A little progress is being made...

Have finally completed the 10 postcards for the Beyond the Sea swap. I'm very happy with the outcome. Now to begin work again on the shower curtain... I have added borders to it, and am in the throes of populating the undersea portion of the curtain. I did not want to have the finished curtain to look as if it has layers of things, one atop the other...so removed a few of the pieces of seaweed on the left side of it and machine embroidered a small group of angel fish down then reapplied the seaweed so that it appears they are swimming amongst the greenery. I was thinking this would shortly be finished, but as I look at it, it really needs more work to complete it than originally planned. I do have a bad habit of thinking that my creations need perhaps just one more object added to them, only to find that I am adding many more! Today's plans include locating my coral colored fabric for the sea coral and hopefully beginning to stitch some of it down. It seems with each addition that it becomes more lifelike and in the end will make a wonderful statement!

No new pictures yet...perhaps after I get a bit of the color of the flora and fauna of the undersea applied (that way it looks as if I had worked harder on completing this project!)

New Fiber Post Card

I am so enjoying the making of post cards using fabric and fibers. The current set I am working on has the title of Beyond the Sea. To me that means something that you would like to see there, but a bit of a fantasy...hence I chose to stitch out a mermaid. Not just any ol' mermaid, mind you...not the comic type that we see drawn , but rather an almost human looking being, with a fish tail! I love the mythical aspect of a mermaid, almost like a fanatsy creature as were the Unicorns, and of course Fairies. She fits into my scheme of things quite well. It was a bit of a struggle for me to locate the perfect background, they just do not print fabrics that have the appeal of the undersea to my mind's eye. Everything I had envisioned using for a backdrop for her just did not hold that punch.

However, there is no limit to the imagination of the batik fabrics available, and even when confronted with the miriad of fabrics available in that department of the fabric store, I still had choices to make. Would it be a green, perhaps a blue, maybe a blue-green, and finally as I rounded yet another corner in the shop, there it was! The perfect background fabric for my vision. The fabric is difficult to describe, it has the blues, the appearance of movement that was necessary for my internal vision of this card, greens, a bit of turquoise, and most important part was purple to allow me to not have to create shadows on the finished card. I really think this card is a great card! With a few additions of some stitchery to create a few pieces of seaweed, the addition of other fibers and of course the star fish and the sand dollar, and I believe that she is about done. I also added some cellophane to it, as one of the challenges for the month is to use some paper in one of our creations...I found a nice cellophane with an iridescent quality to it that shines in the blue of the paper as well as picks up a bit of pink and gold. I do believe I have succeeded with what was in my mind's eye!

The design is not my own creation, although I did change the color of the fish portion of the body. I never did believe a mermaid would have a yellow and green body, so have made mine a subtle blue and green. The artist and digitizer of this design is Susan Mackinlaw, who owns a fantastic site for embroidery designs called BFC Creations. Not only is she a wonderful artist, but does an outstanding job on her digitizing.

Thanks to all who have expressed interest in this blog. Your thoughts are very helpful to me and in some cases beyond kind! Nice to know I have friends out there whom I have yet to meet in person!

I am involved in a few very interesting groups on-line. One of them is the Fiber Artist Traders, who create and trade their works of art via a fiber post card, which is created and actually mailed to our swap partners. I try to fit in at least two swaps a month to keep my hand active in this endeavor, sometimes the swaps tend to get a tad bit out of hand, in that my art is a realistic type of art with a twist. You always will recognize what I create, but perhaps, such as my Flying Colors swap card, not what the card is wearing. The Flying Colors was a swap in which the participants were to use the colors of their nations flag to create a card. Now you must know that the only place I have ever been other than the United States has been Canada. I am not a world traveler, but this group has members from all over the world in it and I have been lucky enough to have shared art with artists from other nations as well as the wonderful United States of America. I love my country, although I do have some problems at times with those who govern us...don't we all? At any rate, here is my Flying Colors, which was created back in September 2005, but will always be a popular subject for me...

At the current time this group has a themed swap entitled Ageless Post Card Swap. We were told to create a card depicting our favorite age. It will soon be known that my favorite age is now...at the age of 66, I have come into my own. It is wonderful to not have to get up in the a.m. and prepare myself for a grueling day at the office. I worked for 17+ years for the local school district in the Facilities Department, who got to spend the big bucks for creating new schools and refurbishing older ones. Our district, Bethel School District, has close to 18,000 students, and is growing by leaps and bounds. When I began working for them there were almost 9,000 students, at by the standards of our county, it was a large district, especially because it is a rural district. I believe at the present time there are around 25 schools in our district which encompasses approximately 250 square miles. Hence, my days were spent traveling the district, as well as spending an undue amount of time at the County Building Permit counter obtaining permits to add new classrooms to existing sites, as well as seeing that permits were obtained in an orderly manner for other projects throughout the district. At any rate, it is so wonderful to be able to sleep in until 6 or 7 a.m. these days and to not have to worry about what will I wear to work! And so, my creation for the Ageless swap is to create myself at the age I am. I am happy with my age and my accomplishments, and I have found that even though I was declared an adult at the age of 21 (I guess because I was able to vote, I could be called an adult), I have discovered that we do not quit growing because we have reached that elusive title, but that we continue to grow, and where I am at currently is indeed a wonderful place to be. I have the opportunity to do what I desire and if I am not done with it at the end of the day, I can stay up and work on it till the next day if I so desire.

And so, here is my humble creation. As I love to quilt, I have pieced a tiny quilt using 1" pieces of fabric to create the background for my comic like image. I have been told by friends who know me when they seem me on the streets that the image in only correct in the hair color, and the color of the clothing I wear, other than that, she is a bit oversized for my present self... I do love the little twig hat she is sporting! It looks to me to be rather like the tumble weeds that blew around the farm I lived on when growing up up in Eastern Washington.

Another list I am on, called the Fairy Goddess Mothers, creates the most wonderous quilts using of course, fairies as the centerpiece. I am a great fan of fairies, have believed in them since a small child. I was lucky enough to have an Irish father, and he told some of the most amazing stories of fairies and, of course, leprechans as well. Our list mom, Linda Poole, is an amazing artist and has created a challenge for us this year. It is a fairy goddess pattern that will have colors assigned to it each month and by the end of this year we will have ourselves a fantastic quilt made. This little fairy has a butterfly body, but it is surely a fairy. Our theme for the month of January is the Fairy of Winter and we were to use blue and white for the colors of this block. List mom invariably comes up with a side challenge to get us charged up and raring to go and this month the first person to post received a wonderful 2006 calendar from AQS, no small prize that! It was won by a newbie to our list, Susan from Australia! That is so wonderful. I think it really gives those new comers a boost to discover that they can win something so quickly after joining a list. Congratulations to Sue! Here is my take on the Fairy of Winter...

Well that is it for this day's posting, unless some-thing earth shattering happens later on in the day!

"Art is...the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced..." Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

A New Venture

This is a new venture for me. Others have insisted it is an easy journey, from my mind to the blog...it may be easier said than done, for my mind is consistently on overload! I no sooner get a thought and it expands into a full scale book!

At any rate, I am bound and determined to use this space to show off what I am doing in my creative world. At times it will simply be musings, at others I will post photos of some of my quilts and fiber art post cards.

I am currently involved in making a quilted shower curtain. One of the groups I belong to, Fiber Artist Traders, has a great group of gals on it, and they are always trying to dream up new swaps for the group. One suggestion that I took note of, not for swapping (too much work goes into a shower curtain) but for my newly remodeled living room and attached guest bath was an altered shower curtain, however mine would be a quilt with a seaside theme. My LR and Bath have been remodeled to resemble what I think the inside of a beach cottage would look like with wainscoting going from the floor up 40", then nicely textured, painted walls above.

But on to the shower curtain. I had a pattern from Woods and Quilts of a three part quilt, it was to be about 30x36 inches in size. I had it enlarged so that it would comfortably fill the space in front of the tub. There are three sections to it...the sky (I chose a setting sun with an early evening sky of hand painted fabric in pinks, lavender and blue with a little white. The middle section is of the sea surface and holds a clipper ship with a peninsula and of course, a lighthouse (a passion of mine). Under the sea comes next, and the largest portion of the curtain, when it comes to size. It has a boulder sitting upon the sand, a beautiful mermaid resting her upper body on the boulder whilst her tail is beneath the surface. I will attempt to post the few pictures I have of various parts of the curtain, and we can see what becomes of it as I proceed. I am always a work in progress, and even when I get a good start on a project, more ideas flood in and consequently there is constant revising taking place until I feel I have everything just right for me.

I will be adding (to the best of my plans at the present time) lots of embellishment on this. Everything seems very one dimensional at the present time, but by the time I am finished with it, I am hoping it will develop a personality of it's own!

As I was creating this, I decided to add portions of the main design that would extend into the border. They are at this time some of the landscaping around the lighthouse, as well as the mermaid's tail. There will be other items extending into the border on the opposite side to balance it. Since this latest photo was taken on 12/27/05, I have added sand at the very bottom of the quilt, as well as some bits of sea grasses on the near side of the curtain.