Well…I’m only 2+ months behind on some blogging!  I’ve been busy on the road teaching in Arizona, Massahusetts and Ohio (at the NQA show!), and then Knoxville (AQS), TN, in July!   But I am trying to get caught up and share some of the lovely things I saw while on our family vacation after teaching in Arizona for the statewide quilt guild. Here is what the Grand Canyon looked like when we arrived at the South Rim in late April:

Notice that dark cloud on the horizon, especially to the left…well, it moved fast!  The following sequence of photos was taken as we walked along the rim…took all of 40 minutes.  We went from overcast:

Notice the cheerful (sigh…) family…woefully underdressed for the weather we were about to encounter:

All I can say is THANK HEAVENS the boys got this glimpse…even the jaded teenager went “WHOA!!!!!!” on first looking over the railing/wall!

To mist moving into the canyon about (literally) two minutes later:

Then looking down into the canyon:

And watching the veils of mist and snow and rain and shafts of sunlight–it was actually pretty cool to see this, as opposed to screaming blue skies and sunshine typical of summer:

To rain:

To clouds down in the canyon:

And the markers explaining the stone layers that you see:

And drifting cloud wisps–you can see the snow gathering on the north rim:

Then the north rim disappeared:

To SNOW…a late spring snowstorm.

To WhiteOut:

On the drive back to Flagstaff, cars on the Interstate highway had slowed to 25 miles an hour the road conditions were so slippery!  So before we got on the road, we went into the big old inn for some hot food.  I loved the table setting:

Back during winter, I took an online course on Lino-cutting with Australian Dijanne Cevaal (her blog is here).  One Sunday while watching the Winter Olympics, I began carving this 12″ block–it took most of four hours to Oh-So-Carefully cut (and not slip) just the pebbly center, but it was SO worth the ache in my hands.  I just love the way this turned out:

You may be able to get more feel for the quilting from this angled shot:

The quilt was quilted, then wrapped onto artists’ stretcher bars (staple gunned to the back), then finished the back with a nice cloth cover.  Here’s a detail:

Hope you like it!

PS–Dijanne offers the course periodically.  If you are interested, surf over to her blog and ask when it is next scheduled.  OK…just checked, next session starts July 14, so am posting this earlier than I initially planned!  If you move fast, you can take the class soon!

Patsy Thompson is a quilter, author and DVD maven (with seemingly unlimited energy sources!) who loves quilted feathers…the more of them, the more intricate and hyperquilted, the better!  She recently shared her book Feather Adventures! with me:

The book is aptly subtitled:  The Machine Quilter’s Guide to Creating Stunning and Innovative Free Motion Feather Designs, and tantalizingly adds “Volume One”  (that’s hidden in the glare of the camera flash…sorry ’bout that).     The information in this book is good for machine quilters using both home and longarm (on a track) quilters…it’s all about design and building or creating your colorful feathers.

The book is organized into the following chapters:

1. The Basic Freeform Feather
2. Feathers with Stitched Spines
3. Start Thinking Outside the Box!
4. Hyperquilting!
5. Hyperquilting Special Effects
6. Epilogue

Patsy proceeds from an intro-level feather to increasingly complex variations on the theme, guiding you one step at a time.  The designs at the back at first might appear to be overwhelmingly complex, but as you follow Patsy’s clearly laid out process, you can see that these seemingly-complicated designs are a fairly simple, straightforward process.   As I was flipping through the book when it arrived, I had my first “smack-self-upside-head” moment:  use a flexible ruler to create the spine, then flip it over to mirror image the design OR simple move the curved ruler to repeat the motif.  DUH!   Why didn’t I think of that?  Thank you, Patsy!  (Read more about how on pages 14-15.)

As you read and play around with designs through the chapters, you can see how Patsy has used different variations to come up with feathers that while structurally the same look quite different.   It is up to you to decide how much is just right for your quilt!

The Stitched Spines are some of my favorite variations…. I can see using these ideas as a jumping off point for using feathers creatively in my quilting.  Even though I tend to make pictorial art quilts, I’ve already begun incorporating traditional quilting motifs.  In the quilt of my son playing his guitar (final post with finished quilt here) , I used several large feathered vines to quilt the background, and think with the inspiration of Patsy’s variations, I’ll be using them even more.

I really liked the curlicues in the photo above, too…. this particular wreath has traditional feathers on the outside, a decoratively stitched spine, and the curlicues on the inside…way cool!

Then Patsy goes over the top with a term I think she coined, Hyperquilting!  Although this might be a bit too much on many quilts (and would get lost on print fabric!), it is sure a fun idea, and may spark new ideas in how to use thread in your quilting beyond just feathers (yes, Patsy….. we all love feathers, but there are other things too!).  The only thing I wish for is more photos (of course?  what quilter doesn’t want more pictures?), especially of the entire quilt pictures.  The detail shots are perfect for achieving the aim of this book:  to teach us how.  But I’d love to see some inset photos that show the entire quilt to the edges so we can get the overall picture.   I’ll look forward to future volumes!

The book is available in a number of places, including from Patsy, here.  While you’re visiting her site, check out her blog…she has LOTS of great information there, too!

Have I said recently how much I love living in Camden, Maine?    It is a lovely, friendly town, and the locals know the back way from here to there (and where to find parking during peak tourist season).   That means we know about the back doors of some of the shops, like Rockport Blueprint, and the footbridge over the river.  There is a new ice cream stand in very bright colors near the bridge–I love walking on the bridge and over by RiverHouse hotel because the owner loves his gardens:

One of the picnic tables comes with a water dish for thirsty doggies who happen to be in town:

To get from the parking lot behind French and Brawn to the Library or the the front side of the shops on  Main Street, you can go over the footbridge or in the back door of Rockport Blueprint (our wonderful local art supply store), then out the front to Main Street.  Here is the sign next to the lime green ice cream stand:

This is the back entrance…definitely a workroom, receiving area for shipments, etc.:

And here is what you frequently find in between the sign and the door,  at the bottom of the steps (which also runs around the side of Rockport Blueprint to the back door/kitchen entrance to Boynton McKay (deli, coffee shop, great salads, breakfast, sweet treats, coffee, homemade buttermilk donuts…..wonderful place!):  DUCKS.  The river runs under some of the buildings out to the falls and into the harbor, and the ducks like to hang out here because the tourists crossing the footbridge have a propensity to FEED the ducks.

And the view from the deck/walkway to the river:

When the weather is warm, Rockport Blueprint likes to keep the back door open for the breezes (almost no place here has air conditioning…all but a few days a year we don’t need it!).  Here’s the solution to the duckies (in case you can’t read it in the photo, the paper says “Duck Gate”):

When you’re walking on Main Street, across from the park honoring the fallen of the Civil War, the Library and the grassy  park/hill overooking the harbor, this is the view up the river toward the footbridge–the tall chimney is from the now-offices-former-Knox Mill complex:

Yes, I love Camden!  Dog bowls and ducks…yeah!

A brief detour from the Arizona trip…..

I’ve been a  part of Postmark’d Art’s last two swaps.  This time, I used one of the exercises from my Lino-Cutting class (blogged about in January and February).   I rooted through about (no kidding) 20 years of old photos to find this one of a farm in southern England, which I snapped in about 1984.   It was funny, I thought I used to be a good photographer, taking good and artsy shots.  Hmmm.  Not so much.  Some were good, but most were….ummm…boring!   It appears I have trained my eye for composition somewhat in the intervening decades!   Anyway, this one was good, so I used it to cut a lino-block.

Here are the assorted prints drying on the floor:

Some blurred a bit, and will be cut up, tossed, or printed over.  Others turned out great!  I used three fabrics:  a pale baby blue fossil fern (the one that looks grayish), a commercial sky print (the bright one), and a blue fabric I painted and fiddled with (and used some for the mermaid I blogged about recently).  There are also two guardian Owls for a friend whose husband passed away recently.  Owl’s are a favorite of hers (I carved the block during the class with her in mind!), and decided that she and Lou needed a guardian Angel Owl.

One difficulty I have had with the class, is that the teacher–Dijanne–is from Europe and Australia, and not so familiar with US brands.  The Speedball water-based printing ink that I find makes the best prints is, shriek!, not wash-fast!!!!!   So I have begun doing some testing.  Here I took prints (heat set with the iron and not) of a sun, then treated each with various things like soft gel medium, a varnish for textiles, GAC 900 (a compound for using paints on textiles), and nothing. I also want to run another test where I treat the fabric FIRST, then apply the Speedball ink.   I don’t like how on a couple of these the color of the fabric changes so much (not to mention how stiff it got)!  I also have tried using Krylon Spray Fixative, an archivally safe spray fixative; it is often used on top of pastels so they don’t smudge.   Anyway…here’s a picture of the test, in progress.  I next need to soak these and see what happens.  Stay tuned!!

And here’s a shot of all the postcards in the swap: