Last year, Karey Bresenhan and company (the forces of nature behind the International Quilt Festivals) had a great idea:  an exhibit of the photos quilters use to inspire them.  The small exhibit was such a success that they are doing it again this year, and two of my three entries were accepted!

The theme this year is Reflections.  As soon as I heard that, I KNEW I wanted to have this photo as one of my entries, titled Joy Reflected.  It is the day we brought home our puppy for our son’s 9th birthday gift:

Joy Reflected: the day Pigwidgeon (the pug puppy) came home, with the dearly departed Yeti-dog on the left and Eli on the right

I also remembered a photo I took while on a visit to the Maine Coastal Botanical Gardens with the Frayed Edges.  Since the photo was a bit tippy, I fiddled a bit with it in photoshop to make it look better (including odd clipped edges).  It is, to me, one that captures all the elements:  Earth (the rock and trees), Water (caught in the carved boulder),  Air (reflected sky) and Fire (that helped create the rock), so I called it Elemental:

a foggy Maine day reflected in the carved boulder

When I was teaching in Arizona, the hotel in Flagstaff had these AMAZING carved doors.  I am always on the lookout for quilting motifs, so snapped a few photos.  Although this photo didn’t make it in to the exhibit, I still like it.  And I, my camera flash and the overhead lights are reflected in the shiny doorknobs:

SAQA is the Studio Art Quilt Associates, a non-profit group to promote art quilting with members around the world.    There are regional groups, including one for New England.  Those of us in sparsely populated Maine –the state population is about 1.3 million, the same as San Antonio, Texas or San Diego, California!–live far enough from the majority of the regional group members in Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire and Vermont, that we don’t often get to the meetings.  So Sarah Carpenter, Beth Berman and Wen Redmond had an idea an made it happen:  SAQA-Maine retreat weekend in Searsport, Maine the weekend of Sept. 18th!

Beth VERY generously hosted much of the meeting in her home and new studio.  Other meetings were at the hotel just a mile or two up the road and a nearby church (the evening show and tell…alas it was part of the event I couldn’t attend). I forgot to take pictures of the first part which was meeting, at Beth’s house, or when the workshops began.  Various regional members offered to do demos or mini-workshops, and oh was it fun!  Valerie Poitier’s talk on perspective (my right brain was confuddled but I did get it eventually!), as was Wen Redmond’s demo on making thermofax screens and printing with them.  At least  I finally remembered to take the camera out during my mono-printing session with Margaret Sheehan.  I sure hope she comes back and does a two-day workshop near enough for me to take…talk about utter playtime! You can visit Margaret’s blog here and see some of the sheers featured below in the photo at the top…wow!

Here are the pics from that session:

Valerie Poitier looks stunning in Margaret Sheehan's sheer artcloth (also seen in the first photo of this blogpost)

Margaret S's red sheer mono-printed cloth---I LOVE that bird's nest design

And holding the red sheer up with the light from the open doorway behind...

I think this falls into the category of “Be Still my beating heart” and “I wanna do that NOW!”

Margaret explains some of the techniques used on this cloth

This piece of Margaret's shows how she used freezer paper resists when mono-printing

Yet another heavenly sheer--the synthetic sheers come from JoAnns mostly, the prom dress section, and obviously are vastly improved with paint

A different red sheer with sunswirls

Margaret showed us how to use heavy mil plastic drop-cloth, textile paint and common tools for surface design; notice the whisk.....

Transferring the mono-print (paint on plastic) onto the cloth is a tactile experience

In the upper left corner, Margaret pulls away the plastic with spiral she has just printed onto the cloth

The table I worked at! My stuff is on the near side and in the center

A closer look...here on my blue/green I used too much paint and lost definition. It is a learning process!

Even my paint tray was pretty!

one of my classmate's circle design...ooooh! I'm pretty sure she used an Afro/Hair pick for those marks

Drat I wish I could remember how she told me she made those marks....you can see this is addicting!

Again..I forget how shemade those purple marks, but I love them!

As you might gather, for a 2-hour session that was about an hour of demo and an hour hands-on, we the students really were inspired and went to town with our scraps.  Thanks SO MUCH to Margaret for sharing her time, technique and paints!   Next year we REALLY need to chip in to cover expenses for supplies…. Margaret, if you see this send me your snail mail address and I’ll either send you a fiver or a bit of hand-dyed as thanks!

Some days are just perfect, and this month’s Frayed Edges was just that.

Birthday cupcakes from Kathy

My birthday is around about now, and Kate and Kath were amazing!  We met at Kate’s home, a quintessential New England Cape home that is WELL over a hundred fifty years old if it is a day!  It has, of course, been updated, and the skylights and double-paned windows make is so sunny and homey! On the way down, I decided to go via route 24, which runs along the western bank of the Kennebec river, so I turned west onto Route 17 to head towards Augusta.  At that point I turned the GPS on to head to Kate’s home.  It told me to turn before I got to my usual spot, so I thought “Why not?”  OH MY GOODNESS!   The sad part is I was driving and couldn’t take pictures at the same time, but I think I drove through the most beautiful non-coastal part of Maine I have seen yet.  Autumn is just beginning, with flashes of scarlet and gold….small Maine towns, white steeples, babbling brooks, blueberry barrens glowing crimson and auburn and russet….oh my!

This was the table that greeted us:

Kathy arrived before I did, and Kate’s lovely autumn setting (notice her felted-sweater napkin rings, complete with acorns made with real acorn caps and felted wool balls?) was so welcoming!

Kate has these incredible hand-made dishes and silverware that she takes out for our special days.  I just love the cheerful sunflowers:

Kate's place setting...so lovely!

Then we filled them with a new squash and sausage soup, accompanied by salad and some awesome sourdough bread I bought at the Market Basket in Rockport (I really did NOT need to learn that their breads are SO good):

Those goodies you see on the left are birthday prezzies….  Kate UTTERLY indulged me with a Pashmina scarf/shawl in my all-time favorite turquoise/teal/aqua, and Kath bought hand-made chocolates given on a one-of-a-kind pottery spoon rest, accompanied by the adorable Egbert (  made by Kathy and christened on the spot).  What a perfect funny bird!

And here we are, beak-to-beak:

Sarah and Egbert, getting acquainted

He just makes me smile!  He is now on my dining table where I work at my laptop and keeps me in good humor!

We ate lunch a bit early so we could play with paint; a couple weekends earlier Kath and I had attended the SAQA-Maine weekend (more on that in a future post), and I shared a couple techniques I learned.

Playing with paint

What could be more perfect:  wonderful friends, food, art, friends, fabric and ideas and warmth, glorious Maine, friends…. I am so truly blessed!  As you can see…. the cupcakes were delectable with Kathy’s made-by-her ganache (talk about melt in your mouth heavenly):

There was even more inspiration in the gardens at the Getty Museum when I visited in spring.  One of the coolest things were the bougainvillea “trees.”   Rebar…the stuff used to reinforce concrete walls, was formed into these tree shapes, then the bougainvillea vine grew up the center and out into this colorful canopy:

Here’s what it looked like underneath:

How utter cool is that?  If we ever have a garden with SUN so I can grow flowers instead of moss, guess what I’m gonna try (albeit on a more modest scale!)?

The flowers were varied and beautiful…couldn’t resist this shot of a rose alongside the path down to the lower part of the lower gardens:

Again, I was lured by the tracery of the branches:

and their shadows; in this next photo, the “braid” pattern in the stonework is repeated in the wood of the bridge over the run-off culvert which was when I was there a very small babbling streamlet:

Here’s a wide-angle view from the gardens looking back up to two of the main exhibit buildings:

At the very bottom there is a maze/knot hedge which “floats” on raised beds inside a circular pond…. spectacular (I bet you’re tired of my gushing about this place, eh?

Even the drain covers had pleasing designs (notice my lovely lime green sneakers, too):

Another of my obsessive “through the trees” shots:

And a final view back up the hill:

Wow…what a place!

The landscaping at the Getty Museum gardens is just as much a work of art as the buildings and their contents.   The picture above is of the run-off culvert and bridges, with Los Angeles city in the distance.  The Getty website page about the landscape says:

Landscaping the Getty Center has been a collaborative effort involving a number of distinguished landscape architects, consultants and craftspeople through the years. Emmet Wemple, landscape architect for the Getty Villa in Malibu, began the project and conceived preliminary designs. Richard Meier conceived the master plan, which called for developing 19 of 24 acres as landscape or gardens. Dennis Hickok of Richard Meier & Partners served as liaison and for design and development of the works for the architects and landscape architects. Laurie Olin and the Olin Partnership, Philadelphia, PA, joined the team in 1992, and have remained through the project’s completion. Fong and Associates of Orange County and Raymond Hansen assisted in plant selection, procurement, and administration. Daniel Urban Kiley consulted on the project beginning in 1990. The landscaping would not have been possible without the work of numerous other consultants, contractors and craftspeople who helped create this impressive environment.

I love the tracery cast by the shadows of tree branches especially in the non-leafy seasons.  Here, Joyce is walking down the stairs and  path in front of me:

And here I am taking a picture of someone taking a picture…ya think this place inspires?

Again, successful use of elements of design:  rhythm, repetition, line, contrast (trees are organic, walls and stones are rectilinear), depth and dimension…..sigh….. I want to make art every time I look at these pictures! The next photo is one I think, with some tweaking in Photoshop, could make be used to make a great screen for printing onto cloth…..

Here is a view of the lower gardens:

On the way, you pass this stunning building-view:

And a cropped version that I may turn into a quilt for a Frayed Edges project:

Hope you’ve enjoyed this installment of my trip to the Getty…clearly way more than a day’s worth of   inspiration in just one visit!  more down the line…