penny-studionotes-2

I've been out of the studio for a few weeks, both because of travel, and because of having some work done in both the sewing studio upstairs and the wet (dyeing) studio in the basement.  I was finally able to uncover the machine again to do some sewing, but needed something small to help me get in gear;  I had finished up a couple of larger quilts just before the work was done, and didn't feel I could jump right into the next big project.  So I decided to make up some more pillowcases for my bed.  The ones on the right are duplicates of a pair I made out of the fabric used for the 4-patch stacked posie quilt below, which is on my bed.  (The blocks are all made from the fabric used for the main body of the pillowcase.) I had also recently gotten a bit of some lovely Kaffe Fassett " shirt stripes" fabric for a couple of napkins, and had liked it so much that I ordered more for pillowcases, as I think these will look nice on the bed also-- the cases on the left. ...

I spent a week earlier this month in a workshop with Dorothy Caldwell at Nancy Crow's Barn.  The name of the workshop was "Human Marks," and we spent the week making a variety of marks on paper and fabric, with all sorts of implements/methods.  The final project was to make a small book with the products of some of these exercises, plus anything else we wanted to add, and to do that we also learned a simple book-binding method.  The workshop was both stimulating and fun, and it was a great group of people--more diverse than most workshops, as it drew people from a variety of backgrounds, including people whose main work was in weaving, collage, installation, dyeing, quilting, and more. The small pieces on the left (the shorter ones, about 4x13") were done by putting soy wax as a resist on fabric and then discharging color with bleach.  The four smaller pieces all started out as black fabric (top two on a black that discharged to tan, and the bottom two on a black th...

I'm working on two projects right now that are both based on the traditional "rail fence" pattern, but that go in different directions.   The first one, above, had its origin in an improvisational quilt class back in February, described at the end of this post .  This quilt retains the notion of each block having parallel pieces, with a common layout that staggers horizontal and vertical blocks.  But I did improvisational curvy lines instead of straight, and made the strips of uneven width.  I'm about 2/3 of the way done with quilting this one, straight lines going horizontally across the quilt (which you can see at the top and bottom of the photo; as always, double-click to see in more detail).  To choose colors for this quilt, I looked at African textiles, which often combine gold, red, blue, green, and black.  As mentioned in the earlier post, the darker colors are commercial Kona cotton, while the lighter values are mostly fabric I dyed to widen the val...

I've been very happy with Google Reader, so was disappointed to hear that it will no longer be functioning after July 1.  I've been keeping an eye out for blog-land discussions of other RSS feed readers, and last night tried out the three I'd seen mentioned a number of times:  bloglovin', feedly, and The Old Reader.  I much prefer The Old Reader to the other two.  As its name indicates, the idea of this one is to stay as close as possible to the "old" Google Reader, and since I was happy with that, it's not surprising I like this one.  It has an additional feature or two that I also like:  You can easily mark all entries in one blog as read (handy if one is getting behind), and can even mark all unread entries in all blogs as unread.  The last feature was useful when I first opened the reader with my feeds, as they each showed with 10 or more entries as unread.  I knew I had just read all current entries in Reader, so I could mark as read all th...

I timed a recent visit to New York so that I could see a large Matisse exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  When I think of Matisse's use of color, I think of his vibrant blues, greens, yellows, oranges, and reds.  The label next to two paintings of apples included this quote from Matisse on his use of black:  "Before, when I didn't know what color to put down, I put down black.  Black is a force:  I used black as a ballast to simplify the construction."  Ah, if Matisse sometimes had to rely on black, then I don't feel so bad about my own use of it.  I am especially drawn to using black when working with solid fabrics.  But I've felt a little guilty about it, because it does simplify decisions.  Scroll down through these images from the Matisse show , and you'll see the many places he uses black, including the two 1916 paintings of apples, where I saw the quotation.  The apples also here and here . So, here are some thoughts on w...

It's been a long time since I posted about this quilt, but I have slowly been making progress.  There were lots of decisions to be made before I cut into the fabric.  You can see the story of this quilt on "Regret" here .  That post shows a small maquette of the quilt; the maquette was about 28x23", while the actual quilt top is 72x60".  The basic design remained the same, but I tipped the figure on the left a bit, which I think is an improvement.  The design process was arduous; the simpler the design, and the smaller the range of colors, the more impact each decision has.  I won't go into the many days it took me to dye exactly the red I wanted, and then to replicate it on the 3 pieces of fabric I needed to cut all the shapes.  The black too, took some trials, as there are two different blacks that I commonly use.  With the fabric finally done this weekend, I could go back to the full-size pattern I'd made and start cutting.  I'm glad I did...

During a longish intermission at a concert recently, I looked around the church for something to draw.   My eye was caught by the simple pattern of the wood panelling on one wall, so I made a rough sketch, with some guesses about spacing (1x, 2x, 3x): I've been meaning to learn how to do simple drawings in Word for a while--I haven't been able to figure it out on my own just from messing around with the Drawing toolbar.  It occurred to me that this simple drawing would be a good way to start out.  So, I googled "Drawing in Word" and got all the help I needed.  This YouTube video got me started; various other sites give more detailed info.  Here's the drawing I made with Word, the plain sketch and then one quick stab at colors: Now I can have fun trying out different colors.  It's also daunting--in simple designs with few shapes, each choice of color and value has a very loud voice.   I have a great set of Color-aid papers, 314 colors (thank you R...