What better pairing than a great exhibit  (of which I am proud to be a part) AND an opportunity to help “Kickstart” a great new chapter in the Why Quilts Matter series.

I’ve blogged before about my quilt, Strength and Calm, which has been juried in to the Rituals exhibit that will debut this summer at International Quilt Festival Long Beach then travel on to the mega-kahuna-mecca of quilts, International Quilt Festival in Houston (where I will also be teaching again! would love to see/meet some of you in my classes!).  Well curators Leslie Tucker Jenison and Jamie Fingal have been running a fun and fascinating glimpse into the lives and personalities of the artists who have made the quilts in this year’s exhibit.  Today is my turn!  So to read more about it, go here.  Thanks to Moore‘s Sewing and Havel (as in those wonderful scissors) for sponsoring the exhibits!

Speaking of sponsoring, I was starting to read some old QuiltArt digests, and discovered that Shelley Zegart has launched a new project, a companion guide to the WONDERFUL DVD series, Why Quilts Matter (click here to read lots more about the series).  I’m thrilled to say I’ve just made a donation to her fundraising campaign on Kickstarter.  You can click on the widget (the doohickie to the left) in the sidebar of my blog or go here to help support this effort and read more about it.

Hi everyone! I’ve been seriously absent, mostly busy!  I taught in Arkansas, got home at suppertime (stopping at Eli’s track practice on the way home from the airport), off to Coastal Quilters the next morning, unpacked that day, repacked the car the next day, and the following morning off to Massachusetts for a dyeing workshop!  More on all of that, but for today I’m sharing what I’ve just finished… lesson 4 in Jane LaFazio’s Joggles class, Watercolor Sketchbook:  designs from life.

The finished sketch/lesson

This lesson was “from the mountains,” so my garden filled in!  I chose fiddlehead ferns, a sure sign of spring in Maine, and the tightly furled (and opening) leaf buds of the beech tree.  As I wrote to the class:

I just adore the beech leaves, how they cling so tenaciously to the branch throughout winter, only relinquishing their hold when new growth finally forces them off and to the ground.

I’m posting a photo of what I sketched, but alas I waited too long and things kinda wilted, so I picked a second branch so you can see the long, slender, tightly furled leaf bud.

What I sketched, slightly wilted (with a strong afternoon sidelight and long shadows from the window)

Beech sprig on my closed laptop

I really liked Jane’s page with the two rectangles of leaves and the background of larger leaves and paint coloring the page around the boxes (not shown…in the lesson). I tried to do a similar tint/wash on this, but think I might better have stopped before that step. I was tired of plain backgrounds, but think this painting-in-back would be more effective if I had multiple smaller boxes/windows for the composition rather than this view. I included one photo of how *I* flooded in color: dampen section, add dots of thinned color, blend with a flat brush.

wet into wet....

…..I ended up with stronger blots of color than I wanted, tried to lift, then got sorta yucky rubbed areas. I do think I may want to use a less wet approach on this paper and then make myself a “mixed” journal of both mixed media and watercolor papers, or just suck it up and pay for a large watercolor paper journal period.

I DO like my “photo corners” tho! And it is curious that I, who adore vibrant color, am having fun with more subtle colors… AND (drum roll! ) I managed to remember to take photocopies of just the inked drawing for possible “other use.” What a concept…my brain was engaged!  Here’s the inked page (draw in pencil, draw in with ink, erase pencil) and the page with the greens and browns added, but no background wash.  I think maybe I should have stopped here, but so it goes.  Turn the page, try again!

The inked outlines

At least with my current skill level, I think maybe I should have stopped here and not added the wash of color in the background

Anyway, here ’tis. Now for lesson 5 and back to lesson 3….. Constructive criticism is most welcome and appreciated!

The same applies for all of you…. should I have stopped

Time-suck alert:  WARNING!!!! Reading this post may cause you to spend several extra hours surfing the web….but your soul will be refreshed! and PS…pictures are clickable to view larger.

Incoming Tide by Winslow Homer (from Maine!), from the US National Gallery of Art

The U.S. National Gallery of Art just launched NGA Images, an online resource to view and USE portions of their collections.  Here is how they describe it:

NGA Images is a repository of digital images of the collections of the National Gallery of Art. On this website you can search, browse, share, and download images. A standards-based reproduction guide and a help section provide advice for both novices and experts. More than 20,000 open access digital images up to 3000 pixels each are available free of charge for download and use. NGA Images is designed to facilitate learning, enrichment, enjoyment, and exploration.

Astonishingly and wonderfully (this is one of the things the U.S. Government does so well), the artworks no longer under copyright are FREE for you to download and use and enjoy (just be sure to make sure you read their terms of use).   Thank you to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation which made this wonderful resource possible!  And thanks to Uncle Sam for doing this.

One of the most popular paintings in the collection is Leonardo da Vinci’s Ginevra de Benci.  The painting is relatively small, even with the frame it is smaller than your typical college-dorm poster.  And the detail is phenomenal…you can see individual hairs on her forehead.  Just imagine, he and this young woman lived over 500 years ago and there she is, still alive for us today in this portrait!

Ginevra de Benci by Leonardo da Vinci

And one of my favorites is Gaugin’s Fatata te Miti.  When I was an undergraduate at Georgetown University, I would every now and then take my books and hop on an “even 30’s” (32-34-36) bus line which ran from Wisconsin Avenue, NW in Georgetown down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the White House (the street was open to cars  then) and down to the National Gallery, and sit in one or a couple of the galleries to do my homework.  I could look up between paragraphs or assignments and just absorb all that incredible art!

One of my favorites, Fatata te Miti by Gauguin....just LOVE the color!

At least as astonishing as NGA Images is GoogleArt or, more accurately, The Art Project powered by Google.  All I can say is HOLY COW!   WOW!!!!!!!!!!! This resource lets you explore museums around the world and you can zoom in so close, the photography is so phenomenal, you can see brushstrokes and small cracks in the paint!!!!!! I mean, you can see details that you’d need to be standing 6 inches away in real life to be able to see that well (and I expect in many of the museums you’re not allowed that close!).

Just SOME of the museums on GoogleArt are

• The Museum of Modern Art (New York City),
• The Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam)
• The National Gallery (London)
• The Van Gogh Museum (Amsterdam)
• The Versailles Museum (Versailles)
• The Uffizi Gallery (Florence)
• The Hermitage (St. Petersburg)

I mean you’d need to win a BIG lottery to be able to travel to just these museums let alone all of them.  And to be utterly greedy, I hope that as more and more of the repositories of our world heritage bring their collections online, they will become a part of this phenomenal resource.  And the Art Project not only lets you see the artwork, but the museum spaces, too…. oh sigh drool dream!  It’s like you are standing in the rooms…..sigh, drool, dream!

In this image captured from the site (and gosh I hope that is OK to have done!) you see Les Vessenots à Auvers by Van Gogh.

Van Gogh's Les Vessenot à Auvers in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid

If you go here, to the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Spain, look in the lower right for a slider bar that allows you to zoom in.  You can SEE THE BRUSHSTROKES and daubs of paint….

Zoomed in to see the individual brushstrokes and daubs of paint

Have I said recently how much I love the internet?   WOW.  And remember…not my fault if you forget to pick up the kids after school or make supper <GRIN>  HAVE FUN surfing the web!

I was going to title this Pass on Your Passion as Interweave did, but figured that would bring in about a zillion spam comments, so hope the title worked!

Fabulous news from Cate Coulacos Prato, editor of Quilting Daily and Cloth, Paper, Scissors Today:

Interweave’s Pass On Your Passion campaign celebrates National Craft Month. They’re sharing a link to all of our free beginner downloads and also, each Interweave community (Quilting Daily, Cloth Paper Scissors, Jewelry Making Daily, etc.) is hosting at least one blog giveaway.   I just went to the link (at the end of this post) and WOW… I knew about the free ebooks from Cloth Paper Scissors and Quilting Arts, but there are lots more there, including drawing ones that I TOTALLY can’t wait to download and absorb.

You can get all the details here:

http://www.clothpaperscissors.com/blogs/clothpaperscissorstoday/archive/2012/03/08/march-is-national-craft-month-pass-it-on.aspx

http://www.quiltingdaily.com/blogs/vivika/archive/2012/03/08/pass-on-your-passion-for-quilting-giveaway.aspx

Here is the link for the free downloads:
http://www.interweave.com/free-eBooks-videos/default.asp

Pass it on!

Thanks so much Cate for letting us know…. now I’m off to do some downloading, NOW!

Got some great news this week, made official with the arrival yesterday of semi-finalist information from AQS (American Quilters Society):  my 20 1/2 by 20 1/2 inch quilt that I made for the Coastal Quilters Grocery Challenge, From the Schooner Coast, has been accepted in the miniatures category at Paducah! The smallest squares  finish at (shoot me!  WHY? did I do this…and believe it or not I could actualy see doing this again) 1 1/8″.  Yes, scarcely larger than an inch.  For those of you not in the U.S.  that is about 2.6 or 2.7 cm.  Small.

From the Schooner Coast (click to see a bit larger)

This quilt is a hybrid of a 9″ square art quilt depicting Camden Harbor and miniature storm at sea blocks.  I talked about the Grocery Challenge here (part 1) and here (part 2), but in a nutshell (this was something I thought up…imagine…an original challenge idea!) take a food or beverage from the grocery store as your inspiration.  You had to use at least 4 colors from the package (adding black and white was allowed), but so that folks just didn’t troll the aisles looking for a package with colors they liked, you had to add at least one motif or element inspired by the packaging.  For example, if you picked corkscrew noodles, you could quilt with a corkscrew design; or, if you picked Tabasco sauce, you could use a chili-pepper fabric.

I chose Shipyard Export Ale because I love woodblock prints and I love that the image is so “Maine.”  However, I thought the picture on the label looked like Wiscasset, not Camden, so I changed it a bit to look like OUR town and feature one of the local schooners (with permission of the captain). Here’s the bottle and carrier:

Shipyard Export ale, my "grocery" inspiration for the 2011 CQ Challenge

SO…. if you are lucky enough to be headed to the big show in Paducah, hope you get to see my little quilt.  I harbor NO hopes that it will win any awards…the piecing isn’t quite perfect and this is the quilt where I learned that I should have used the hopping foot to free-motion quilt, not the one that skims the surface.  Why?  The “skimming” foot got hung up on the thick intersections for those blocks.  And when I pulled/tugged/etc. to get the quilt under the foot, the stitch length became inconsistent.  But I love this little quilt of “home” anyway!   And I learned something new that I can share with my students and all of you!