Fun and Fungi

While on a walk in the woods today, I tried taking photographs while purposely moving my camera to see what kind of blurred effects I could get. I think the top photo looks like the painted page of a sketchbook. I saw many kinds of mushrooms and in the photo just above this text, I was drawn to how transparent the leaf is to allow some of the mushroom's colour to show through. I was thinking about how chiffon or organza might be used to show that effect. In the photo of the maple leaves, I saw how they created a line on the pavement and then I combined that photo with another blurred photo I took to add a rainbow of colour. Photo play is a quick way to capture an idea and a blog can be like a sketchbook that records experiences, techniques and photos.

Filling in the Rainbow

I'm just back from my quilt guild's annual 'garage sale' which was such fun to look at the multitudes of fabrics, books and other quilting related supplies. I found a Nancy Crow book and a few metres of solid coloured fabrics, among other things :) I will add snippets of the new colours to my developing chart which I made in a hurry and discovered just how tricky deciding what colour family fabrics are from, can be. I think I will learn alot just gathering the supplies for the Nancy Crow course!

Show Time Again!

My art quilt group show opened today at Satin Moon Quilt Shop and will continue through November. I enjoyed seeing everyone and their pieces! I've also started buying solid coloured fabrics for the Nancy Crow workshop I will attend next spring - these sample snippets against the folded fabrics remind me of crayons. I have alot more colours to snip and tape so that I can keep the sample on hand if I find more solids to potentially add to the stash, since I don't want to duplicate.

Show Time

The weather today seemed suitable for the theme of the opening of the 'Peace and Conflict' show at Coast Collective Gallery - back and forth from sunshine to pouring rain all day, as you can see in the photos that I took from inside the gallery, of the rainbow and rain running down the window pane. I met three local fibre artists as well as talked to friends, and also got out to the Sooke Harbour House gallery to see a fibre show there. I took the photo of the nest imagining representing it in stitch.

Inspiration

Here is the rainbow spiral bag I bought from Pam de Groot's Etsy shop - I just love it and her work! You can see what she creates here: http://pamdegroot.blogspot.com/ I picked the bag up from the post office yesterday and transferred my personal items into it just in time to attend my quilt guild's Christmas sale, where I was amazed at all the fine work, the variety of items and styles, and sheer volume for sale. Very inspiring and I imagine making a tablecloth, tea cozy, throw for the couch.... I just need more time!!

Stitching Stars

The sky this morning was such a lovely moody contrast of values and made me think of a giant embroidery stitch of light combining two fabrics. I'm continuing to stitch on the piece shown above - it's nearly done and I'm working on the stars. I've also made some business cards and written an artist statement for the shows I'm in this weekend.

Sketch Stitch

Today I cut a small piece from my painted 'clean-up' cloth and stitched it to one of my sketchbook pages, then added pencil crayon and text - a small experiment following my curiosity and marking the day. My rainbow ribbons and coins page, that I did yesterday, springs from a photo I took of the stripes of my paint smock/shirt that I wore during the Sketchbook workshop. I've finished stitching the waves around the ship in the handstitch piece I'm working on and am moving on to working below the surface, in the depths.