Home again, home again

After two years on exhibit at the Art Place XV, Yale Medical Group in New Haven CT ten pieces are home again. It's good to see them. I can only say how happy I was that they enjoyed the work and asked to have the contract extended for so many months.

Pictured here are two that I had mounted on foam core. They only require a simple picture hook to hang.

Tagged by Vivika whilst working

I got tagged by my buddy Vivika! Thanks. No, really, thanks. It's a great break from my totally focused full day of piecing. First of all, I am tagging the following bloggers who need to follow up with their own posts.
*Sue
*Loreen
*Constance

*Diane

*Linda

Here are the rules:
1. Thank the person who gave you this award.
2. Share 7 things about yourself.
3. Pass the award along to 5 bloggers who you have recently discovered and you think are fantastic!
4. Contact the bloggers you've picked and let them know about the award.
Those seven things...
Seven things about me:
1. I am a very impatient person and I thought learning to quilt years ago would help me overcome it.
2. My favortite color is red/orange. 3. I live in a three generation house and love watching my granddaughters grow up close and personal.
4. I enjoy finding patterns in working sudoku.
5. My stash embarrasses me with it's size. I should be producing a lot more.

6. I collect Australian Aboriginal art and mid-twentieth

century design "stuff".
7. I am practically tone deaf.

This is my Florida granddaughter's new quilt for her newly painted room. It's a design and color palette that she chose. The flowers are just pinned on at this point. Tomorrow I will applique them down, piece the backing and get the whole lot to Susan Wood, our local long-arm quilter. It's 80" x 85" and I'm no fool.

A Quilt for Masako

On my October 9, 2009 post I introduced my "Masako Goes to Africa" piece. It is the first of my kimono shaped series...and the first of my sister Masako's virtual travels. She still lives within 50 miles of her first home in the United States, a small town in Texas, where she married, raised her girls and continues to work.

Masako is very ill. We are going to see her and I've made this little quilt for her. I hope it will comfort and warm her through her chemo and radiation treatments.

She continues to inspire me. Almost fifty years now.

Fiberactions Post

Fiberactions is a collection of thirteen fiber artists from around the globe who explore the challenge of creating pieces based on a theme suggested in turn by members. Each is to be 16"x20" and posted on the 15th of alternating months.

My submission for this most recent challenge is Signs and Symbols. I've posted here a detail.

Check out fiberactions.blogspot.com for my rational.

Yes, those are five yen pieces referencing the not too subtle "money talks".

Rainy Day Drawing

It has been an indoor kind of day all day today. A fellow member of Shoreline Arts Trail (www.shorelineartstrail.com) Molly McDonald hosted a drawing class at a local gallery (www.stonycreekgallery.com). It was a great day to stay in the cozy, art-filled space and draw.

It was particularly restful. Just what I needed after a week of hanging the Faculty Exhibit at the Guilford Art Center (www.guilfordartcenter.org). The opening was last night 5-7, just an hour after the last piece was delivered. The remarks overheard whilst I was being a "fly on the wall" were very satisfying. I wanted to hear that the artists were happy with how their work was presented. The faculty is a wonderful collection of artists: potters, weavers, painters, metalsmiths, jewelry makers, calligraphers, art quilters, collage makers, felters...the list is only limited by ones imagination.

Today I photographed some of my favorite bits and will post them tomorrow.

Cosmic Dragons

Who doesn't love a kid who knows exactly what he wants? Maybe it's me. (See August 27 post: A quilt for Jinju) Okay, it's me. I just can't resist them even though raising them can be a challenge, grandparenting them is a hoot.

Last month my stepdaughter relayed to me that 8 year old grandson Steven went on a rare shopping excursion with her to a "big-box" store (rare for him not her). Whilst cutting through the fabric aisles he spied a bolt that he grabbed, exclaiming "Do you think Cookie Grammy would make me a quilt out of THIS"? Now, you gotta love a kid who can look at a bolt of fabric...granted it does have dragons and it IS blue...and can see it as a quilt.

Of course it had to happen. Pictured here is "Cosmic Dragons", adapted from Maxine Rosenthal and Joy Pelzmann's book "One Block Wonder encore!"

So that Steven could have some of the fabric in its original incarnation I used a piece for the center of the pieced backing.

Now for quilting, packing and sending off because right behind it waiting is the fabric that his older sister selected for her new "tween room". You're probably not surprised that she knew exactly what she wanted too!

When is enough enough?

And I'm not talking snow here...although I could after the third snowstorm of the month.

No, I'm talking about when is a piece done?

I remember reading that Pissarro sometimes added to a painting, continued to tweak it, even when it was hanging on a galley's wall.

I'd been thinking about how language changes.Perfectly acceptable words become "bad" or dated or just plain silly and drop out of use. After a decade or so goes by and they have dropped out of common usage, whole groups of people have no knowledge of them at all. Sometimes this is a good thing.

And, other words are added to the general public's vocabulary that are brand new. Language evolves in a way.

This is the basis of my most recent work: "Evermore: Language Evolves". I created a time machine monitored by my trusty, nosy crows into which old words pour and out of which brand new words are spewed.

I'm beginning to wonder when it will be done. Or if it already is. I am continually reminded of another word that should be added on one end of the "evolution" or another, and, like Pissarro (and that is the ONLY thing we have in common, obviously) I keep adding to this piece.

Unfortunately in so many ways, I've never ascribed to the Meis van der Rohe axiom that "less is more". Well, almost never.