Reasons For Keeping A Visual Journal

Why keeping a visual journal is so important, with thanks to Ricë Freeman-Zachery:

Cherry Bomb

 The cherry tree was in glorious bloom not so long ago.  I wish it lasted longer.

Design Exercise the First

 As part of a new small group I'm a member of, I had to make a small piece incorporating three symbols that each of us chose. I chose a spiral, which surprised no one. The other two members chose a kind of S shape (not-exactly sine wave but close) and a triangle.  We were all recently reading the book
Design By Nature: Using Universal Forms and Principles in Design by Maggie Macnab (I highly recommend this book!, It is very well done and thought-provoking), and we adapted some of the ideas about design and pattern into this group exercise.  It was really interesting to see what the other two group members came up with, all three were completely different.

I started out first with a three part background all in greys. I kept the irregular edges of the fabric pieces 'as-is' for visual interest.

The shapes were quilted and drawn in each section, spiral, S-shape and then triangle. I drew the shapes with a fabric marker, and added the dots at all the corners of the triangles because of a pen mistake.  That made me think of architectural style drawings, so I went back and drew over the shapes, adding fig.1, etc.

My original plan was that this would be the background and I'd add additional fabric shapes on top of all this.  But I was pretty happy with how it looked at this point so I stopped there.  This end design turned out to not combine the shapes quite as much as I really wanted to though. I will probably try this exercise again as I found it really useful and I'd like to see what else I could come up with.

Contained Observation

A new quilt that I finished recently, "Contained Observation" (20.5"w x 30.5"h).  I used many of my hand-dyed or painted or marbled fabrics, two of my hand-cut stamps and re-purposed zippers.

Mail surprise

What a nice surprise it was to get such a lovely thing in the mail, a fabric postcard from Virginia Schnalle!  I love having such talented, giving friends.

Trading Up

So the good thing about making ATC's is getting to trade them. 

Angela's, The quote says: 

Now and then

it's good to

pause in our

pursuit of

happiness and

just be happy.

-Guillame Apollinaire

Boy is that ever a good one that I needed to hear!

 I ended up with two from Maureen, these are made with fabric paper and have an addition of small crochet lace.

Rhonda's

 

And a very cute heart one from Virginia

And a last one from Maureen which has all these great transparent fabrics and either printing or silk-screening too, very cool.

March ATC's

 For the March CQFA meeting I managed to make some just-in-time ATC's.  I started out with some discharged and dyed fabric with some added shapes on top.

 A whole lot of stitching later, here's how it looks.  You can see the thing that will be added a bit later, paper lace.

 A little closer up on the stitching, some was straight stitch, some zig zag with variegated rayon thread.

 And here they are once they're chopped up and stitched around the edges.  Sometimes the fun part is deciding where to cut, a sort of  a last step design exercise.

 Closeups of the individual ATC's so you can see how the paper lace looks along with the quilted surface.