A Variety

I have not finished anything else this week.  I have been hopping around pulling out different projects.  I like to be working on a lot of projects at once.  I am very easily distracted.  I can be in the  middle of quilting a section of a quilt and suddenly jump up and start playing with another design on the wall.
Rather than pound on myself for being "scattered" I prefer to think of it as overflowing with creativity.

I got kind of bored with the two pieces I planned to quilt this week.  I was not terribly  unhappy with the quilting, but doing it on the machine with walking foot can get very tedious.  My biggest problem is how to make "U-turns" that don't look messy.  I have my little pieces that I bought from Lisa, and I look at her photos on her website, but I don't know how she makes her edges so neat.  Somehow she is able to stitch over things and get the stitches to land in the exact same place.  Practice, I'm sure, is the key.  But it tells me that I'd better get serious about free motion quilting. Which also means more PRACTICE.  Sigh.

Here's what I've been up to:
The two pieces to be quilted:

This was my prototype for Working in a Series last year.

This was a challenge for FFFC.  Abstracted Van Gogh.

I almost hate to admit it, but I've been sucked back into "Dear Jane."   Sometimes doing something teeny and precise appeals to me. Another thing I need to get good at.  I don't see my real art being that way but there are always times when I get frustrated by my lack of technical skills.  So I spent about 90 minutes Wednesday and Thursday piecing block A-1.  They finish at 4-1/2" so blocks are made 5".  5" and 28 pieces.  1-1/8" half square triangles.  I had fun trying out this method for making eight at once.  Thank you Katie.

I had an epiphany about Jane - I do NOT have to make all the squares.  Not only that, but I can make DIFFERENT blocks too.  I can make up my own, if I want.  I have no desire to do the applique blocks. I have enough hand sewing backed up to get me through a winter worth of TV, why do more (badly)?  I can just keep making random blocks until I am bored.  I have been loving watching the Tula Pink City Sampler bloggers.  But I am fighting the urge to star one of THOSE too.  And the urge to buy the book!

Instead, I plan to mingle Modern blocks and Jane blocks to my hearts content.  Maybe that's stupid, Jane is the ultimate in fussy, Modern Quilters are the ultimate in loosen up already.   But what the hell, maybe it will be like Grandma meets Modernism.  

I also realized that in addition to a selection of teal-ish fabrics bought for Jane, I have a bunch of teal-ish fabrics bought for Tipping Point. So I might do the whole thing in shades of teal.  Or I might add a second color.  Or two.  Or ten.   Here's my progress so far:

Yeah, seven blocks.  But look at that sucker in the upper right.  That's the one from last night.  And if I may say so, the points are pretty damn good.  ;)   The one on the upper left I made up when I was practicing the HSTs.

Some other oldie-moldies that are back on the design wall:

Pink and Black nine-squares.
Sorry about the crappy picture.  

I started this really early in my career, when I was still interested in more traditional stuff.  I bought a whole lot of pink and black fabric because I had Zero quilting fabric.  Now I'm thinking about whether it should be anything or just scrap it.  What more creative thing can I do... ?

Carol Taylor Class

I NEED to finish this because I spent waaaaay too much money on her fancy yard.  Really?  I need 6 different yarns for this 18" square piece? What am I ever going to do with all that??

What to do with this project from Nancy's class is more interesting.  I thought at the time that making a diagonal cut seemed like the way to turn it into something.  While it hung on the wall I realized it was nothing, horrible, a mish-mash.  So I took it apart and stuck parts back on the wall.  But I'm thinking I have to take out the slash.  At least for now.  So those pieces are wasted.  Oh well, it will be smaller.  

P.S.  I forgot to add that I am spending WAAAY to much time on Pinterest.  I've become sort of hooked on seeing my followers increase. Not that I'm vain or anything.  :) But I have gone from 4,000 last weekend, to over 4,500 today.   I like to search out new things on the web to post, rather than just re-pinning from the people I follow (bcs. my followers probably have already seen those things too).   It's a guilty pleasure, that at least doesn't contain calories.

I guess since this post has lots of stuff on the wall, I'll link up to Nina Marie's Off The Wall Friday!

Bliss

I spent a wonderful afternoon in LaConner yesterday.  Carol Taylor's talk about her work was riveting.  I am constantly surprised and  grateful when such leaders in the field are so willing to share, explain, and discuss their work, their inspiration and their techniques.  Maybe I'm surprised because architects rarely do this.  If you go to a lecture by a well-known architect you do get pictures of their work and what inspired it, and maybe some anecdotes about design along the way, but not the process that they go through to design.

So Carol showed some work from each of her series, and her design process, as well as some of the techniques she uses, fused applique that is then satin-stitched down, preparation of individual "confetti" pieces that are the building block for those quilts... and her current work that take uses leaf forms.

After the lecture, she led us on a tour of her work hanging in the museum.  There was a great selection from all of the series, and I took a zillion photos (with her permission).  I'm sure I will refer to them frequently when I am wondering,"How did she do that??"  As always, seeing the work in real life was SO much better than books...  I need to go to more shows!

Carol Taylor Arc-i-textures Workshop

Tomorrow is my full-day class on "Arc-i-textures."  I have selected a funky kimono silk in shades of olive green and sort of mango orange/pink  (Orange again??) to base my palette on.  Hope that's not a mistake!!

Filmstrip

I made steps toward another group of units I like.  I am so SLOW!  At the end of one of our critiques, Nancy asked, "Are you always so SLOW?"  and I replied this was fast, for me.  But it probably isn't improvisational if you study it on the wall for weeks before making a move!  But I'm not going to beat myself up over it.

I used this made fabric on the right

To make these units

I'm not sure yet how they will relate to the rest of the composition, but I'm pretty sure this is the orientation I want.  I really like the green line and also the secondary horizontal orange lines that are running behind them.

After these were done, I pulled out all of the extra fabric in this palette that I have left, in case I fall in love with an idea and have no more available to me.  One that I really love, the mauve-ish lavender, was a remnant from Jo Ann's.
I'm not sure about adding the prints anymore.  The seem to precious and fussy.  Except the lavender stripe between the orange blocks.  I love that.  But it requires me to stick those massive blocks together as a larger unit and I'm not sure I want that.   I still think the orange is overwhelming, and I am being way too fussy about making things matchy-matchy.  Studying classmates work, I see big chunks of relatively unrelated units, and that was appreciated and praised by students and instructor.  But searching the internet for other strip piecers,  Riley is the closest I find to this, but (except for "wrenches")she has a sort of "plaid" aesthetic going.

So should I feel happy I'm on my own path, or scared that my path is "wrong."  I don't want to be so headstrong that I don't learn from my teachers/mentors.  I'm probably way too young new and inexperienced to have the conceit that this is my "voice."

So I will keep looking and learning the best I can until the next class.  In other news, I am taking a class from Carol Taylor on Tuesday, and seeing a talk by her tomorrow.  The talk is titled, working in a series.  She was one of the very first quilt artists I discovered and fell in love with.  Her confetti series -especially Dispersion - took my breath away.

Dispersion, by Carol Taylor

The workshop is on "Architextures," which I don't love so much, but it's the only one of the classes she's teaching that worked for my schedule.  The others are Sensuous Lines and Curves, and Going in Circles.  From the way she is teaching her works as "workshop pieces" makes me feel like she's sold out, or is dumbing down her work to make it teachable.  I have picked up a few other negative comments about her recently, but I'm trying to stay open minded.

Sometime before Tuesday morning, I'm going to have to prepare fabrics and materials, so that is going to steal sewing time, which is already being lost by blogging, when I should be moving, painting, or gardening.  Sigh.

I joined SAQA yesterday.  They sent an e-mail talking about budget cutting, and I had always wanted to join anyway.  It seems inconsequential, but it's another big step toward calling myself an artist.  Now if only I was creating art!!