If you liked gods in Alabama or Between, Georgia you’re in for a treat, especially if you are an art quilter. Joshilyn Jackson, author, mom and quilter, has written a new novel about an art quilter, inspired by the irrepressible Pamela Allen. Joshilyn has blogged about the new book, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, here. And you can read Joshilyn’s blog, Faster than Kudzu, here. And to see Pamelala’s creative mind at work, click here and here.  After reading Joshilyn’s intro to the book in the blogpost, I think I’m gonna be booked for late September… READING time!

In the meantime, I am reading and LOVING Stephen King’s Lisey’s Story.  I am normally not a fan of horror, though I quilt like fantasy and some (non-techy) sci fi.  This book isn’t really a horror story, though it does have its scary  moments… perhaps all the more scary because they are so close to possibly being real.   It is a novel about an intense  love story between Lisey Landon, widow of a famous and successful novelist, and her late husband.  Personally, I thought King’s On Writing:  A Memoir of the Craft was a 200+ page love-letter to his wife; it is about writing, but it is also about a deep and enduring love between him and his wife, author and poet Tabitha King.  Lisey’s Story is dedicated to her, and is an even longer love-letter about a love that extends beyond every day life.  So now I need to get back to doing (and finish!) the paperwork for various teaching gigs next year so I can escape to the back porch while the nice weather lasts and keep reading Lisey’s Story!

The sculpture at the Botanical Gardens is as wonderful as the hardscape and the landscaping, and is exquisitely placed. As you approach the entrance to the visitors center, one of the first sculptures to greet you is this woman and owl (there was a sticker on the tag, so it seems some pieces are for sale, like this one, and others are permanent installations):

There has been a bit of talk over on Rayna Gillman’s blog about working in a series as well as on the SAQA yahoo group. Well, I’m one of the “don’t think I could do a series” types (as in I don’t want to!), but after seeing the woman and owl and this next piece by the same artist, I’m thinking maybe, just maybe, there *might* be a chance of a thematic sort of thing…..

One of the pieces that most captured me was this yellow-orange blown glass flower / reeds / whatever was in a large pond near the entrance and large open grassy areas (where weddings happen, we are told)…. Kate and Kathy weren’t nearly as enchanted as I was… I took gobs of photos of it:

On the way down to the river, you come around a bend and see this glorious glass orb. We don’t know if it is solid or hollow, but it appears to be made out of sheets of glass. Even on an overcast (ok, just finished raining and still drippy) day, it was lit up, and when the sun is out the photos of it make it seem to float. The siting of it on a mound above the path is perfect:

I’ll share more photos of sculptures in a few days.

Last week I made my journal quilt, and tried a new-to-me technique: screening with Thermofax screens. My attempts to get the screens “burned” at the local tattoo place didn’t work (he had a Vista machine, not one of the 3M, so it didn’t work with my screen materials). SO, I mail ordered from Flying Images (check at the bottom of the page here, on Jane Dunnewold’s site–click on suppliers then scroll down). Talk about FAST service… I e-mailed and called on a Monday morning to see if she could do a quick job (I had been told she has one-day turnaround), e-mailed her jpegs that morning, and by suppertime the screens were made and in the mail…WOWIE!

In the photo you’ll see her printouts of my images of origami-cranes and, on the bottom half of the second screen, a design I did up printing with half of a sliced white onion. Because I was sub-dividing the screens into smaller pieces, I framed them up myself…some with purchased white plastic frames, the others with cereal box and duct tape.

I used textile paints to screen onto fabric for the journal quilt. This year, instead of doing one journal 8 1/2 x 11 inches each month, we are to do one quilt 17×22 inches (the equivalent of four pieces of paper) using at least three techniques from the Creative Quilting Book (which I really am going to review, soon I hope). We can’t share the journals with you, but I can share these faxes and some playing around that I did before beginning my 2007 Journal (which went in the mail on Tuesday… two full weeks early!).

This first piece is a pastel batik. Along one edge, you can see where I daubed paints testing for the right color. Around the edges I tried out the cranes in various colors. When I blobbed the blue paint on the screen, I had rinsed my brush and it was a bit wet, leading to too-thin paint that bled under the screen; lesson learned! In the center, using low-contrast metallic green (Lumiere paint) and gold (also Lumiere) I screened the onions… oh OW am I gonna love using this one for subtle background texture:

This second piece is one I gave to Kathy, since it is her (and my) favorite turqoises and teals. I began with a piece of my hand-dyed fabric…one that admittedly was a bit lacking in oomph. As in blah. So I used Jacquard Textile paint (the white), then mixed some Setacolor (a dark-ish teal) with some metallic (I think it was Pebeo / Setacolor also) along with a bit of white to get the middle-value screened onions, then more of the same but less white for the darker value. I was thinking of adding a bit of gold, but Kathy is really good at painting on fabric, so told her to take this piece and feel free to add to it and play with it:

OK…. you take beauty where you find it.  Last night it was spam in  my e-mail in-box:

and preening, dancing on the basepaths,
XIV. Franz Josef Land: The Amazing Drift of the Tegetthoff  The surge of swirling wind defines
Your red cheeks radiant against the wind, The edge of that other square cut from the right
Yes. You’d want that said, (if you Glimmering of light:
Homeward into the howling woods, although  Only a fox whose den I cannot find

A google of “The Amazing Drift of the Tegetthoff” brought me to this Wikipedia entry on “spamdom”, which it defines as real words / phrases used to fool spam-catchers so as to allow the spam “sales pitch” (for Adobe, viagra, whatever) to get through.   Who cares….   It could be interesting to do a quilt challenge to illustrate a particularly beatiful bit of spamdom……

Can’t you just see a young buck, prancing on a light dusting of early winter snow, the moonlight streaming down through the bare birchtree branches, glinting off the crust of ice….white lines quilted and swirled in among the trunks of the trees howling the winter in (to steal a line from a favorite song by Makem and Clancy, written by Michael Peter Smith called “The Dutchman“.   Here are the lyrics.  You can hear clips at either Amazon or iTunes).

Anyway…just another bit of flotsam from my life…..

On a glorious Saturday afternoon in Maine, we had our artists’ reception at the Camden Public Library. The room was colorful, even more so because of the gorgeous flowers Kate brought, some from her garden (sigh…someday I will have a garden that has SUN).

Kate also had the brilliant idea to put out some “Quilt Show” signs to alert passersby, and it worked! Unfortunately, I didn’t get pics of those, but I can tell you Kate made up the “flags” at home, then she and Kathy cut out the fused letters and ironed them on while camping at Mount Battie here in Camden, using the electricity in the bathroom. Now that’s dedication!

Just above, you can see Hannah, her oldest daughter, Kathy, a friend of Kathy’s and the “kitchen” end of the room (the kitchenette is behind the folding doors), with our refreshments table in the center with Kate’s beautiful batik cloth. Our grid piece is on the right.

Here is my dear friend Betty Johnson who came with her daughter Karen Martin. Both are mainstays in the Coastal Quilters, and I’m so glad they are both there. Betty is an amazing art quilter with an unerring eye, and Karen does the most perfect piecing I think I’ve ever seen…lots of detailed paper piecing too! Gorgeous! Betty is looking at our 5×5 / Five Artists, Five Views piece where each of us interpreted the same photo (each column), and where each row shows a single artist’s variation on the five photos.

Betty also surprised me with this little “Inchie and three quarters”… I had bid on her small art quilt at our Coastal Quilters fundraiser but got outbid, but she remembered and made me a “congrats” on the show and my Quilting Arts article with her bunny fabric (I have a thing for bunnies). I may make this into a pin or necklace!

Here’s a closer look at the items in the display case and above it (from left to right on the wall, Kathy’s birches, Sarah’s Autumn on the Village Green, and Kate’s interpretation of http://www.esteritaaustin.com/s pattern of a stone-flanked doorway):

Here is another view, this time of the corner opposite the kitchenette, with my Koi on the far wall (the wall you see as you look through the doors into the Picker Room) and Deborah’s “Anthony Avenue” anchoring the wall on the right.

I am still trying to catch up on lost sleep from all those hospital nights, but life is good. The show was fun, there are many wonderful comments in our guest show book (another one of Kate’s grand ideas!), Joshua is eating more, and getting more like his usual (sometimes teen-attitude) self, which means he is healing, his skin grafts look better (ok, less bad!) every day, and nighttime temps are ever-so-slightly beginning to drop. The first green acorns are already dotting the driveway, and school starts in 24 days. Not that I’m counting… GRIN! Now, to get to work on the book….