Invisible Woman

looking forward

 I'm just taking a quick and hard-earned (floor mopping!) break from today's pre-Thanksgiving cleaning festivities. The boys arrive tomorrow afternoon & night, and for me, tomorrow will be dedicated to doing as much cooking prep as possible for Thursday's big dinner.

It will be just our family here this year, but we're rarely all together anymore, so that's a real treat. I bought this pretty new tablecloth, and hope I can remember to take some feast photos before the gobble-gobbling begins.

Then on Friday, when those with more shopping stamina than I are jamming the stores, and sportsfans are glued to the TV, I'm planning to spend some time at home with my new friend:

 

Mrs. Mary Delaney (portrait at age 82, in 1782).

 

 

I saw this book mentioned in the December issue of Martha, and was immediately intrigued when it said Mrs. Delaney was an artist who created botanical embroideries and collages in the 1700's.

 

 

This intricate silk thistle embroidery from 1741 was part of a petticoat panel, and is pictured on the book's back cover.

 

 

This is a closer view of the passionflower collage pictured on the front cover.

Mary Delaney painted and freehand-cut the petals and leaves and other details of her botanical collages, which are astounding today, but even more so given that they were created in the 1770's when Mary was in her seventies.

For now, I've only had time to quickly leaf through the book, so I'm really looking forward to savoring it page by page.

But alas, for now, it's back to the housecleaning.  

 

through my window: the fan club

Sometimes the arrival of the quail family is announced by other members of the fan club.

This morning, Lucy and Pete watched intently out the window, tails twitching in unison, as the quails pecked their way closer and closer to the house.

 

They had a good view as the chicks wandered beneath the plant stand.

 

Our favorite little family stayed for a long time. We all got a generous fix of quail cuteness before they finally headed off down the hill, and the cats turned their attention to the finches and squirrels.

  

HB to me

Today is/was my birthday.

And it was a very happy day.

The older I get, the *funner* birthdays are.

I suppose as we age, we gain a fresh perspective, wrinkles and flab be damned.

A few weekends back, I had my east coast celebration.

Today, I took myself to the Desert Botanic Garden for a good long daytime wander, and it was really great.

I've uploaded a slideshow to Flickr so you can enjoy a wander through the DBG too, just click here.

visual soul food

 
I've got two great new books to help get some fresh creative juices flowing.

The first book is Collage Lab by Bee Shay; it contains 52 different collage/mixed media technique "labs"; a person more disciplined than I am might try working through the book, one lab per week, as a year long project. And that would probably be a great learning exercise.

But I bought this more as a technique-specific reference and a source of visual inspiration.  And if you follow popular mixed media blogs or magazines, you'll recognize many of the artists who have contributed their beautiful work to this book.

The second book is 500 Art Quilts, a new member of Lark Books 500 series.  I rarely attend big quilt shows, so I rely on books for exposure to what's happening in the art quilt world.  This book is full of eye candy and happily, I didn't recognize too many of the pieces as reruns from other books.  It's wonderful to have such a diverse collection of art quilts gathered together.

One inclusion of special note is Judy Coates Perez's amazing Moon Garden painted(!) wholecloth quilt, featured in front, back and detail views and as the photo on the back flap.  Congrats to Judy and all the artists included in this great little book.  So much inspiration in one compact volume! 

a desert wander

Yesterday afternoon, as the cool front bringing today's rain began to move in, we decided to take a late afternoon wander through the foothills out back.

 

This cute little Anna's female was standing guard just outside the neighborhood.

 
We encountered what looks like a cholla family: two parents and lots of happy little babies.  Presumably all the recent rain has helped these thorny offspring take root.

This is one of the few ocotillo cacti along the trail; it thrives on the sloping side of a wash.

And a closeup of the vivid ocotillo bloom.

 
Here's an example of the unexpected partnerships found in the desert.  It's hard to know whether the tree or the saguaro came first, but together they found greater strength and shelter.  Now, after so many years together, the tree's branches are forever entwined in the saguaro's arms.

This yellow wildflower was one of the few colorful blooms visible; another week or two of warmth should bring on the colors.

 
Finally as we headed home, the sun peeked through the moody sky, bathing the distant Estrella mountains in magical light.

experimenting

As I was recently browsing through last year's Calypte Anna photos, I came across this one.  It was an instant favorite for me the day I took it.  Don't the babies look like they're having a heart to heart chat, or maybe sharing a bit of hummer gossip?

I've always known this is an image I want to interpret somehow in fabric.  So today I fiddled around in Photoshop Elements 7 and came up with this edited version:

The following may not make much sense if you don't have a Photoshop editing program of some sort.  But anyway, here's what I did:

First, I cropped the image a bit and used the cloning tool to magically remove all those unsightly "dirty diapers" by covering them with cloned patches of branch, sky or nest.  I saved this as a new image (thus keeping my original photo intact).  The new image became the background layer for experimentation.

Next, in the layers menu, I created a duplicate layer, and on that I used a filter called "accented edges" to create some outline highlights.

Once that was done, I duplicated that layer and then used a filter called "paint daubs" to soften and texture the image.

Again, I duplicated that layer, and then adjusted the contrast.

Finally, I duplicated that layer and used a filter called "grain - regular" to add a bit more texture, and I adjusted the color saturation (which probably should have been done in yet another duplicate layer, but I forgot).

All these layers create a large file, but it allows the flexibility to revert to an earlier stage and then experiment with different subsequent choices.  It also enables you to adjust the opacity (see-throughness) of each layer, which can also create interesting effects.

In this case, each new layer contained the cumulative effects of all previous layers, so ultimately I could delete all the intervening layers once I was happy with the final layer... unless I'd ever want to use one of those middle layers as the basis for a new project.  (I admit, I'm a layer-saver.) But as a layered image, this takes up about 6 times as much storage space as a non-layered image.

 

Once I was happy with the final image, I saved it and printed it as a 5" x 7" size on EQ Printables inkjet cotton with my Canon MX860 printer, using high quality/photo paper settings.  This is the first fabric print I've done on the new printer, so we'll see how the color holds up when I rinse/set it.  (My old Epson printer set a pretty high standard in that regard.)

I'm not sure yet what's to become of this image, but I did notice that it goes nicely with the fabrics in my blue/purple quilted pillows.

I guess time will tell.

where to go from here?

Do other creative folks face this question that has been lately nagging at the edges of my consciousness:

Where to go from here?

Do I keep doing more of what I've done recently, because it is familiar?

  Do I return to something satisfying from my past, hoping to find a further-forward path?

Do I try something entirely new and risk having nothing to show for it, and perhaps no feeling of accomplishment?

?
?
?

I can look back over my several years of these blog posts and see the solid evidence of my ADD tendencies.  Something grabs hold of me for a time, and I focus on it intensely.  But then, most often purely by chance, something new catches my interest and off I go.

 

I admire artists who can sustain a focus and develop great expertise in a particular niche, and I wonder how it is they do that?

How are they not distracted, or bored, or simply lured away by the promise of something entirely new and fascinating?

 

My creative detours have included, in no particular order: sewing, gardening, knitting, crocheting, decoupage, traditional and art quilting, lampwork beadmaking, wirework and jewelrymaking, collage and mixed media artmaking, stamping and stampcarving, photography and polaroid transfers.  And probably a few other things I've forgotten at the moment.

 

Part of me wishes I could choose one, or two, or even three things and stick with them.  Get focused.  Develop my niche. But it never seems to happen.

There are just too many possibilities, and I can't seem to ignore them.  Sometimes I even briefly become obsessed.

 

Alas, it's a fault that leaves me a dabbler in much, and master of none.

collage mania: preview open

 

Several weeks ago, I mentioned that I'd submitted the above 8"x 10" collage to Collage Mania, for which all proceeds are donated to the American Cancer Society.  This year 383 collages have been donated, and you can see them all in the 39 pages of previews starting here.  (My collage is on page 28.)

On May 5, each collage will be available for a minimum donation of $80.  On May 6 & 7, the remaining collages will be available for a minimum donation of $40.  The goal is to raise $20,000 for ACS through this event.  It's a great opportunity to own a piece of original artwork and help a very worthy cause all at once.  Each collage is sized or premounted to fit into an 8" x 10" frame.

So if you have a few minutes, please go take a look!  There's lots of creative inspiration to be enjoyed, in honor of the many people whose lives have been touched by cancer.  And hats off to artist Virginia Spiegel and friends, for organizing and conducting such a worthwhile event.

another collage; then off we go to virginia

So I didn't finish that second collage in time for Collage Mania; and honestly, in the end I wasn't sure I would have submitted it anyway.  It's just so different than what I usually do, and though I really like it alot, I'm still absorbing it. 

The story behind the photo is that it was taken along a footpath bordering our old neighborhood in Reston, Virginia, when a huge new county park was being built.  One midsummer morning, a few years back, I was walking the dog and we happened upon this beautiful wild morning glory. It had grown up entwined around an underground gas pipeline marker, amid the construction chaos.  I later went back with my camera to capture the scene forever, before some overly-aggressive and under-appreciative worker could obliterate it with a weedwacker. (Such nature atrocities happened regularly in our neighborhood.)

So despite it being a personal favorite, this photo has pretty much languished on my hard drive until now.  For this collage, I Photoshopped it a bit to add some speckly texture and discoloration and the blurred border.  Then I printed it on Epson matte photo paper, to which I fused Heat'N'Bond Lite on the back side.

The CAUTION background was created in Word, then pasted into Photoshop (mine is just an Elements version), resized and recolored to suit me, then printed on inkjet fabric. After rinsing & heatsetting, I fused it to stiff Peltex. Then I fused the trimmed paper photo to the inkjet fabric background, deiberately slightly off-center.

For the border, I printed another sheet of inkjet fabric with black stripes. (For this cool idea of a fused binding, I credit Judy Coates Perez.)  After rinsing and heatsetting, I fused Heat'n'Bond Lite to the back and cut it into 1+1/4" strips to fold and fuse onto the border of the collage.  Then I machine stitched this fused "binding" with red thread to add detail.

I'd already printed the faux fortune cookie "beauty" message on white matte paper, so I simply machine stitched it into place with the red thread through all layers.  The small grommets in the photo corners were added last.  I still have to decide how to back or mount it, but the design part is done.  I think.  We'll see.

As happy coincidences go, we're heading back to our old Reston stomping grounds this weekend.  John has a law school alum event at the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, so with an extended weekend visit, we'll get to see our sweet boys and our dear old friends and our beloved old haunts in northern Virginia. We spent 17 lovely growing-family years there, so it will be quite a trip down memory lane.

And if I get the chance, I'll go and see if that morning glory is coming back again this year.

collage for a good cause

 

Spent most of today finishing up this collage that I'm submitting to Collage Mania, in hopes of making a small contribution to benefit the American Cancer Society.  The collages will be sold May 5-7 online.  I wish I'd started sooner, to have more done to donate, but the deadline for submissions is April 1.  We'll see if I can quickly finish another one by Wednesday.  Never submitted to this before, so I'm not even sure my collage will be accepted, but it was a fun process anyway.

I used my petite queen hummingbird photo as the basis for a digital collage, with my favorite stripes below; all printed as one unit on inkjet cotton.  After heat setting the inkjet print, I washed the sky with watered-down blue Lumiere textile paint to give it subtle sparkle, and heat set it again.  Then I ironed the inkjet print to fusible Pellon interfacing, and machine stitched along some of the branches with black thread for texture and emphasis.

Next, using Heat'N'Bond web, I fused the cloth collage unit to a sheet of scrapbook paper, and machine zigzagged around the cloth collage edges.  With more Heat'N'Bond I then fused the scrapbook paper unit to stiff Peltex interfacing, with another scrapbook paper then fused to its back side.

To finish, I machine blanket-stitched the outer edges, and glued on the "courage" text and its corner beads.  The collage had to measure 8"x10" and be ready to pop into a standard frame, which it is!

You can find much more detail about this mixed media/interfacing sandwich collage process in the Sharon McCartney section of Mixed Media Collage by Holly Harrison.  Endless possibilities!