Forever V-Day

💘💗💖💕💓Happy Valentine's Day! 💘💗💖💕💓

Sure it's a "Hallmark holiday" and all, but still, it's a sweet idea to have a day to communicate your love. This is an inadvertent heart-shaped KaleidaCam of my holiday table runner. (Now washed and put away until December). I don't have a Valentine's one, maybe I should put that on my table-runner to-do list?

I got a good start on the Valentine's card I'm making for my DH. I had a bit of a fail at first, but it turned out I just needed to change out the teeny tiny blade on the main cutting device. It's very easy to do, just like changing your rotary cutter, they wear out eventually.
 

Happy Superb Owl Day!

 As seen in Santa Cruz yesterday. I see faces in everything, but this time it was very clear. 

Do you know about Superb Owl Day? Apparently one of the most common spelling mistakes when people are googling about the Super Bowl is to mistype it as Superb Owl which leads to very different search results. Some conservation/education groups take advantage of this and have owl-related events and fundraisers today, which is a good use of the internet and its inherent penchant for meme-creation if you ask me. The more support for owls and their habitats the better for us all. There's even a subReddit (of course there is!)

My favorite owl is whichever one I hear nearly every night, it seems like they take turns, one is definitely a Western Screech Owl 

and the other is very likely a Great Horned Owl.  I've never seen them with my own eyes, but I feel lucky to get to hear them all the time.

But today is our favorite day of the year to go to Costco during game time, it's like a ghost town which sounds lovely. That's where we'll be this afternoon since the 49ers didn't make it all the way this year.

Jade Kaleidoscopes

 

Time for some KaleidaCam photos.

I took these out in the bright midday sunlight so the pictures are extra clear. 

I think this is my favorite one. It looks a bit like an overhead view of a really closed up artichoke.

Red edges on the Jade plant, this happens when you grow Jade in bright sunlight. Doesn't get much brighter than out on our deck.

Triptych Trio

 

Here are the final three quilts I've been working on the last few weeks. 

Hung up all together in their intended triptych form. 

I'm going to be quite happy to hang these up in my home if they don't make it into the Prism Play SAQA show that I made them for. 

I gave all three quilts Latin names based on their color and position in the triptych for some reason I couldn't express at the moment. Mostly it's because the Latin word for left hand is *Sinister* which I've always loved very much. 

Chartreuse Sinister  - The Chartreuse Mountains are where Carthusian monks have traditionally made the drink of the same name and color. The outlines of the curves of the mountain range inspired the curving lines and shadows. The Latin word for left is sinister. This is the left-most piece of a triptych.

Aqua Centrum - The curving lines and shadows echo the color changes in the open ocean water at various depths. The Latin word for center is centrum. This is the center-most piece of a triptych.

Aurantia Dextera - The curving lines and shadows evoke the rolling hills covered in orange groves. The Latin word for right is dextera and for orange is aurantia. This is the right-most piece of a triptych.

Down to Size

Time for trimming! Getting all three quilts down to 15”w X 45”h was a challenge. I cut all the facings out at once which made me feel very efficient and organized.

 I also changed out the rotary cutter blade, finally! I don’t know why I always take so long to do this. The blades last a long time but not forever.

Wandering Wednesday - Dry Creek/Garin Park

 

Last Saturday was our chosen hike day to get together with my SIL and her family, both of our kids plus one friend came along too and three dogs (but not ours). We were quite the crew out on the trail, it was fun.

It's our joint goal to get the two families together once a month to go on a hike. So far we're 2 out of 2, so off to a good start. 

This would be a pretty ideal place to be a cow, ample shade and water, endless green grass (at least until it warms up) and lots of room to roam.

The grassy hills look so smoothly green from far away, but they're quite rough up close.

It was a little hazy so we couldn't see all the way to San Francisco.

There are so many more hikes just in this one park, Dry Creek/Garin, there is one trail that goes all along the ridge right behind my BIL.

My niece was surprised to hear that we drove an hour and a half just to go hiking. But when I told her we made the drive mostly because we wanted to see her and her family she got it.

There were so many raptors in the sky, my niece was concerned about her little dog, Ginger who could definitely be scooped up by a hawk.

I was really glad to get out into the sunshine with our people. A two hour hike, about 3.5 miles, 80 floors according to my FitBit. I was slow, but I got there, and I wasn't in a lot of pain the day after.

Good re-use of horse shoes.

Some parts of the trail were pretty steep.

My daughter's dog, Bella, mere moments before she dove headfirst into a rather juicy cow patty. Yikes.

Quilting Blue

I buckled down and got the quilting done on the blue Prism Play quilt yesterday. All thanks to a library book on CDs, the latest Stephen King book, Billy Summers. The story is non-supernatural or horror, it's about a military sniper turned hired assassin and as per King's usual a great character study. The performer reading the book does very engaging and realistic voices for the many characters.

As you can see here, I had a lot of fun with free-hand, non free-motion quilting.

I went for making as much texture as possible and got pretty good results.

These are all still un-trimmed, and just roughly pinned down to size, but give a good general idea of how they'll look. Now on to the cutting to size and adding the facings. And then the photography and completing the entry (due on the 10th eeeek!)

 

Floor Fabric

Remember this picture I took a while back? It is a shot of the highly polished floor in our local Costco. I took it while I was waiting for my son to get his Covid booster shot. One of the very few times you ever get a chance to sit down in Costco. I fooled around with it in Percolator which turned out some very cool designs, which I also said I thought it'd make a great fabric. Instead of those abstracted images from Percolator, I just went with the original.

 And what do you know? I was right. I tiled the image in the Spoonflower editing program in a mirrored repeat and got 2 yards of fabric printed. I think it'll make a great skirt, to wear to Costco of course...so I can blend in. If I do, I promise to get a pic of myself standing in this spot wearing it. 

I chose to use Spoonflower's Petal Signature Cotton, but it would probably be fine on a lot of other choices that they offer, maybe even wallpaper. If you want to order some of your own, please go right ahead.

Seeds and Fog

We had a few windy (for us) days and the sheer amount of redwood seed blown down onto the deck was really remarkable. In theory, you can gather these up and grow your own redwoods. Our property has two groves of redwoods, so we've already got plenty, thanks. But the redwoods are visibly quite stressed by the recent fire, the unusual changes in the weather, like years of drought, extreme and sustained heat waves, greatly reduced amounts and days of fog, etc. And that in turn results in more seeds being dispersed by the trees, pretty good planning there on the part of the trees, huh?

There is a special project within the USGS, The Pacific Coastal Fog Project, where they concentrate on monitoring and studying the changes in the fog along our coast that the plants that grow here are acclimated to. They're trying to model what to expect as far as fog amounts in the expected coming warming years.

I was joking the other day about how we're going to have to have county trucks going up and down the roads in all our redwood groves dispersing fog pretty soon just to keep the existing trees alive. I follow @KarlTheFog on twitter, which is a fun account that personifies the famous SF fog. We need one of those for the Santa Cruz Mountains.

 

Everything Is Blue

On to the third and final Prism Play quilt, this time I had to choose between three color cards. I settled on Aqua Blue because I had the most fabrics to choose from. Here's the start of the quilt and the fabric pull I was working with. I ended up pulling out that very dark green one that very much was not in the correct color range. It happened to be one of those shot cottons, so under one light it was absolutely spot on, but under another light or at another angle, it came off very differently. More like: why is this obviously green fabric in here?

I again encountered the colored head of my pin exactly matching the fabric. Like playing "chicken" except with a sewing machine instead of a car. Slightly less dangerous.

This song was of course running through my head as I was stitching on this one:
 

Two Down, One to Go

 

All done with quilting two out of the three Prism Play quilts for the SAQA exhibit. These are such an odd size, 15" wide x45"high. This is the green one before quilting.

The blue one that I'm working on goes in-between the green and orange pieces:

Here they are with their corresponding color cards.

These aren't cut down to size quite yet, the edges are just pinned. I'm really pleased with how the quilting turned out. Because of the odd size it's going to be a real challenge to light these well enough for photography to enter the show.

Into The Green

 

Now that I'm done with orange, I'm onto the green. I had two color cards to choose from this time. Yellow-green and Chartreuse. Can you tell which one I chose? 

Of course, yes you've guessed right, Chartreuse. I actually pulled fabric for both and went with the one that would look the best with the orange piece. These three color quilts are intended to hang as a triptych in my mind. At least at this point and assuming that none of them sell.

Workshop: Inspired By Art

 

The workshop I took last month with David Owen Hastings was really excellent. It was titled "Inspired By Art" which sounded very intriguing to me. SBAMQG had him speak at our retreat last year so we got a little preview of the idea. We were supposed to choose a piece of art that we liked and to be ready for class, to pull some fabrics based on the colors in the art. Here's most of the fabric I pulled to work with.

This is the piece of art that I chose, a Dali print we have had hanging up in our house ever since we saw a Dali exhibit in Venice in 1988. My goodness, that was so long ago! The Berlin Wall fell the year afterwards! Anyway...time marches on, and I continue to take classes.

After a great presentation by David on what to look for when being inspired by art for this process, we got  down to work. 

First, we folded up pieces of paper to make a nice infinitely adjustable view finder and then sketched out basic lines for potential block designs in a small quick study.

Then we enlarged the designs to the size of blocks we wanted to make and it was time for fabric. The sizes were all very loosey-goosey and improv-y which worked for me. No exactitude required, as this is all "inspired by" not  "making an exact copy of" kind of process.

One of my intended to be a square blocks turned into quite a rectangle, but I got the curves in that I wanted to make and it worked out.

I surprised myself how well I did on the curve sewing, but David had great advice on the sewing of improv cut curves which worked for me. Sometimes a teacher says something in a certain way that finally gets through to me and I have that wonderful lightbulb moment.

Then it was time to "square up" into blocks. There was quite a lot of fabric wastage with using this technique, but if I'd been sewing more exactly and measuring it would be reduced.

At the end of class I had three blocks done, and I'm very pleased with how they look together.

The colors and lines really capture the painting for me, and they're such interesting blocks especially all together. David showed us all sorts of ways to continue from this point to set the blocks into a quilt top design and I plan to make at least ten blocks and go from there. This workshop was so fun and challenging. It was truly awesome to see what everyone else in class made as we went along. 

I really recommend taking a workshop or lecture from David if you ever get a chance.