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Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

Notan-light and dark and Abstraction…(and a note about the Blogroll)

Friday, June 29th, 2007

The most recent issue of Quilting Arts magazine, had an article by Jane Dunnewold that was for me a KAPOW light bulb moment! I totally encourage you to pick up a copy of the issue (order it from QA Mag directly, or check your neighboring quilt or book store). She referenced a book called Notan: The Dark-Light principle of Design, which is available at Amazon (hotlink below and now on my wish list!). Basically, the idea is that you cut shapes from the sides of a square, then flip them outwards. Of course, I didn’t do it like she said….

I can’t remember the last time I have been so excited by an article that I had to drop everything was going (including getting things ready to mail my Houston entries!) and try it! Of course, I had to tweak the idea, because I thought immediately how cool it would be to make diamonds with positive/negative wave shapes to screenprint onto cloth. Here’s a first attempt…. the white is the paper, set out onto batik… I LIKE IT!

Looking up Notan: The Dark-Light Principle of Design, of course, let me on a merry journey thanks to Amazon’s “other people who bought this book also bought (fill in blank). That in turn led me to Camden Public Library’s online card catalog, through which I ordered up Abstraction in Art and Nature by Nathan Cabot Hale, a sculptor (forgive me, for I am probably a troglodyte and he must be well known). At first I thought I’d add it to my Amazon wish list, but then decided maybe not… Do any of you have favorite books about learning to work abstractly? I liked the recent articles in Quilting Arts, and would love to read more….
And a note about the BLOGROLL on the left:

Because of the new format, the sidebar area had come to look very cluttered. Even worse, Blogrolling is no longer updating links to show you what is “new” (has new posts), so I have switched to something called Bloglines. A very helpful woman on the QuiltArt list posted about it, and I really like it so far. So, I am switching over all of my links to Bloglines (which sends me an alert when any blog has a new post…yeah!), and leaving only a few in my visible Blogroll. All the other folks on my list are still there, it just won’t appear on screen. So my friends who are on the list, I am not abandoning you, I’m just going underground in a way.

And a last note:

Have been madly making samples for the book: you know those in progress shots in books? What a TON of work to make five different steps, all of which have to be send for professional photography so you can’t make one, take a pic, work on it, take a pic, etc…….. but I’m hoping to take decent pictures of my grid pieces and two new pieces and have them up in the next day or three.