Here's What I've Been Up To.....

Busy, busy, busy .... that's the only way to describe things around here. That's the reason I didn't get a chance to post last week's journal. Last week, I was perusing the "Go Green" Quilting Arts issue and was inspired by the menagerie of five inch squares created for the challenge. In turn, I took out the final sewn scraps I had from my Tropical Bubbles challenge piece and joined them into a square. I followed up with branches made from an orange plastic bag and leaves from a green one. I had the bird print lying about my room, so I put that in, too. (The print was made from an etching on a styrofoam butcher's plate.) This was fun to do.


I've been thinking a lot about my blog and my artwork lately. I imagine that my blog can get pretty boring to look at sometimes because it seems I primarily post about my journal quilts. Some are lovely (some are not!), but that doesn't make for particularly compelling reading. Unfortunately, these little pieces are often all I have time to do. I think they're very helpful for me -- they get me to create and I try new things, but I think I've become too focused on them. They leave me little time for anything else. So, for the remainder of the year, I'm going to try to be a little more light-hearted about my journals and try to use them more as I intended: as exercises in creativity. And, I'm going to try to find some time for larger pieces.

With that in mind, here are two pieces that are on my design wall (I don't recall if I've shown them to you before). Please pardon the pins and basting you see in the pictures. I'd love your feedback. This one is waiting, I think, for the perfect sheer to augment the rectangles -- all cut from a larger piece of fabric printed using gelatin plate printing. I'm hoping some of the fabric I bought last week in the city will be perfect.


This one is waiting for me to sew down the irregular border pieces. I think I'm going to add some big spool shapes after that.


And this is a piece of fabric I painted today. I had a few minutes to spare and decided to play. I must say that I so enjoy painting fabric. It's the one of the few things I feel comfortable doing without an end result in mind. For this piece I sprayed water all over the scribbling I'd done with Neocolor pastel pencils so the colors would bleed. Then I stenciled on top of that with painsticks. I confess I love how this turned out.