Last week, before a long weekend filled with visitors, I worked on a couple of watercolor paintings. They were definitely ‘painterly’ and not ‘artistic’. The effort left me decidedly frustrated and I turned for a short time to a beading project (to come) while I processed what had happened and strategized on a new approach.  I’ve been away from my brushes and paints too long!  I’ll share my initial efforts...

I can’t believe that it’s eleven months since my last post!  It’s not that I haven’t been playing, experimenting, painting, stitching, beading and in general creating!  The rambling lifestyle (check out my other blog) has lots of benefits but it does take a toll on serious ‘studio’ time.  Not to mention two years of recovering the use of my dominant hand and wrist after a serious break have taken their toll...

In September I walked into the Fabric Addict in Lethbridge (the day after our arrival) and there sat a new shipment of smocking pleaters waiting to be unpacked.  Now I have been thinking about exploring this media for a while.  It’s one of the few things I have never tackled, mainly because my Mother smocked dresses for two generations of girls in the family and I didn’t want to tread on her space.  She passed away last spring and...

          On September 23 I drove to Calgary to check out the results on two entries in the quilting and fiber art competition at the Calgary Creative Stitches and Crafting Alive Show and was ecstatic to find that I received a first on my Wearable Art entry – Memories of Arizona and a second on one of my memory quilts – The Fabric of my life.       Memory Quilt – The Fabric of my Life...

A Collage of the Painted Fabric – (Later Incorporated as a layer in ‘paper cloth’) Just did the heat set and thought I would publish the results.   The Fabric Before Painting   I’m going to challenge myself to use each of the pieces someway over the next few days.  I’m doing a series of small and ‘quicks’ so it may work out okay. Thought I would throw in a shot of this morning’s...

I do have a lot of activities on the go – I just haven’t blogged about them.  There is a smocked dress, a pair of socks, samples of free motion quilting based on Leah Day’s work, a challenge piece posted to Dale Anne Potter’s facebook fan page …..  All this and now I have my days to myself so there will be lots more.  Let’s hope the weather continues to be fair!  The combines will run!!!! A little personal...

  Check out the link to Quiltersmuse.com for a posting re one of my quilts with ‘words’ or writing on it (August 28th posting).  I have been catching up on past postings on the quiltart digest and noticed a call for ideas about how people use words on their work and thought of this piece ‘2008 Revisited: Retirement Angst’.  It hasn’t been posted anywhere yet and this is just a teaser shot as I would like to...

As a follow-up to all the postings on Dale Ann Potter’s FB page about her dream of traveling by RV and teaching as she goes, I decided not to delay any longer with this posting.  It’s been planned for a while but I thought I should wait until everything was tidy!  This may be a bit of a ramble and I’ll try to group info but here goes! My Mobile Studio We have been traveling full-time in our motor home since January 2009 and...

Over the weekend I continued to work on samples until I ran out of suitable fabric – plain enough for the stitching to show but not totally plain.  My machine was cantankerous, making new noises and not making perfect stitches so I was glad that I had booked a visit to the service man Gil at Rumpled Quilt Skins in Okotoks.  Not next door but this store comes highly recommended by a friend back in Ottawa.  What a banquet of quilts to view...

I’m finally back at my sewing machine.  Thanks to surgery and physiotherapy, the wrist is working fairly well, although my coordination is not what I’d like it to be.  So I designed my own therapy to work on that! I started about a month ago when I tackled a task I had talked about for two years – documenting the built-in embroidery stitches on my sewing machine.  Somehow the computer images just don’t tell the whole...