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Archive for the ‘Family’ Category

Day 15

Tuesday, December 15th, 2015

It has been a pretty good day despite the gloom hanging over Portland. I had lunch with Amy Frazer, who I met through SDA. She used to work in the sock division of Nike and traveled a lot meeting with athletes regarding their sock needs, I guess. She was doing fiber art work, mainly embroidery, on the side. Now, she no longer works for Nike and is pursuing a more artistic life.

Here we are enjoying our decadent desserts at Papa Haydn’s, known for their desserts. That is my cheesecake with a toffee crust (so good). She had the Buche de Noel. We both took half home to our significant others.

I wore my bionic brace for more than four hours today. I find that if I wear it during my most active time, it saves my knee from getting enraged and screaming at me.

Tonight, we toodled over the hill to Kristin La Flamme’s home and had some munchies and then went to hear her daughter, Katja, play bass with the Wilson High School Jazz band. Such fun and good memories for me of the days when I was a band, orchestra and choir member in high school. Plus, I adopted Kristin several years ago as my art quilt daughter, so Katja is sort of my grandchild!!

The other good thing is that I got to miss the republican debate!!

So, it has been a good day.

Posted in Family, Quilting Friends | Comments Off on Day 15

Day 12

Saturday, December 12th, 2015

Finally got some holiday mojo going on here in The Congdo. It was a gloomy day so we turned on as many lights as we could and cranked up the Christmas music on the stereo.

More of my nativities.

An assortment of angels on the mantel.

And some glittering bling in a bowl.

Tonight we went to a beautiful concert at Trinity with the choirs and organ and Oregon Symphony brass and then out to dinner with Clay and Lisa. So much fun.

Posted in Family, Holidays | Comments Off on Day 12

31 Day Blog Challenge

Tuesday, December 1st, 2015

Cheryl Sleboda has issued a challenge to other bloggers to post to their blog every day this month. I know that I have been posting a lot less. I will blame a lot of that on Instagram and FaceBook. I feel as if I am duplicating my activity by then posting to this blog. So, I am going to give this a go and see what I can come up with to entertain you for a month. If you would like to know more about it, click here.

We had a great Thanksgiving with all our children and grandchildren in town. Mark, Jayme and the whirling dirvish 3 year old Paige stayed with us. It was fun to spend so much time with her. Jayme had to take very important medical boards yesterday and today so she spent a lot of the week-end studying and taking practice tests.

Here is a rare quiet moment while she watched Sesame St.

We took her to OMSI, a science and technology center with lots of interactive stuff for kids. She got to walk on a giant guitar in the guitar exhibit.

Paige and Scooter got along very well. Scooter wanted a turn on the iPad!

We had Thanksgiving at Lisa and Clay’s home. On Friday, we moved on to Steph’s home. She made us turkey and butternut squash enchiladas. On Saturday night, we took everyone out for pizza.

During the bedlam of the holiday, I tried to get me November assignment finished up for my Master Class. I love the color palette, but with the rush of finishing, I didn’t notice that my background columns had gotten askew before I quilted them down. I call this Christo’s Fence Redux.

As a reminder, here is the photo inspiration:

Posted in Family, Holidays, Inspiration, My creations, Paige Ada | 3 Comments »

November Is Almost Over!

Monday, November 23rd, 2015

Truth be told, I am having a nice November. My SDA job has taken less time. I no longer have the Printed Fabric Bee to worry about. Portland has been beautiful this fall. Wednesday, Paige and her mom and dad are arriving to spend Thanksgiving with us. I am so happy about that. We will be going to Lisa’s for the dinner. She has a big dining room table. I am making the turkey, stuffing and a pumpkin pie. It will be nice having the whole core family here in Portland.

At Trinity, we are having our annual art show and sale for Thembanathi, a nonprofit project that provides early childhood development, education and community building in an area of rural South Africa devastated by HIV and the effects of segregation, poverty and unemployment. The bowl and necklace up there were my purchases. Here are some other examples.

There are also prints and photographs. The work is done by Zulu artisans and is really beautiful. The bowls and little animals are made from colorful covered copper telephone wire and the jewelry is mainly beads.

My art quilting friend, France Alford, turned 70 last month and she requested that all of her friends make and send a 6 inch block that was sandwiched and quilted. This is what I sent her. I finally got it finished this month.

I also finished this sweater and hat for a little girl baby. Her mother is a friend of my daughter Stephanie. Now I am starting another set for my hair stylist’s baby boy.

You know I am chilling when I am knitting.

Last week, I got to go back to the Seeing Nature exhibit at the Portland Art Museum for a docent tour with my local SAQA group. It was great to see it again with a docent. There was another interesting exhibit that was not quite installed when I was there last time. It was very intriguing. It is title Paradise.

The artist collaborative Fallen Fruit will explore Oregon’s paradisiacal backyard through the lens of Portland Art Museum’s permanent collection. Based in Los Angeles, artists David Allen Burns and Austin Young create site-specific projects using fruit to examine concepts of place, history, and issues of representation often addressing questions of public space.

I hope I can go back and study this a bit more.

For my master class this month, we were given our choice of 3 photos to simplify and interpret. I chose this one of Christo’s gates in Central Park.

I decided to distill it down to the simple shapes.

My mock up in fabric was thus:

I did not have satisfactory grays so I am waiting on some to arrive from Etsy and I also need to work on the orange bits. I cropped it so that it looks centered, but it is not.

So, I am not blogging as much, but I hope that I bring you something interesting when I do.

Posted in Art Dates, Family, knitting, My creations, workshop | 2 Comments »

Time Out

Thursday, November 5th, 2015

I needed one – a time out that is. After being sick for a week and rushing to get some work done to submit for a SAQA show, I just crashed. About all I did in October was my SDA work and fulfilling a few obligations. I am now trying to get back on track. Above is a photo of a sunrise we could see from the condo a couple of weeks ago. We had a nice Indian Summer and now it is quite cool and rainy off and on.

We took care of Wilfredo for Lisa and Clay while they traveled in Portugal and Spain. Sometimes, I had to walk both dogs which was a bit challenging. Here we are in the elevator heading down for our walk.

When the girls came back, they gave me this wonderful necklace which they found at a shop in Porto.

Here is a link to information about the artists – all work is handmade and have bits of crocheted beads among other fiber frippery. I love the colors. perdi o fio à meada

I took lots of walks with Mr C and the dogs and photographed the beautiful fall colors.

This is a view of fall from the condo gym.

I prepared 4 older quilts of mine to travel to Brazil where they will be displayed in the annual Patchwork Design exposition with other members of the High Fiber Diet group. It is nice to have some older work get out there.

I also shipped two quilts to Coos Bay for the In Stitches exhibit at the Pacific Park Gallery. Mr C and I are going to drive down for the opening reception and spend the night on Sunday, Nov 15th.

Our local SAQA group met in the Oregon College of Art and Craft dye studio last month. One member led a group in immersion dyeing and I gave a brief demonstration on discharging fabric and then let people play.

I showed them the different results that you can get with different agents.

The fabric is the same black. On the left, I used soft scrub cleanser with bleach, the middle leaf was with Jacquard discharge paste and the one on the right was clear DeColourant. The green in the front was the result of discharging a piece of navy blue cotton.

Terry Grant played with drawing with soft scrub.

Mary Arnold used some stencils and got these great results.

I did a test on snow dyed fabric with lots of dye colors in it.

I am also making progress on this little red sweater. I just have one more sleeve to do.

My project this week is to clean, declutter and reorganize the multipurpose room here in the condo. I bought these modular storage units which I finally got into the room yesterday and started putting stuff in the drawers.

Today, I hauled everything out of the storage closet and rearranged it.

I had the hanging thread storage and the drawers with thread on the other side of the closet and they were harder to get to with my sewing table right in front. My goal is to make the whole room function better because I do so many different things here.

Finally, here are some photos of my grands. They are growing up so fast.