Well, I don’t know about for the state of Maine, but for us personally this is definitely the coldest weather we’ve ever been in!   Last night when I went to bed about 10, this is what the weather station showed!

At bedtime last night. Wind chill went down to -34, but thankfully not down to the -40 predicted! I can hardly believe I just typed that…this is Minnesota weather, not Maine!

It was a little less wind chill when I walked the dog at 9 pm, and I tell you it was seriously Nanook-ette of the North in terms of clothes.  Dog wanted to come back in ASAP, but once he got the idea that he was **not** going back in until he peed, he got to it right quick.   This morning, Paul decided he needed to shovel the walk before taking the dog out (I just waded out in top-of-knee-deep snow and the dog sorta swam out).  In half an hour the path will be blown full of snow again, but this will give you an idea of depth and drifts:

Why am I reminded of Sysiphus? All that snow hubby is shoveling will get blown uphill toward our neighbors, and more will fill in the trench!

So what do you do when snow, wrestling meets and what not are cancelled?  Why finish up on a much-delayed postcard swap:

My cropped version of Henri Matisse’s Purple Robe with Anemones

I’m on a small group called Postmark’d Art (site here), and every several months we swap and can pick our theme for the trade from several choices.  I immediately wanted to do Matisse and the cutouts, but I was slow and the other four did cutout type cards, so I opted to paint.  I learned that my fabric paintbrushes stink for details (sigh).  I also learned that the next time I decide to do a postcard swap and individually paint four cards someone needs to smack me upside the head.   Seriously…I spent three full days on these… nuts! Well, at least a large part of several days.   I’m just glad they are done, apologize for the bumbling faces, and hope some new brushes (THANK YOU Susan Brubaker Knapp!) will help when they arrive.

And if you ever want a laugh, watch a dog in winter booties.  Can you read the expression:

Seriously, Mom, you DID this to ME? Your beloved pug-love? ME? WHY? I am beyond humiliated…..I feel so betrayed……

And then: Ha HA! I’m not as much of a walnut-brain as you think I am, Mom! I can deal with Velcro. Well, at least until you come wrap it tighter and I can’t get the end seeing as I don’t have a snout!

With that, I’m going downstairs (hoping the power lasts…looking good so far) and working on the back of Joshua’s quilt and maybe even putting in some miles on the exercise bike!

And here, as promised, is the completed quilt!  Imagine, two blogposts in two days…after the past many months that’s nearly a miracle!

DRUM ROLL: Mr. Wiggles Does the Circle Dance, complete. I changed from red strips on the side to the red fabric as binding. Color me happy!

Can you tell I totally ADORE that sweet pug face?  I want doggie smooches!   And yes, that pathetically small amount of kibble is all he gets.  Anyway, I hope you love this as much as I do!

Remember back when the world looked like this? Yes, that was a bit over 3 months ago–hard to believe in the torrid heatwave right now!

Well long ago and many degrees cooler than now (about 75 degrees cooler to be precise), I began work on a piece for a juried exhibit / book, and I’m thrilled to say that my piece was accepted.  Mary W. Kerr, author of Cutting Edge Art Quilts (see my book announcement blogpost here), came up with another great idea for an exhibit:   “Dare to Dance, An Artist’s Interpretation of Joy.”  It worked so well, she sent out an invitation to make a quilt 18 x 30 inches for possible inclusion in a book on that theme.  Immediately I KNEW what my image would be… but it would just need to get squeezed into a very busy time period when I was also writing three articles, doing new artwork for the articles, AND prepping and filming my Quilting Arts DVD (post about that here).

The image:  Mr. Wiggles a.k.a Pigwidgeon a.k.a. our pug!   See every time he gets hungry, he puts his feeties up on your leg.  When you look down at that sweet pug mug and ask, “Are you hungry?” he immediately hops, then drops onto all four feet and begins The Circle Dance.  Always counter clockwise.  Several times.  Accompanied by a hop or three.  Then he scootches around behind me (after I’ve creaked my knees into standing) and nudges me into the kitchen by pushing at the back of my calves with his sweet smooshed-in face, just to make sure I know where to go!

I’m excited to see my article on backgrounds come out in an upcoming Quilting Arts issue (blogpost about that here), and this is yet another example of how backgrounds make a difference.  But first, I needed to get a photo to use as my model for his wiggly body:

First I had to capture the correct curve of his body. This too MANY photos because they were mostly blurred because he was moving too fast!

Then we needed to get the “putting down the dish” thing:

First attempt at putting down the dish. Decided the proportions and bowl at the top didn’t work.

So….

So this time I managed to take a photo with my left hand only to get the proper perspective, which would then be at the bottom of the quilt.

Once I had my working photos, I fuse-collaged the dog, the bowl and my hand, and my slippers.  Next:  choosing a background.   Hmmm.   Let us just say I tried MANY colors.  If a color contrasted with the warm tones, the blues/purples blended in.  If the color contrasted with the purple and blues, the pug got lost.   Some prints were blah.  Some were too visually busy.

The red contrasts well with everything, but was a bit much for me. I know this will hang in our home, but it was just too much red.

So how about blue? Egads, NO!

So then I tried blue. Definitely not this one. Nice batik, but not here–washed out AND busy. Blech!

So off to try my favorite turquoises.  Hmmm.  Not so much.

OK, but not great. The dog and my arm stand out well, as do the dark slippers, but the food dish kinda mooshes into the background.

Tried another turquoise, with more visual texture. This was NOT an improvement. OK, moving on….

OK, so yellow and orange won’t work for obvious reasons, don’t want browns, red doesn’t work, neither does blue or turquoise.  Don’t want that much purple.  That leaves (drum roll) green.  So how does that work?

Definitely better. However, this fabric looks much better in the photo than it did in person. It is a “fractured ice” type of pattern, and it looked pretty flat and dead in person, but the color was definitely working for me with pug, arm, dish and feet!

Here’s another green. Again, the “print” of the batik is a bit flat, and perhaps it is a bit too briht, but like the red strips on the side. For quite a while I planned on vertical stripes of red.

I really liked this print, but the yellow of the sunflower petals was a bit disctracting.

The solution? PAINT! A thin (very thinned) wash of blue paint knocked back the contrast a bit. Just enough visual “life,” not too contrasty, not too flat. The Goldilocks choice: Just Right!

Then comes the quilting.  A couple of times I have tried this method, and I like it–not all the time, but often.

Here you can see the back: I do the thread-coloring (aka thread-painting) with a batting behind the figure as a stabilizer. Once done, I trim away the excess (not trimmed on the pug). Notice the fabric on the left, unpainted, with the painted background…just a bit of difference on the yellow petals.

Can you say “LOVE MY JANOME”? This is the 8900–every time I think they can’t make a machine better, and yet they do. LOVE quilting on this baby (I call him Gandalf because of the silver front, and it has to be a guy because he’s so big!).

Tomorrow, the completed quilt!

Deborah Boschert, one of my Frayed Edges mini-group, is also part of a wonderful project called Twelve  x 12.  They have a blog here, and a website here, and even better…..well, not sure if I can tell you about it yet but there is something really cool coming in their future!   So hold on to that thought.  Anyway, Deborah now lives (sob we miss her) near Dallas, and the Dallas Quilt Guild is hosting a 12 x 12 challenge.  The rules:  anything goes as long as it is 12 by 12 inches.  Deborah invited us to participate and send quilts to hand in the show this March.  Well…..

I was totally, utterly blocked.  I had NOT A CLUE.  Not a whiff of an idea.  Inside of brain darker than a cave in a coalmine with no lights.  Nada.  Nicht.  Zip.  Zilch.  Then I had to walk the dog.  This dog (note…there are fifteen photos in this post, and all are clickable for a larger view):

Isn’t he CUTE?  Even from the hind view with curly little tail and dog butt, he is CUTE.  Well, the good news is that the quilt is NOT of his hind end.  I figured the cuteness of a dog’s butt is not necessarily appreciated by all, but how could ANYONE not love a pug mug?   So, I scoured through the umpteen thousand (literally) photos on my hard drive, found the one above, and cropped the photo:

Then I decided to use value as my plan of attack for fusing up this puppy.  At first I selected beige, tan, charcoal, and went YUCK.  I wanna play with color.  Back in the fused fabric stash they went.  Out came the colored fused stash.  I started with medium values…some lovely turquoises.  Then lights, deep darks, and some transitional values.  Not suprisingly, the light lights were yellows, the deep darks were navy and purple.

To get ready, I enlarged the photo to 12 inches on my computer, got out the large tracing paper, and traced his outlines.  This tracing was my pattern guide in cutting the pieces of fabric for his sweet face.  Here is the first bits:

Then a bit more work–you can see the tracing in the top left, the laptop with the cropped photo for reference, and the scattered bits of pre-fused fabrics tossed about (and note the yellow mug…I LOVE the fiesta ware!):

Here’s a close-up of the pug at this stage:

Then even more; I have added the background, but notice the face is kinda upright, not that cute cocked head, the quizzical look (note the green fiestaware mug):

Edges trimmed, but face is still upright…wrong!

So after uttering a few cuss words at having not noticed I was trimming him with his head in the wrong position, I sliced things off and fused up some more background–and yes, there is an “issue” with the shape of his head on the left, but I knew that would be cropped off so I ignored it:

This shows ‘Widgeon quilted (tho not the background…more on that in a sec):

and a close-up:

Here’s what it looks like from the back:

Next, I trimmed away the “middle-backing” and the wool batt I was using from under the turquoise background:

I then added cotton batting and the “real” backing and quilted the background, plus some of the major creases in his pug mug:

Finally, I had thought I would face the edges.  I used an old rust colored fabric on the back, and for the facings, and realized it looked MUCH better than the turned/faced edge.  So I found a better quality hand-dyed and made narrow bias bindings:

Last but not least…two close-ups.

Hope you liked the journey through the process. The quilt started out with a working title of “You want me to sit STILL?” (as in sit still so I can take a picture of you!), but that evolved into either “Walkies?  Puhleeze walkies!” or “Cookie???? PLEEEZE cookie!”  Eli (the dog is really his) and I both liked the Cookie version better, so that’s the title!

I absolutely ADORE this little 12 x 12 inch quilt… I think I did OK, because each time my sons see the quilt they start grinning, too!  Of course, we are biased and utterly in love with the little dog-beast!

Can you tell I love snow? And taking pictures… here, some more winter inspiration, starting with the tree in the cemetary (not that you can tell with all that snow), Mt. Battie in the background:

Here’s the Village Green:

And the Harbor, from in front of the library:

I love the “dinosaur ridges” on the tree branches (near our house):

The reflections in the not-yet-frozen run-off creek near the house:

Eli playing in the snow with ‘Widgeon:

and Joshua playing in the snow, too:

And the snow at least a foot deep blanketing my studio over the garage:

The snow-bound creek (which will freeze over before too long):

And the laden pine boughs alongside the driveway: