Music Around Us

A musician saw birds on telephone wires and translated them into musical notes...



Now, when you see birds on wires overhead, won't you wonder what tune they're playing?

Happy Yarn

Oh dear. I came across this blog and now I have a severe urge to make Granny Bunting.

My personal olympic challenge: applique!

I can't believe it was four years ago that I joined Stephanie McPhee aka Yarn Harlot and entered the Knitting Olympics.  I never would have tried to knit a lace shawl if not for the enthusiasm she sparked, and trust me, I will never knit another lace shawl again.

So I only have myself to blame for my latest project.  Well, I'll assign a touch of blame to Kellie and her gorgeous blog "Don't Look Now" for enticing me toward hand applique as no other collection of quilts and patterns have ever managed to do.   I'd been marveling over the beauty of Kellie's "Joseph's Coat" quilt-along, but I'd resisted....until it occurred to me that it'd be quite nice to have a hand-sewing project to work on as I followed the Olympics.

And what better color to use than PINK?!  I pulled pinks out of my stash, and added a few more quarter-yard cuts to the collection...

and away I go.  I've finished ONE block so far.  It makes me very happy. 




There's no way this will be done by the end of the Olympics, but that's okay.  Working with these fabrics and colors is so cheering that I'm content to take this slowly. 

And if you're tempted, Kellie has the full directions on her blog so you can jump right in!

Ira Glass on Doing and Getting Better

I LOVE Ira Glass.(If you are not from the US, he is a public radio broadcaster who hosts a wonderful weekly radio show called "This American Life."  It's a bit of everything, short radio stories on a particular theme each week.  You can find a free podcast of TAL on Itunes and you can livestream episodes at the TAL site.  Go search for the "Fiasco!" episode and prepare to laugh until you cry.)

Anyway.  Ira Glass gave some talks about broadcasting, but among them is his discussion of how to keep doing what you do to push forward through the "I'm not as good as I want to be" phase.  It's very inspirational and speaks to any creative pursuit.



I do love Ira Glass.

Cutting and pasting

Life has been mostly about work and family and household stuff lately. In a good way, mostly. But I had a nice break the other afternoon when my sister stopped by for a short visit and to let our dogs romp together. From time to time, we like to sit and tear stuff out of magazines and add to our notebooks, so that's what I was doing while she organized another project.

Now, I know a lot of people who keep notebooks... And a lot of them keep them beautifully organized... by color, by artistic element (line, shape, etc), or in some other thematic way.

Me, I decided early on that I'd be paralyzed if I got hung up on organization. So, my one rule in my books is that I do NOT organize. I put things in page after page, gluing things in where there is space. I don't try to make things pretty or elegant. I just smack something down there there is space. Like so:



And what do I collect? Anything that catches my fancy, for whatever reason. Or no reason.



The funny thing is that as I look back through the books I've finished, I DO see themes and a definite aesthetic.



I get a lot of inspiration from these books. And I get a lot of enjoyment from the process, too.

Remembering Shereen

I woke up this morning thinking about my friend and mentor, Shereen LaPlantz. Shereen was an amazing artist and teacher who introduced many of us to the world of artist books. Her book Cover to Cover is still the best and most inspirational book on the market on making books, and her second book, The Art and Craft of Handmade Books, is equally as gorgeous. (And you can find some work by yours truly in that one!)

I had the great experience of working with Shereen in a 3-year artist book program. Over the course of those three years, twice a year I and 11 others would travel up to Humboldt County in northern California to spend a 3-day weekend in Shereen's studio learning new techniques and book structures. I'd never experienced such visual stimulation and artistic excitement as I did on those weekends. It was then, for the first, time, that I started to think of myself as an artist...or, at least, someone who had the potential to become an artist.

Shereen was an incredibly generous teacher. She would teach you anything you wanted to know, always with a positive and encouraging attitude. One wall of her studio was lined with plastic drawer units, all filled with handmade books of every kind. There were books she'd made, books she'd been given, books she'd bought... And in between work sessions, we were free to poke through the drawers and look at books and figure out how they were made. It was like having an enormous treasure chest at your disposal, with the freedom to explore at will.

We remained friends after our class ended, and I went up to visit her several times before she died of a particularly pernicious cancer. The most significant thing I learned from her, I think, was how to cope with illness with courage and spirit and determination. I've never seen anyone more determined to appreciate every day left to her.

Shereen loved typography, and ampersands in particular. So, to celebrate Shereen's effect on my life, here's an Ampersand mosaic.

Do you have a significant art mentor in your life?

Pointless Comments

Yesterday, my art quilt group "The Pointless Sisters" met for our monthly meeting. Virginia had us laughing when she told us that as she said goodbye to her husband on her way out the door, he said "So, you're off to the Hopeless Sisters?"

Hey. We may be pointless, but we're always hopeful.

There is nothing like gathering of women with quilt art in common. We represent a pretty wide variety of ages, life experiences, quilting and art interests, and artistic goals. Still, it's always interesting when we get together to show each other our latest work and discoveries.



That's a bolt of muslin. And it's there because our current challenge is "Muslin." The idea is to make any art quilt using JUST MUSLIN as the fabric. We can paint it, dye it, embellish or treat it in any way...but the only fabric in the quilt must have started as muslin. The results of this challenge are due next month, and I'm very eager to see what comes in. Two members have shared their Muslin Challenge pieces already, and you'd never know that they started with muslin for their colorful pieces. (I'll take photos at the official "reveal" meeting next time.)

Meanwhile, mine is not quite done but well underway. It's a big departure from my usual stuff. I've opted to keep a fair amount of the muslin plain, unbleached, with threadwork providing much of the design. I'm not sure yet how successful it is, but it's been a fun experiment.

I respond well to challenges. Apparently I'm sufficiently pointless on my own so that it motivates me to have a specific task and deadline to meet. I'm already working on ideas for our next Pointless Challenge.

Which leads me to these questions: what challenge would you like to do? What challenges have you done that you found really fun or thought provoking?

Just for fun, I searched "pointless" under Google Images. I learned that there is pointless music...even a place to buy "pointless but cool" items.

Randomly trawling through Google images? Now, that's pointless.

What to do with all that thread...

I'd never heard of Devorah Sperber before I stumbled onto a photo of her work recently. But I'm enthralled. She makes amazing art pieces, separating images into individual pixels of color and then assembling the images with a spool of thread for each pixel.

Want to see the Mona Lisa done in thread? Take a look here.

She's made works using a similar process but with marker covers, vinyl flowers, and map tacks.

For quilters who assemble images from bits of fabric, this art is intriguing and a very thought-provoking "next step."

And it makes most of our thread collections look pretty puny, too.

It feels good to feel inspired

This fabulous mask quilt was made by Dale Fleming, the author of "Pieced Curves So Simple." Dale was the guest speaker at our guild meeting yesterday, and I was really glad I was there to hear her talk.

(I have to digress to say that for a bunch of reasons, I rarely made it to a guild meeting over the last year or so. I swear, the universe aligned to throw me curve balls on the third Thursday of each month -- a sudden work emergency, a necessary appointment with that as the only available day, a child home sick. I have missed attending guild and seeing those wonderful folks and enjoying show and tell and I am determined to improve my attendance record this year!)

Anyway. Dale's talk was terrific. She talked about getting from inspiration to quilt, with particular emphasis on how far from the original image or idea a resulting quilt can be. She even played us a favorite song of hers and then showed us the quilt that resulted from that inspiration. She has a great sense of humor, and her presentation brought a lot of laughs from the audience.

She also walked through her simple curved piecing technique, which she's demonstrated on Simply Quilts and which is the subject of her book. (She's doing a workshop for the guild today and some friends of mine are taking it...I'm looking forward to seeing what they do.) The technique sure looks easy -- it mainly involves using freezer paper as a template and glueing, then sewing on the resulting fold line afterwards. I've gotten the itch to give it a try and just play, which is always a good feeling.

The excited and inspired feeling I left with (and have been lacking of late) reminded me why it's good to go to guild. There's nothing like hanging out with other quilters.