Janome has introduced a new longarm line/suite of products, the Artistic Creative Suite.  One of the items is a longarm (well,  a couple actually).  You can read more about them here.  Since Janome has been kind enough to include me in the artist/teacher program lo these many years, I in return make projects or write brief articles they can use on their website, blog or wherever they need.  In late spring I lent them several free-motion quilting samples for possible use in print media, and I decided one of this year’s projects I would make and just GIVE to them in return for their years of support:  a 17″ x 42″ banner with the Artistic logo (albeit made on my/their Janome 7700)!

Here’s the banner while being quilted. You can see that I used blue washaway pen to mark the logo and segment the background for quilting into different filler patterns.

The logo is red, so initially I thought I would paint inside the lines to re-create the flower and lettering.  This was a test of various paints on the white cloth:

Testing the red color and paint for shade and for bleeding using acrilyc ink, inktense pencils, and textile paint. Ick. Some were too orange. The ones that weren’t looked like fresh blood spots. Ick. So I opted to outline with red thread only!

Here’s a close up view:

A close up of the quilting in-progress. I modified the convertible free-motion foot. It is a closed metal circle, which is perfect for some uses. But I wanted an OPEN circle (not a U shape, which is another of the convertible options, not a large clear plastic disc which is the third alternative). So I bought a second presser foot set, took out my trusty dremel and removed a small portion of the circle to improve visibility!

Here is the finished banner–I’ll do another post with close up pictures of the free-motion quilting!

Artistic logo banner made by Saran Ann Smith for Janome-America, with thanks for their ongoing support!

Usually I don’t take my digital SLR because it is heavy!  But I am so glad I did on this trip because I would never have been able to get this shot without the full 2 second shutter exposure…. definitely the best night shot I’ve ever taken!

Can you say breathtaking? Taken from our 2nd floor room on the beach in the Florida Keys

I propped the lens on part of the balcony railing and held my breath so as not to wobble while the shutter was open.   I later got an email invitation to enter a quilt show with a specific theme, and my idea is for a night quilt, so even though the exact subject matter will be different, I KNOW I will use this photo of the moon and reflections on the water as one of my source images!

I’ll also, over a series of posts this coming month, share many more of the photos I took on this trip.  Nothing like a change of venue to wake one from the doldrums and start snapping madly with the camera! Enjoy the pics, and back in a few days, perhaps even with actual QUILTING.  What a concept…

The banana “flower” after the fruit has formed. I totally LOVE the rich red colors and the dried, curled up petal/frond/leaf thingies (not sure what they actually are, biologically speaking)

Loved the way these unopened flower buds are silhouetted against the darkness of the background foliage.

More of the glorious silver-gray-silver-curly-haired palms that enchant me

Not sure as this was growing shrub-like, but I think this may be white (?!!!) bougainvillea. Lovely not matter what it is!

And this suitably exotic and colorful … ummm… flower? leaf? sepal? whatchamacallit????

Sometimes it just takes a change of venue to open your eyes!  We went on a vacation–something we do about every 4 years–this past month.  Back at the beginning of middle school, when our younger son came home with honor roll grades the first quarter of 5th grade, hubby made a deal with him:  if Eli was on Honor Roll for all 16 quarters of middle school, he could pick the destination of his choice (in the continental 48 United States) for a family trip.  Well, Eli did it, plus added in three individual championships in three sports his 8th grade year (Cross Country, Wrestling and Track)!  He is interested in marine mammals and the ocean, so he picked the Florida Keys and off we went!

I opted to lug my heavy DSLR (new, this is its first out-of-studio major excursion), and am so glad I did.  I took a deep gulp (hoping not to get dumped into the water) as we sat on a small kayak and paddled into the warm waters offshore our first day in the Keys and (thanks to rapid fire shutter speeds!) got  fabulous photos of a cormorant–several duds, two great ones:

Cormorant taking flight

and

Cormorant airborne. Granted the horizon is tippy, but I was on a kayak!

We stayed at a gorgeous, fancy resort…nicer than any place I’ve EVER been…for just the first night.  The grounds were amazing…I wandered with my camera in the Florida heat (90+ degrees, 90+ percent humidity…drip!) and found inspiration at just about every turn:

I love looking up at palm trees, and I love those berry-like things that change in habit (upright, drooping), size and color depending on the palm tree.

A palm trunk like this makes you want to grab some fabric and Shiva painsticks and do a rubbing. In the absence of those supplies, a camera and making a thermofax screen for printing… or using just the shapes for a filler quilting design. Or use the shapes and make a modern quilt in undulating strips…..

Fan Palm…again, reinterpret in cloth….

I had never seen palm trees with silver-gray leaves/fronds. As you can gather by these three photos, I REALLY liked them. They were beyond round, so the center would fold in on itself…this is just ONE frond! The light part in the center is where the frond folds in and tucks into the center of the beyond-a-circle shape.

Close up of the silver-gray palm frond…love those curly rivulets of leaf peeling off from the edges of the frond

And another–going for symmetry this time.

And the canopy of fronds overhead…can you tell these just grabbed me?

An employee spotted me and said she, too, was a photographer, and sent me off in the direction of this cool path.  The trees were trained to grow diagonally across the walk, and there were tiki torches along the path to light your way at night.  On one side you look back through the arch/tunnel to a pool……sigh!

The palm trees are trained to grow at this angle to form this tunnel!

I’ve got TONS of photos to share, but I’ll try to alternate between Florida and what I’ve been doing the past couple of months!  TOO MUCH catching up!  I’ve been busy DOING life and not blogging about it <grin!>!!!

Sometimes, good stuff happens.  And sometimes, you get to say thank you in person.  And sometimes, things come full circle, and you keep on going and quilting and enjoying.  All that happened on Show and Tell night at the Vermont Quilt Festival this year.  (And yes, that was –gulp, hanging my very red face– two months ago!)

One of the most exciting and nerve-inducing moments for me at Vermont Quilt Festival  came Saturday night, at Show and Tell.

With Mary K. Ryan at VQF 2012. I ordered her pattern in 1990, finished it about a decade later, and 22 years after starting it, got to have my picture taken with Mary and “our” quilt! I’ve never shown this quilt at a big show before, and still have goosebumps from getting to tell the story and the thunderous applause when I unfurled it on the show and tell stage. PS–if anyone got pictures of me up on stage holding the quilt, please write..I’d love a jpeg!

Back when I was newly-booked to teach there, I was chatting with Missy Lackney, the education chair, and shared that one of my favorite quilt stories involved a Vermont quilt designer, Mary K. Ryan, and a quilt I made from one of her patterns (link is to a wholesaler…sorry, I couldn’t find an online source!).  Missy told me that Mary rarely teaches now, but would be teaching this year and I should share my quilt on the Saturday night event…. so for over a year, I looked forward to sharing my second-ever quilt top (tho it took another ten years to finish quilting it!).

To begin at the beginning, I learned to quilt in Bolivia (while assigned to the US Embassy) and then in Libreville, Gabon (on leave without pay while hubby was deputy Ambassador, so I wasn’t allowed to work under him in the chain of command–what a shame, I got to sit home and quilt!).  While on transfer in 1989 from Bolivia to Gabon, I learned there were quilting MAGAZINES…what a concept!  I promptly subscribed to Quilters Newsletter Magazine.  I then discovered I could order back issues, so I got every one they had, back to 1984!  I pored over EVERY issue, reading everything I could to learn.  On the back of many issues was the Polyfil advertisement with a large bed quilt featured with this note:  To order this pattern, write to us at XXXXXX.  I was in love with the quilt, and had no idea a Mariner’s Compass pattern was supposed to be difficult–not something to make for your second quilt!

So I promptly wrote away to order it.  Now–our mail came and went via Diplomatic Pouch:  secure but sssssllllllooooowwwww.  It took about six weeks for a letter to reach the US Mail system, and usually another 2 months to get a reply if someone answered promptly.  So 3-4 months after I sent away for the pattern, I get a letter back from PolyFil saying:  you can order a wall hanging version of this quilt by writing directly to the pattern designer, Mary K. Ryan.  {insert banging head on wall!}  So I wrote away again, saying I hoped so much it was a full-sized pattern as I wanted to make the big quilt.

Oceans Alive, my version of Mary K. Ryan’s Mariner’s Compass pattern. The published pattern is for the center medallion. Mary had made the quilt bed-sized, and I wanted to also. It took quite a while, but I did it, and I still love this quilt as much today as I did when I made it.

When the reply came, it was for a 28×28 inch wallhanging only, but to my UTTER astonishment and delight, Mary included a hand-written note!  Alas, the note is downstairs and I’m still on a walker and not able to go downstairs to find and photo the note…but I have it and the pattern! Mary told me how many yards I’d need, how many running inches of the fabric for the inner borders, how to enlarge the pattern by 125 percent to make the center medallion (I would NEVER have figured that one out on my own!).  I had also discovered Mary’s quilt was featured on the COVER of QNM in the mid 1980s and had back-ordered that issue.  So with Mary’s instructions by my side, and a ruler that measured in millimeters, I measured the known width (of the compass border) with inches, then figured out how wide that was in millimeters (the size on the photo on the cover), and did the math to figure out how large things should be!

I made cardboard templates from cereal boxes.  I started outlining onto the cloth with pencil, but soon discovered the pencil dulled quickly and I could see my sizes would be wrong.  So,  because I didn’t know better, used my rotary cutter to cut alongside the cardboard templates!   I soon discovered that I was cutting into the cardboard, so I put my plastic ruler on top to get a nice edge.  …And proceeded to cut out several hundred compass points!

Paul’s cat Brandy (dearly departed lo these many years) supervised cutting on the dining room table.  My cat Cassy (dearly departed lo these many more years) supervised the piecing and eventual sleep-worthiness of the quilt.  I got the entire top stitched while we were in central Africa.  I was SUCH a newbie to quilting, I didn’t even know the points were supposed to come to the edges of the circle!  Miraculously, when I learned this fact years later I went to look and most of them did!

Serendipity happened when an oceanographic / environmental group sent a “donate to us” mailing with a coloring book with dolphin and orca whales in it.  How perfect for quilting motifs!    But it was central Africa.  Even with the air conditioning on at full blast, I had to sit under the quilt with a lap hoop, and my hands would get sweaty with just 20 minutes of hand quilting.  So the quilt got set aside for almost ten years.  By then we lived on San Juan Island, Washington, (where we could see the orcas from our deck!) and I set myself the goal of finishing the quilt in time to enter into the County Fair, where it won Grand Champion that year!  I was so I excited I wrote to Mary to tell her of “our” win!

Detail of my quilt, Oceans Alive. Begun in 1990 in Gabon (West Africa), finished about 2000 in Friday Harbor, Washington. Pattern by Mary K. Ryan.

Fast forward another decade-plus.  My heart was pounding and my palms were sweaty as I waited my turn to Show and Tell at VQF.  I’m OK with speaking to a large quilty crowd, but this was different:  I knew Mary would be in the audience!   Show founder Richard Cleveland was doing emcee duties, and I mentioned to him as I approached the microphone that I needed to tell the story first, then show the quilt.  I left out the details of which ad/company and what design—until I said “What a wonderful welcome to the wonderful world of quilting, that the designer should write  to me like that!  So with great thanks to Vermont’s own, Mary K. Ryan!”  and we unfurled my quilt to what sounded to me like thunderous applause and oohs and ahhhs and gasps….I was SHAKING!  But I made it through the story without crying or losing it….and I was thrilled!

At the end of the show and tell, I made a beeline for Mary moving against the tide of departing quilters (and I had never met or seen Mary….Richard C. pointed her out to me from the dais as we showed the quilt….turns out she is on the board of VQF!) and we got this picture of me with Mary and “our” quilt!  I’ve never shared this quilt before at a large regional or national show…just locally.  Since I’m now known for art quilting, I was so nervous and so happy at the reception and being able to surprise Mary with the story and the quilt.

I’ve got goosebumps all over again….thanks for reading this far and letting me tell all of this story.  I now know that such incredible generosity as hers happens in the quilt world quite regularly, but I didn’t then….and I’m so glad I had such a warm welcome to this world of ours that brings us all such joy.  Thank you, Mary K. Ryan!

Ooops…I didn’t realize it had been THIS long since I wrote!  That’s what happens when you’re busy!   We’ve had a wonderful summer, school begins next week, and I have about  a thousand things to share.  All I need is time to blog about them…heavens, I still have cool stuff from teaching at Vermont Quilt Festival back at the end of JUNE!   But to start with today and working backwards…..

My dear friend and Frayed Edge Kathy came to keep me company today (keep reading), and because her birthday is coming up soon (when she’ll be away) we celebrated today:

Birthday cream puff (thanks to hubby for picking these up for us!)

So why did Kath come to keep me company?  Well… I have/had arthritis in my big toes.  The had is because I had surgery this week on my right foot!  The plan for surgery was to have the arthritic bone growth removed, then the doc (a bunion / big toe specialist down in Portland) was going to break (EEEK) the metatarsal and shorten it so there would be enough room in the joint to prevent future /continued bone growth.  The great news is that when he got done scraping out the yucky stuff, there was plenty of flexibility in the joint that he didn’t need to break the bone!  That means faster healing.  On principle I took one of the pain pills just before going to bed the day I had the surgery (Weds.), and I haven’t needed any since!   I go back on Tuesday for a follow up, and the doc said I’ll be able to walk on that foot –just six days after surgery!  It was supposed to be 7-8 weeks until resuming exericise, but I’m hoping now it will be shorter.  WOOT!

Before

After, with ice-bag

I was so wobbly on the crutches (I have a terrible sense of balance) that the nurse sent me home with a walker, as I am on strict orders:  NO weight on the right foot until next week.  So just call me hopalong this week while I catch up with reading, an online class, and (ahem) blogging!

And speaking of the class… I’m taking a class at Joggles.com with Sondra Holtzman.  The watercolor style is much looser than our dear Jane LaFazio’s style, which I adore (which is why I’ve taken several of her classes).  I am a bit of a control freak at times and think I need to loosen up, so this class will be good for me.  If I don’t fall off the Blogging Wagon (again) I’ll share more pics in due time.  For now,

A basic color mixing chart with primaries, secondaries and and complementaries (and complementaries mixed)

and what I need even more, loosening up..this time dropping wet into wet!

wet into wet color play