil/crayon and blue pen, quick sketch, with a bit more interesting background color.






Simple Still Life for January.
We were to have items two alike, and three different.
I went with an all blue theme, two frosted glass eggs, a blue plastic cup, cd case and lightning ball.

52 Figments - 1st 3 Weeks

52 Figments, Week 1: What is your theme for 2006? My answer is obviously: GRATITUDE!

52 Figments: Week2: All expenses are paid and your safety is guaranteed...Where in the world do you want to go? Sicily Ireland New Zealand Australia Fiji Alaska Portugal Norway Bali Outer Hebrides Japan Scotland Tibet Isle of Man, Madagascar Malta Peru Chile

52 Figments: Week 3: Imagine having a conversation with yourself 20 years from now. What question would you want to ask?

If I were a cyborg

Cyborg Name Decoder which functions as a type of personality/horoscope too, thanks Croque-Choux

Tahoe Snow Fun

Some pictures of interesting stuff from this past weekend in South Lake Tahoe.


Backyard icicle!

The flowing river through Upper Truckee Marsh

Many tracks in the snow

Good reuse of old skis

Red tail lights on the way home , that traffic was baaaad!

Happy about Spam?!

I was feeling a little left out.
I hadn't received any spam asking to buy my artwork from Nigeria.
Finally, Mr. Andy Cole came through for me.
Funny how spam is somehow confirmation of one's status as an artist?! or maybe that is just how my crazybrain works?


Subject: artwork enquiry..
To: andy_me11@yahoo.co.uk

Hello,
Good day! I am Andy Cole. I am interested in purchasing some of the quilts artworks from your gallery and it will be ship to my new resident in Lagos,Nigeria. So please let me know if you can sell some of your quilts artwork for me to put to my new resident. Payment will be made out to you in form of a Cashiers Check or Money Order in us funds once we are able to reach a concrete agreement on the price. i do hope to hear back from you.thanks and hope to hear back from you soonest. have a lovely weekend...

brgds
Cole..

Daily Devotions Blog

Since I don't have nearly enough to do, I started another blog, just for my Daily Devotions art, and named it oh so creatively....High Fiber Content Daily Devotions.
I wanted to keep all this daily art in one place, so that at the end of the year, Bam!, it is ready for....action?!
It is all pictures.

Montage-a-Google And ImpeachPac

Here is an image I created in a fun new Google app, Montage-a-Google. You type in a few words, and it pulls together random images that match. Interesting, no?


A new political action committee has been formed, IMPEACHPAC.

Here is a message from founder Bob Fertik:

As you know, George Bush wants to know what you've been Googling.

He says he's just looking for porn searches. Why don't we believe him?

Maybe because he lies all the time, right to our faces - like when he
said this on April 20, 2004.

"Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government
talking about wiretap, it requires - a wiretap requires a court order.
Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down
terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so."
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/04/20040420-2.html

If Bush wants to use Google to find out what Americans are thinking,
let's tell him - LOUD AND CLEAR.

Please visit http://google.comright now and type this:

IMPEACHPAC

That's it, just IMPEACHPAC

When you get the Google search results, click on the very first link
for IMPEACHPAC.

Once you visit IMPEACHPAC, we hope you'll send a second message by
making a small donation to help us elect pro-impeachment candidates to
Congress. Our goal is $100,000, and we're over half-way there.

Small Designs

I recently took a class from Liz Berg through CQFA. It was all about design, and very well done. She had us do compositions with fabric scraps, glue stick and index cards.
Here are mine.

Quilt in a Day

So I made this quilt yesterday. Except for the binding I think it is done. I think. It is about 24 x 20"

It is for a color challenge for an online group I'm in. Can you guess what color I was assigned?

Yes, that's right, WHITE.

I purchased a bunch of different fabrics that are "white", chenille, wool, silk, and WOW (white printed on white) way back in October at PIQF. Also bought a bunch of white embellishment type of things. Originally I was going to do another labyrinth quilt, with the embellishments on top making the labyrinth design on top of this. But when I completed the quilting last night, I put it up on the design wall and decided I didn't want to goop it up with "stuff".
This is probably one of the simplest things I've ever made, but I'm really pleased with it. I wish you could see it in person, the contrast between the different fabrics is so fascinating. This will be one of those quilts that gets touched a lot when it is shown, not too cool that it is white because it will show all the fingerprints, plus with the wool and silk on there, it isn't too terribly washable. Oh well, I'll have to retitle it if gets too terribly dirty.
So, the title is "White Hot Pain", which is unfortunately what I was experiencing yesterday.
Here it is before the quilting.

Bread of Champions?

I noticed this today when I was making lunch for Alex. "Official Bread Supplier of the U.S. Olympic Team".

Wow, the whole image/branding/identification with superior athletes goes all the way down to the level of bread now. Guess they need all the sponsorship they can get. Plus I bet they go through a lot of bread at the training camps!
Bank of America, Visa, visible on the main page of the team are sponsors, but the suppliers such as Orowheat are on a subpage, but they can plaster these words all over their products, look for Kleenex with the same kind of stuff too.

Material Evidence

Here I am at the recent opening of the California Fiber Artists' new show "Material Evidence" at The Art Museum of Los Gatos . The show is up until February 26th, go see it!

My son Zach took these pictures of me, both of my pieces are on either side of a window so the lighting is a bit strange. My smile is a bit strange too, I think I was probably about to tell him what to do, instead of concentrating on smiling nicely. He puts up with a lot this kid.
The first piece is called "Variegated Exit/Entrance", made with all cotton that I've dyed and discharged, plus minimal beading that you can't see except for on close inspection.
The second piece is "Meteor Meltdown", made completely out of recycled stuff. Discharged cotton/lycra, tyvek, wedding veil, thread scraps.

Message from the Far Future

Self Portrait Tuesday

For Self Portrait Tuesday
This is a picture of me on a very happy day. My dear husband Marc and I are telling my mom and dad that we are pregnant! This was at Easter in 1993. 13 years ago....
Boy do we ever look young. sigh. Look at how short my hair is. And I'm wearing my pearls. I never wear my pearls anymore! I think I was even wearing pantyhose too. Gawd, it has been ages since I've worn those torture devices.
So what has changed in thirteen years?

We've had two children.

We've sold and bought a house and moved once.

Marc has changed jobs 3 times.

I changed jobs 4 times including one layoff immediately after returning from maternity leave (grrrr.)

Lots of stuff in our lives has changed.

Are we the same?

No, thank goodness!

We had NO idea what becoming parents really meant.

I'm ever so glad that you don't need to know everything about parenting before becoming one, that you get to learn on the job.

Yet another new diversion

Thanks to arlee for yet another new diversion.

A new tarot deck and more from the past

I'm so excited that Arnell Ando's Transformational Tarot deck is getting published this spring. She's put up a great website with images and descriptions of the cards, plus you can pre-order straight from her.
Go check it out, just to see her cool collage style.

And for those who haven't seen it, you must go look at Lunaea Weatherstone's Full Moon Dreams Tarot deck. I've been using it for several months now and it has given me many surprisingly accurate readings. Plus there is a tarot spread from yours truly (me) in the instruction book (grin) .

Have you seen my tarot majors? I did them as part of a project with other artistjournals list members, where we created one per month and then got one from each person, ending up with 20 majors decks from 20 different artists, it was a long but very worthwhile project.
They are on my website here. Someday I'll do the rest of the deck, someday... The picture here is the King of Wands that I did for a collaborative tarot deck.

How about my tarot quilts, those are here. There is so much to the tarot, I could spend the rest of my art life making art having to do with the tarot, hey maybe I will. In a way all of life is covered in the tarot, at least the way I look at it, so that is true whether intentional or not!

Celebrity Face Off

I couldn't resist and had to see what celebrity face mine most closely matches from the MyHeritage site, found this through TrollBaby.
According to their face scanning software I am a 60% match for:

Benita Ferrero-Waldner (born 5 September 1948) is the European Commissioner for Foreign Affairs and an Austrian diplomat and politician. She is a member of the conservative Austrian People's Party (ÖVP).

How about that?
I do see the physical resemblance, but I have to wonder if I'll end up that wacko conservative by the time I'm 60 something??? I suppose it is possible, never say never and all that.

United in Pink

I'm SO not a knitter at all, but I happened to notice a blurb in the paper about a cool project supporting breast cancer research for those who DO knit.

It is called United in Pink and the project goal is to knit the world's longest scarf by this spring.
Fifty miles or longer in pink yarn. That is kinda hard to visualize! And I am tempted to ask someone to try one more time to teach me how to knit just so I can participate...
The local store that has info and is sponsoring this project is the Golden Fleece in Santa Cruz. (I love that store name!)

So those of you reading this that happen to frequent knitting blogs, could you please pass this on to them so even more people will participate? Thanks!

Notice from the management

Thanks to That Logan Chick, for linking to the Warning Label Generator, how fun!

You know you need to go make one...

New Year Goals

Here is a good way to write some goals down for the year ahead which I had only been vaguely contemplating, thanks Jen at Bayou Quilts for the easy, yet still very useful list that prodded me to write those goals down.

Remember, write it down, make it happen, make it real.

In the new year...

1. List one person you've lost touch with that you will look up.

Cheryl.

2. List two places you want to go.

Yosemite, Arizona

3. List three habits you want to change or to develop.

Develop the habit of Daily artmaking: no matter how small.
Develop the habit of Daily exercise: walking, weight-lifting,stretching,ChiGong, whatever.
Change habit of neglecting my housework responsibilities.

4. List four things you hope to learn.

Implementing new ideas in designing quilts
EQ5
Flash animation
Html/website design

5. List five goals you would like to achieve

Document all artwork produced this year promptly, photo,slide,cd, and website.
Organize artwork documention and deadlines on either Quilting Pro or Art Pro.
Construction begun and completed on our house addition.
Document Avalon trip website, physical photo album.
Complete writing projects that I have committed to.

There, that wasn't so bad was it? Harder than I thought though.