I like #135

1.  I got around to posting about our Fiberworks 2019 show this week.  There were tons of great pieces,  these pics are closeups of a quilt by my friend Charlotte Hickman;  there is so much depth and detail in her work, it's just amazing.  Click on over to see the rest of the pieces I shared.

2.  I did a bunch of plant maintenance this week.  It was time to bring in all the houseplants that had been outside for the summer, but that required a lot of reorganizing and finding spaces for things.  I think most of them had a good summer outside, but one of the new plants I got from my plant guy this summer has just completely died.  I'll have to see if I can figure out why because I really liked it.  I really enjoy checking on my plants and taking care of them all.  I love the variety, and seeing who's flourishing and who might need a bit of a different environment or some help.  I'm pretty full inside now and I have a couple things rooting that will need homes, but there's always space somewhere.

3.  I got out my fall decorations at work this week; my favorite is this embroidered wreath I made a few years ago.  It was a fun project and I'm always happy to see it!

4.  My cacti are still growing!  I haven't shared them in a while, but they're doing great.  Still pretty small, but definitely alive and continuing to mature morphologically.

5. I enjoyed getting to do a little bit of knitting this week.  Project on this project is slow, but I feel like I'm slowly getting the hang of it!

6.  The pups are good.  They miss me-  it's been a lot of long days at work with after work obligations, but they're always up for a snuggle or walk.

7.  Fall is finally well and truly here.  We're starting to get a bit of color on campus, and I'm enjoying seeing it out my windows while I can (they're moving us to the basement sometime next spring).

8.  I liked getting to work on some quilts this week.  This is the back of what's going to be one of my abstract sculptural pieces.  I did a bunch of painting on the little petals with my Shiva Painstiks over the weekend.  It's fun experimenting!

I hope you all had a good week!  For more positivity, click on over to LeeAnna's!

Fiberworks 2019 Opening

Fiberworks 2019, the annual show put on by the Fiber Artists of Oklahoma opened last weekend.  I had a piece in the show, my large abstract flower bouquet, you can see it here. Betty Busby was the juror this year and last week I blogged about the workshop with her.  The show is always fabulous, it incorporates all different types of fiber art.  I didn't take pictures of everything,  I didn't even take pictures of all my favorites, but I have pictures of some that really stood out.

The first thing I noticed was how much hand embroidery was in the show this year.  I love seeing that, and it's definitely something that I've been seeing more of recently.

This piece is a sculpture made mostly out of dyed gut.  It has several layers, and it really glowed (hence the title I suppose) there in the gallery.  So luminous and fragile looking.

Glow, by Barbara Morrison

This beautiful kimono was covered in hand embroidery and reverse applique.  The artist sat next to me during the workshop so also got to hear a little more about her process and inspiration.

My passage to India, Janis Updike Walker

I thought these three embroidered portraits were really wonderful.  The artist is a new one to our group, but I loved all the texture.  Many of the elements are dimensional, really taking advantage of some of the flexibility that comes from using fiber, and the breadth of stitches and forms you can achieve with hand embroidery.  She won an award, but I can't remember which piece it was.

Life Drawing in Thread (top), and Nude in Velvet (bottom), both by Sean Tyler

Seated Nude, Sean Tyler.

I didn't get a very good picture of this piece, but it was tiny,  maybe 4x6 inches, and solid hand embroidery.  The artist is Darci Lenker and I love following her instagram, she shares tons of great pictures of her embroidery (@darcidolls)

Big Raven-Emily Carr, by Darci Lenker

I loved this quilt-  It has a modern sort of edgy design vibe but is filled with traditional piecing and tons of hand quilting and embroidery.  Really fun.

Inked! Or the Quadriga of Quilting, by Agnes Stadler

This quilt jumped out at me too-  lovely improv piecing with gorgeous resonant fall colors and just a pop of print. 

Cheryl Gebhart, Liberated Log Cabins

My good friend Charlotte Hickman had two pieces in the show as well.  Her quilts include collage, applique, tons of felting, and tons of embroidery/surface embellishment.  They're pieces that get more and more interesting the longer you look and it's always a treat to see them!!!

Azaleas in the Park, by Charlotte Hickman

Look at the beautiful embroidery and gorgeous beads? shells? on the trunks.  Such depth of color and texture!

And finally this giant stuffed fabric sculpture made me smile.   I love the neon colors and graphic shapes!

Stub Toe, by Sam Kennedy

The show is hanging at the AHHA gallery in Tulsa until November 24th so if you have time, go by and see it.  And many thanks to the organizers,  it's a ton of work to put on.

I Like #134

Welcome to another week of things to like.  Overall this was a psychotically busy week and emotional week, but it was filled with good things.

1.  I loved being able to participate in my dear friend's funeral.  My friend Trish died a couple of weeks ago and it's been a rough time.  She was super involved in our church, a really central part of our community in addition to being someone I was close too.  And of course her family is grieving.  But the funeral was wonderful.  A beautiful service with all the liturgical features she would like and tons of music.  She was a professionally trained vocalist (which made it even sadder that she died from complicatiosn of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and hadn't been able to sing for several years), and music was always super important to her.  We had a lovely soloist, and a saxophone quartet to accompany the organ.  And we had a large full choir.  Every time I heard the harmonies of our whole group singing around me it filled me with joy and sadness and hope and faith.  Lots of crying, but it really felt like a good memorial for her.

2. I loved going to the Fiberworks opening and workshop!  I'll share some pictures from the opening next week, but this week I blogged about the pieces I painted/embellished at the juror's workshop with Betty Busby.  She's great and the workshop was fun.  Click over to see more of what we did in the class.  Here's a closeup of one of the pieces I was painting.

3.  I loved this exhibit of art by Liz Whitney Quisgard.  She had a solo at 108 Contemporary and her work is phenomenal.  I'd never seen anything like it.  She makes huge wall installations with tons of small pieces as well as individual pieces.  They're all made from brightly colored yarn and the way she combines the colors to generate the overall field is just amazing.  I was so glad to get to see it; my pictures do not do it justice.

This piece was about ten feet long

This piece was about 20 feet wide by 8 feet tall

4.  I love my dahlias!  I think we might be close to the end for them this year, it's cooling off, but I cut another bouquet to bring in the house.  

5.  Here's a weekly picture of Blue.  He was playing crazy ball, wherein I throw the ball about three times over the course of fifteen minutes and he spends the rest of the time running around, wriggling excitedly, and throwing the ball for himself.  I tried to get a video but was unsuccessful, so this picture of wriggling will have to suffice.  I always throw the ball once for Bentley-  it has to be really close and bounce loudly so he can hear and find it.  He gets really excited to play, but then grabs the ball and immediately runs inside with it, so the game is sort of over.

6.  I got a kick out of this giant snake monster Halloween blow up I saw in the neighborhood while walking the other day.  It was bright and colorful and very very weird.

I hope everyone had a great week!  For more things to like, head on over to LeeAnna's.

Surface design workshop with Betty Busby

Last weekend was triple booked with all kinds of things (including a funeral), but the main thing was the opening of fiberworks (which I'll share pictures of next week) and a two-day workshop with Betty Busby.  Betty's absolutely fantastic-  I've known her for a long time and she's the one who organized the invitational show at the NM State Capitol last summer.  Her work is phenomenal, you can see some of it here.

She does several workshops, but this one was for surface design.  We did a bunch of silk painting using different approaches, did some sun printing using custom cut vinyl, and then spent a bunch of time doing what she calls post-processing.  This is surface embellishment with all kinds of things, colored pencils, inktense pencils, fabric markers, paint markers, shiva paintsticks, gel pens, and many more.  She had tons of tips and tricks to share, and huge bags of different things to try.  It was a lot of fun and I have lots of notes of things I want to incorporate going forward,  particularly with regards to her overall approach.

I did a lot of testing different fabrics during the class just to see how well her approaches would work on different things.  She uses a lot of silk, and I did a fair amount of that, but I also used a bunch of my shiny bridal-type polyester and some polyester velvet.  Usually I'm all about the candy colors- and Betty brought every color of paint you can imagine, but you can see from what I did that I was in a sort of muddy orange mood!


This is a piece I "sunprinted"  It's not traditional sun printing, but you wet paint the fabric and then put down the vinyl shape and as it dries a print is left behind.  The black star, white spiderweb, and black cambrian shell are all vinyl cutouts on the wet fabric.  This was shiny white polyester.

After they dry, and you peel back the vinyl, it's lighter underneath.  Here's the shell after I removed the vinyl and started coloring on it with paintsticks and markers.

Here's the lily pad after I started embellishing it and its background.  I used painsticks and markers and paint markers and colored pencils and gel pens.  Just to experiment!

This one was printed onto a chunk of an orange sari-  I liked the formal gold woven edge contrasting with the organic feeling of the prints.  No post-processing yet.  I might piece a halloween quilt with this and the one above

Here's another one I sunprinted-  this one is on silk, but no embellishment yet, this is just what it looked like after I peeled off the vinyl.

This was painted silk over rubber bands

And this one was silk painted over a place mat.

This started out as some sort of tablecloth-  it was beige, but it had flowers woven in it a sort of jacquard weave so it had a lot of texture.  I wasn't sure whether the printing would work but it did!  

And this one was polyester velvet, painted using a faux-shibori technique.  Came out with lots of great lines and organic stripes even in the velvet which doesn't pleat well.  The next picture shows what it looked like as I was painting it.

And of course the side of my hand was covered in paintstick, paint, and marker after coloring for a while!

The workshop was really great and I had a good time.  It was nice to just be creative without any particular project in mind.  Definitely take a workshop from Betty if you have the opportunity!

I like #133

Welcome to another week of things to like.  This week has been a bit better than the last few, still crazy at work and this upcoming weekend will be stressful, but plenty of things to like along the way!

1.  I like the bunny that lives behind my air conditioner!  He always comes out when I mow the lawn, but seems to go back to his little spot afterwards!

2.  I like that my dahlias are still going!  One of the only good things about having the summer that is still summer in October is that the dahlias are still blooming away!

3.  I like quick projects!  I crocheted up this potholder today,  apparently it's a pretty common way to make a potholder, but I'd never tried it before.  You make one long chain and then crochet around and around.  That becomes the diagonal and it sort of naturally folds into this double sided square.  I don't really like this yarn, but it was the only cotton I had and I do enjoy using things up!

4.  Caught this nice sunrise out my window this weekend.  Pretty colors!

5.  I discovered a place here called the Tom Love Innovation Hub.  It's a big maker lab that is free and open to the public.  They have a laser cutter, so I took a quilt down there the other day to see how it would cut.  It worked great and now I'm experimenting with things!  I love that.

6.  I love my pups! (Duh).  We got to walk several times this week, and they're always so excited.

7.  Finally, I saw this at the grocery store and the incongruity made me smile.

I hope you've all had a good week!  Click on over to LeeAnna's for more people finding things to like!