home
about the artist
gallery
blog
links
contact

Archive for the ‘Solo Show’ Category

So Happy

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008

Have you ever been in that zone where every thing is cool. You feel healthy. The errands are done. There is food in the house. You are caught up on your gotta dos. And you are having a heck of a good time playing with your fabric. The weather is just perfect. Your fave candidate is up in the polls. And if you stop and think about it, you start to worry that life should not be this good. I don’t deserve it. You just have to shake it off, go with the flow and enjoy the good times.

It feels so good to wake up in the morning and think about what I am going to do in the studio. I have gone back to working in the evening, doing some quilting and cutting squares. I have been working out the next few pieces in my mind. I realized I needed some hand-dyed browns. It was such nice weather — in the 60s — so I thought I would do some dyeing, but I didn’t have the right dyes so I made a Dharma order. They usually get things to me in a day or two. I hope the good weather holds.

I finished my Cast Your Nets piece. It is not a wow piece of art, but it definitely works for the theme of my show, which is to interpret in fabric, my impressions of Israel.

Tonight, I started cutting color batiks. I may have to go to Fabric Depot to fill in some colors unless I mix in some of my other commercial fabrics. I am truly enjoying the process of finding the right color mix and cutting my little squares.

Tomorrow, I am going to start on Galilee Sunrise.

The Other Shelter Piece

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

Tomorrow (October 1) is the reveal for the latest 12 X 12 challenge, Shelter. I will post the final piece I did for that in the morning. Tonight, I want to share the piece I did first and that I ultimately rejected for the challenge.

I am not sure whether I have mentioned on my blog that I am doing a solo show based on our trip to Israel in May. The title will be Holy Land Pilgrimage: A Quilter’s Journal. I plan to show a page from my journal with a photo and an accompanying fiber piece based on that experience. So, I thought I could kill two birds with one stone and do a piece for the challenge which I could also have in the show. I love architecture and I was enamored with so much of what I saw in Israel.

The houses that climbed up hillsides and seemed to be built one atop the other was of special interest to me. Land is at a premium. The flat land is kept free for agriculture.The houses were mainly neutral and unadorned. There were many gray concrete structures which were unfinished and were add-ons to existing homes or built right next to them. Our guide told us that when a Palestinian family got enough  money, they would start building a structure and just keep working on it over the years as money became available. In general, the Palestine homes are very simple structures, with no roof. The Israeli homes generally have the red roofs.

It always tickled me when I saw a house painted in a bright color, such as the orange one above or the following:

I decided to use this photo for my design. I took some liberties with the colors and house design.

Here is the piece that was driving me nuts for days on end. I think the problem was doing this in a small format. It would look much better as a larger piece and probably would be easier to create!

Be sure to go over to 12 X 12 to see all the shelter pieces.