Bowls of color

The last few days

I've been on a bowl binge.

When I'm in between major art projects and need something mindless but fun to do in the studio, I make these fabric bowls. My Twisted Nut Stitcher friend Linda J. taught our group how to make them last year, and it's become sort of an addiction. You just wind strips of fabric around cording, then coil the cording into basket shapes and zig-zag the coils together on the sewing machine as you coil.

The endless possibilities for color combos are what make it fun, and goddess knows there's no shortage of fabric colors in the stash. Orange and blue, with some yellow and green thrown in for a summer bowl ... red, green and white for winter ... fuschia and periwinkle ... black, gold and a zip of red ... pumpkin, gold and frosty white ... chocolate and cherry ... turquoise, coral and hot pink ... apple green and white. 

The photo above shows the process, starting with two pieces of blue-and-white batiks (left) from the stash, which are torn into long strips (center front), and then wrapped around clothesline and coiled into the basket under the sewing machine needle.




I've made all of these in the past week, and am on my way now to make some more. Guess what my family and friends are getting for Christmas this year?

Have a colorful day!

Kaffe, color, and Seth

Saturday night my husband and I went to a slide presentation by the

MASTER of color,

KAFFE FASSETT,

who is famous not only for his brilliant and complex quilting cottons, but also for his richly hued knits, needlepoint, paintings, and color combos in general. I bought his latest quilt book, nestled above in some of his fabric that I plan to embellish with embroidery and beads. The presentation was in a little high school auditorium on Vashon Island. Kaffe and his design partner, Brandon, have been on the island for several days of quilting and knitting workshops.

It was a much needed injection of color in our corner of the Northwest, as you can see by the next two photos, which I took on the bridge and from the ferry on our way over to the lecture. As the crow flies, the lecture was only about four or five miles from our house, but since we're not crows it was a one-and-a-half-hour GRAY, WET JOURNEY over the bridge, onto the ferry and through the woods.

Tacoma Narrows Bridge on Saturday at 3 p.m.

Inside our car on the Rhody Ferry from Tacoma to Vashon Island.

IT WAS SO WORTH IT:

This is some of the Kaffe Fassett fabric I bought from

Island Quilter,

the shop on Vashon that organized everything. That store is a MUST for anyone -- not just quilters and knitters -- who needs an injection of color during our interminable gray fall-winter-springs. The slide show was full of photos of tile work, weathered buildings, gardens and other slices of life from around the world that inform his work. But I thought his best comment was afterward, when someone in the audience asked if he could talk "a little bit" about color. He said he could talk forever about color, but that the best way to learn about it is to get outside and LOOK at things. He pointed out that color cannot be condensed into the color wheel, which is how I've always felt.

Here are orange flowers from the grocery store that I brought home a few weeks ago. Sorta similar feel to the fabric I bought last night.

A grocery store bouquet on my kitchen counter.

And here are some orange silk roses that I embroidered on my ongoing crazy quilt project:

Crazy quilt embroidery that I've been working on.

Continuing the orange flower theme, here's a detail of my kitchen tablecloth. You can probably guess my favorite color.

And this young man may be the next Kaffe Fassett:

  

 This is Seth, age 10, proudly displaying his very first quilt last week at the Gig Harbor Quilters meeting. His grandmother taught him to quilt over the summer, and he finished this colorful quilt in time to give it to his mom for her birthday. And he knits, too!

Have a colorful day!

Bunners in the sun

Is this the cutest rabbit or what?

I'd say red is his best color.
I came home this afternoon and found Bunners stretched out on a nice sunny spot on the laundry room rug, enjoying what may be one of the last sunny days for awhile. "They" say we're in for an unusually wet, cold winter, and since western Washington is known for wet winters this is not good news.

My newspaper column today is headlined:

"Bright lights and rain gear

pull us through tunnel of gloom"

You can read it on-line in the Peninsula Gateway by clicking here.


Have a colorful, dry day!

Pumpkin scones and dumplings

We interrupt the previously scheduled programming (on Victoria) to bring you this news alert. When I returned home this afternoon, I found this bowl of freshly baked pumpkin scones glowing on the kitchen counter, propping up the vegan recipe book that Julia used to make them. I've already eaten two.

Over the weekend she made Three Sisters Soup and Dumplings (below), with Pumpkin Ale, beans, corn, squash, and Swiss chard from the garden. Boy was that good.

Victoria, B.C., is for the birds

We went to Victoria, B.C., last week for our first visit and I took so many photos (298) that I sort of locked up at the thought of choosing which ones to put on the blog. So I'll do it in installments, starting with the birds. Everywhere we looked, there were birds! Birds in the bay, in the parks, parking lots, roof tops. Water birds, hummingbirds, ducks, pigeons. But the most surprising was the peacock sitting at a picnic table in Beacon Hill Park, http://www.beaconhillpark.ca/. It was just casually preening itself and let me walk right up to it for a few photos.

Not far away from the peacock, these two guys had a quiet interspecies moment, contemplating the activity in one of the ponds in Beacon Hill. You can see in the photo below how close the park is to downtown. It's a beautiful 200-acre park, with miles of paths stretching from the edge of downtown to the bay. It has colorful flower gardens, wild areas, ponds, a petting zoo, dog park, alpine and rock gardens and breathtaking views over the water. It was probably my favorite part of the five-day visit, even topping the famous Butchart Gardens. (And it's free.)

The ducks looked so cuddly that I just wanted to scoop them up.

Here are a few shots of the flowers at Beacon Hill Park:

... and a view toward town (above) and the sea:

Back in downtown Victoria:

What would a city be without tame pigeons? This one hopped right up onto Dave's hand as we were sitting near the Inner Harbor -- he said its feet were really soft. (No, we weren't feeding them.)

 

 

We even had birds painted on the ceiling of our bedroom at the historic inn where we stayed. Each corner had a different bird composition.

Stay tuned for Victoria's gardens,

harbor, downtown and quilts. 

Rejected



Setting up for the shot. This is hand-painted silk organza.



I got the "skinny e-mail" today from Quilt National, which means my entries were rejected. It was my first time entering this show and the chances of getting in were slim, so I was expecting this. The good news is that now I can show them on the blog. The bad news is that we had a lot of trouble figuring out how to get good photos that would show the transparency. As you can see, we have a ways to go.

Taking down the setup.

This is NOT the professional way to do it.



This one just looks washed out.



The color looks good, but you can't tell that it's sheer.

But I do like the detail shots of the white quilt: 



Have a colorful day!



Flowers and chocolate for breakfast

+

Good morning!

Can life get any better than this?

My neighbor Rosemary invited Julia and me to come over for a "special coffee surprise" today. Now I'm not a morning person, I am a chocoholic, and I adore flowers but am not much of a gardener. So I stepped out onto our porch bright and early at 11 a.m. to go over for my breakfast coffee and found two vases brimming with these luscious voluptuous hydrangeas of all colors. My gardener friend Nancy had dropped them off early this morning and not rung the bell because she knew I'd be deep in sleep. But I knew they were from her because I had admired her garden just yesterday.




THEN I got over to Rosemary's and, much to my delight, discovered that the "coffee" was a coffee cup made of chocolate filled with chocolate mousse, whipped cream, coffee beans, and more chocolate! What a way to start the day, to say nothing of the warm feeling that comes from having friends like these. (Note: Rosemary is the neighbor who threw the Dog Party that I blogged about in August.)

Nancy said the flowers should dry nicely on their own, so I hope to have beautiful dried hydrangeas for the holidays -- a luxury I've never had before.

Wishing you a colorful day!

Photographing the silk work

Looking through one of my silk quilts from the back side.

This year I've been doing more fabric art and quilting with

silk organza

because its transparency opens up a whole new dimension. Because you can see through the layers, you can multiply the color and shadow possibilities. Also, its airiness (when you omit the batting) lets a silk piece float and ripple if hung near an open window. Even photographing the work -- above and below -- is a new adventure. Instead of my usual technique of pinning the finished piece flat against a design wall for its portrait, I take the silk outside and let it play with the light and wind.


Visiting son Keith helps with photographs.



Look at those big, brown eyes! That's Ben Bailey from next door.

Once Keith got ahold of the camera, he was off to explore its closeup possibilities. He snapped the photo of our neighbors' dog, above, who came over to investigate the activity. This is the dog whose birthday party was chronicled a few blog posts ago. Then he zoomed in on the center an orchid on the kitchen counter, below. I think it looks like a bat.

Here is more silk patchwork (I painted the fabric -- it started out white) rolled up, pinned, and ready to go through the sewing machine.

The piece above has white batting underneath the organza, which softens the colors. You can see how overlapping the organza pieces allows for more color complexity ... orange over blue in the lower left yields gray ... blue over blue at the bottom gives a more intense blue ... orange overlapping blue yields lavender.

The details above and below are silk organza quilts that do not have batting, so they're floatier. On the one below I've attached scraps with safety pins while I decide if I like the placement. While the piece is hanging on a design board, I pin, stand back and look, sometimes take a photo, rearrange, look some more, go downstairs for some chocolate, look some more ... the longer I debate, the more chocolate I can have.

Have a colorful day!

Texas book -- I'm in!

Just when I had given up hope that "Forest Fire Spirits" would be selected for the Texas quilt book (see post in July), I got an e-mail today from Karey Bresenhan that it will be included! It sure made my day. She said there will be 200 quilts featured in "Lone Stars III: Texas Quilts Today," to document Texas quiltmaking from the past 25 years.

This was my very first 100 percent me art quilt. Up until then, I had either followed traditional patterns (usually with non-traditional fabric) or created my own design but used commercial fabric. For this one, I painted ALL of the fabric, except the black, and created the design on the living room floor because my sewing room was too small. Since then it's been pretty much all original except when my mind needs to take a rest and I fall back on a soothing traditional style. 

I made it in 1997 when I lived in El Paso, Texas.

These are the roses that our neighbor gave Julia last week with her birthday pie. They graced our kitchen table for nearly a week, blooming bigger every day.

Have a colorful Day!

Fibonacci broccoflower, wild berries, and pie

Here's a strange one from Farmer Dave's garden (above).

We decided to call it a

Fibonacci broccoflower,

and we stand before it in awe. I don't know if we'll eat it or just worship it.

And this shows what happens in the Pacific Northwest

if you don't keep on top of those

wild blackberry vines.

They reach up and out from the woods and cover everything in their path. But we tolerate them to some extent because they do give us sweet wild berries every fall, like this cluster outside our back door.

Mmmmm ...
Blackberry muffins,

Blackberry jam,

Blackberries on pancakes ...

... and a blackberry-apple-rhubarb pie

that our neighbor Rosemary baked for Julia's birthday last week! Notice how she clipped roses from her garden that exactly match the colors of the roses on her china. It was a feast of fruit, flowers and friendship.

Have a colorful day!