Hi all! Wanted to share what I’ve been doing this weekend…making totebags for Janome-America!

I’m doing a pattern for them as part of being in their artists’ program (where I get to borrow one of the best machines ever… the Janome 6600—-it is very close to perfect for me!).

These two totebags will be featured (I think) in an upcoming issue of Janome’s in-house magazine, the Janome International Digest. If all goes as planned, the pattern will be included. Of course, the instructions got long (I like to include lots of detail), so will be posting an extended lesson on making the invisible pocket on my blog and, perhaps if Janome wants to do so, as a web-extra (or in the magazine…whatever they desire!).

Yesterday, I went to the local fabric store, Fabric Bonanza in Rockland, and of course they didn’t have what I needed (D rings), because they never do, or if they do have what you need it’s cheap Dritz quality…sigh! Whooda thunk JoAnns Fabrics would look upscale. Anyway, I substituted—overall suspender clips instead of D rings—on the green and pine needles bag and love the look…could get really cute and funky with playful prints or denims. An idea to save and use again! To see them better, try right-clicking on the photo to get a bigger image.

Here’s a picture of the “pick your own” pockets inside, where you can select the type of pockets that meet your needs inside a purse:

If these look vaguely familiar, it is because a while back (April I think–yep, made in April, blogged about it May 1–click on the hotlink to see them), I shared photos of two bags I made for myself and my dear sister-in-law (in tropical colors) and Mom (cranes, in blue and black). They were the “test-run” bags. Janome wanted seasonal look bags for the Fall/Holiday issue, so I made these two in autumn and winter fabrics. Hope you like! When the pattern is published, I’ll let you know.

Regular viewers will notice I have a thing for trees, and woods, and (lately) sci fi books about exploring space and finding other worlds. Last November I blogged about “Circular Paradox,” a quilt inspired by two books about other sentient species in the universe, and particularly a passage in one of the Ender books by Orson Scott Card. This quilt is another in what I think will end up being a series of quilts about orbs in space. I don’t know why, but I LOVE this one, too. (To see more detail, click on the photo, or right-click to open in a new window or tab.)

If the composition looks familiar, a month or two ago someone asked about how I mark quilts, and I ended doing a post on circle templates and marking tools. I grabbed a scrap of navy blue (leftover from the sky in the nativity quilt) and marked some lines. As I looked at it, I decided I liked it enough to leave the chalk marks and make a small quilt out of it! Here’s a close up:

Like the Marshall Point Light piece that I posted a day or two ago, I decided this quiltlet (under 7 inches tall) needed a bit “more.” I wanted the visual field / stretch to go beyond the borders of the quilt, so I used so “solid” batik and a speckled batik (and I wish I had yards of the latter!) stretched onto a frame. This piece is currently on display at the bank and, if it doesn’t sell there, will move to Ducktrap Bay Trading Company (the local gallery) in August.

In reviewing other recent pieces, I remembered that a small gift I made for follow “Frayed Edges” member Kate Cutko is also part of this series.

Hope you like!

I began this piece two years ago, when we still lived on San Juan Island, Washington, by painting the center panel with washes of Setacolor paints. It sat neglected until this summer, when I decided to turn it into this piece. The sun rises on America here in Maine, so I thought I’d do a riff on traditional feathered quilts in the sunrise and add some of the quintessential Maine coastal islands.

This quilt is “Journal” sized, that is, about the size of a piece of copy paper… in this case 10 1/4 by 11 3/4 inches. Available through Ducktrap Bay Trading Company here in Camden.

A brief detour from the recent work. Yesterday the power went out at 3 (half an hour after I got home from errands), came back on at 7, at which point the internet connection was dead. Sigh. Since I got nothing wothwhile done (although sitting on the screened porch, getting misted with the sideways rain during the thunderstorms was wonderful), I thought I’d post this book review which I wrote a while ago….

I read this book while visiting my mom in California in early May, and have been wanting to blog about it ever since, but stuff keeps happening in the meantime!

First published in 1963 by Yale University Press, Josef Albers’ approach to color was considered radical and outside the mainstream at the time. By now, his theories are so widely accepted that it’s hard to believe they were ever “outside” ideas.

The introduction says the books is a “record of an experimental way of studying color and of teaching color.

“In visual perception a color is almsot never seen as it really is–as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art.

“…First, it should be learned that one and the same color evokes innumerable readins. … distinct color effects are produced –through the recognition of the interaction of color.”

For example, in the scan just above, the ochre squares in the blue field and in the yellow-orange field are the same color. By being surrounded by complementary colors (opposites on the color wheel), one’s “reading” of the ochre color is completely changed. In the blue field, the ochre loos orange-ish; in the orange field, the ochre looks brown. Albers says that in the original design for this study, the horizontal blue and yellow stripes were strips of paper that could be lifted to reveal that a single strip of ochre paper was used to make both the small squares…wow!

The book is a fairly academic treatise, so will not suit all readers. But, if like me, you learn from words as well as pictures, it’s a fabulous work.

The original book and class was significantly larger, and therefore priced out of range of most folks. Over the past forty years, a smaller version of the book was available, but many called for an expanded edition with more of the illustrations. This revised and expanded paperback edition is copyrighted in 2006, and is now available through Amazon for an amazingly low price, so you can see why I snapped it up!

Here’s another page /example that fascinated me… hope it entices you to get the book from the library or add it to your library!

Here’s the technical stuff:

Albers, Josef. Interaction of Color: Revised and Expanded Edition. New Haven: Yale University Press, (c) 1963, revised and expanded edition (c) 2006.
ISBN-13: 978-0-300-11595-6
ISBN-10: 0-300-11595-4
List Price US $15, Amazon Price $9.75.

I LOVE this quilt! I love everything about the way it turned out…. I began with a photo (taken by me) of the Marshall Point Lighthouse in Port Clyde, Maine. Maine’s glorious, rocky, peninsula- and bay-riddled coastline is the result of glaciers on the move during the last ice age. Port Clyde is at the tip of the peninsula just south of Camden…it takes a bit over an hour to get there from here.

I wanted to extend the photo beyond the four edges of the picture with scraps of cloth before I quilted it. When it was done, I decided I wanted to set it off against a background. A huge/wide piece of barnwood or driftwood would have been perfect, but I didn’t have any (and didn’t think I’d find any I could afford) that were large enough. So, out came my hand-dyed fabrics. This brown piece reminds me of wood and the forest floor, and is in fact a length of the same fabric I used in my Nativity quilt for the ground (see posts from June for lots more on that quilt). I wrapped stretcher bars with batting, then this cloth, then stitched the quilted central piece to the brown background.

Here’s a close up of the stitching…as usual, I got carried away and had a ball thread painting:

This piece is currently hanging in my show at Camden National Bank and, if it doesn’t sell from there, will move down to Ducktrap Bay Trading Company for sale. The piece is 14×19 inches overall size.