watching paint dry and embellishing quilt blocks

 

I'm struggling with physical challenges but wanted to feel normal... know what I mean? Feeling normal means painting, writing and quilt making to me... so this in a nutshell is what was made this week. 

mostly in pictures.... can't be at computer for long but connecting with my art peeps keeps me feeling human. 

Love my metallic watercolor set from fine-tec

I did two icads this week,  small artwork on a 4" X 5" index card, the first prompt was wabi-sabi, a Japanese term that sort of means imperfection, impermanence, are to be valued... if you repair an item, make it noticeable... so I drew then painted a vase, then "broke it"

I write thoughts on the backs

the next ICAD prompt I attempted was "Bird" 

torn bits of trash printed paper collaged to the card

the back of the card

finished card with ink sketch

learning to draw a bird on a watercolor painting

3 recent paper pieced blocks

belt seems a bit blah

RSC scrap color this month is Red... I made a dress from the book paper pieced home... definitely not my favorite paper piecing as it has too many angles, and isn't printed with seam allowances between sections of which there are lots in a small block. But. I like her mid-century vibe a lot. 

I added a cute button to the dress, and wish I had a dress like that now. The tote has some iron on sequins and I'm going to sew those flower buttons on. I would like a tote in turquoise and pink, those scraps are from fave fabrics

the undecorated tote, two sections had to be joined with a Y seam, OMG

I finished this big quilt's binding sewn by hand this week, sitting watching Grace and Frankie on Netflix trying to distract myself from pain...

I pulled out a hand sewing UFO too.... for that distraction element, and am working away at the final tumbling blocks to the whole thing, 

there is a lot of the day in 24 hours.... I am phobic about hospitals, and doctors and have had so many the past month, that my nerves are frayed, and I suspect the adage God won't give you more than you can handle is wrong. I am beyond emotionally broken... barely functional, find I want to stay in bed to avoid life. Ever felt like that? There is no answer yet, no relief yet, but one step in front of the other. 

I make art, because I need to 

thank you for listening, and all your prayers, you all have been the bright lights for me this week

Love, LeeAnna

https://superscrappy.blogspot.com

patchwork Sunday   

oh Scrap Sundays

slow stitching Sundays

design wall Mondays at smallquiltsanddollquilts

https://songbirddesigns.blog/monday-musings-6-26-23/ 

http://www.inquiringquilter.com/ Wednesday wait loss

Midweek makers wednesdays  

http://www.myquiltinfatuation.com/ 

https://confessionsofafabricaddict.blogspot.com/ 

face off

finished or not

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watching paint dry this week...

 

My creativity this week was challenged by physical pain... sometimes creative time takes me out, but sometimes nothing can take pain away. Know what I mean? 

the painting above was done in small format of index card, as it's fairly fast. I watched a tutorial by Creative Cove. I started with what was left of a mailing label for the post office, printed on sticky backed label paper. Rather than toss it, I pulled off enough to cover the index card and began painting with watercolors and a bamboo brush. 

you can see the printed words peeking through

I layered many other mark making tools, caran d'arche neocolor, black ink, white gel pen, staedtler watercolor pencils, and some posca acrylic pens. Last some gold paint to remind me of laurel Birch graphics. 

The printed label was from mailing a pet portrait to my friend Monika (her lovely blogo) this week... She adopted Norman from a neglectful situation, and he was a loving boy, did hospital visits with her to comfort others, 

 

she said he loved his little stuffie moose and often walked around with it. It was more difficult than I thought to capture the loving look in his soft eyes... and the hair, I did my best with watercolor and inks

and at the end, a heart of gold.... the sorry fact is our kind hearted loving dogs don't live long enough and no amount of time would be long enough... 

 

I pulled prompts from ICAD at random when I could focus, and this day it was 

"imagination" 

4" X 6" cheap index card and paint

I play with portraits... how many lines will imply a face, a gesture, an attitude? How do colors affect it? 

How does it interpret the word imagination to me? I wrote this little poem on the back

Imagination:  My nose is a bit bent, my eyes aren't symmetrical, my lips turn down a bit, my hair is an entity of it's own...

and I still create. 

I am beautiful in my uniqueness and my spirit is beautiful

I have a big imagination making my world better

The prompt was "trivia" and I thought of my full brain, all the facts in there all badly filed and sometimes misfiled and hard to find... but I love trivia games, especially partnering with my husband who knows so much. Neither of us knows a thing about sports however.

the little cards don't take long to make, but take a bit of thought as to how to interpret the prompt
 

The astrology one, I chose Taurus my sign and put down the character traits, and silver ink stars

for "float" I chose a beloved pink flamingo float I used to love as a kid.... arms over the circle, safe in the water bobbing up and down gently, turning in circles by kicking little feet, the feeling when it broke and deflated.
"Playground" prompt

I used to love the swings best.... pumping my legs, going higher and higher, that feeling where the swingset legs come out of the ground a little, letting go and flying through the air to the ground, whee!

"charcoal" and "evergreen" my photo colors on the tree are not true, it's darker greens and blues. My goal was to interpret a majestic tree with as few strokes as possible. 

the lily... drawn with stabilo crayon very water reactive and runs instantly reminding me of charcoal. A bit of opera pink paint, a stencil bird, and some threads sewn on for texture stamens

when I couldn't do much else this week, I put away embroidery supplies and straightened my kitchen desk a bit, and can see the surface now

that's it, only a tiny bit of hand sewing on hexies... I hope the coming week brings relief or an answer that the ER didn't give...

linking to

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https://kathysquilts.blogspot.com/

watching paint dry, and fresh hand embroidery techniques

 

Welcome to this week's creative offerings... The image above is from one of my embroidery workshops, and it was a full week of lessons, 9 a day for 5 days... the embroidery summit. I couldn't do them all of course, but tried to print patterns and watch techniques from most. 

I seriously hurt my back/spine alignment, trying to finish the binding hand sewing on this quilt last Sunday. It's done when the hand work is done but it's bulky and heavy to work on so... can't do much now.

I let the index cards go for the most part, only able to do so much this week. I managed to do 3 cards

the prompts were " tranquility"

4" X 5" and thin paper, are just a bit challenging

the next challenge was "postage stamp" think about what you'd do to interpret that... I am grateful for Katie Porter in congress, for her explanations, and her smart way of  trying to help citizens have better lives. She's the adult daughter of a well know quilt teacher, whom I also like very much

the last prompt I tried was"unexpected"  I chatted with dh about that... it's not the same as surprise, or shock,  so what represents unexpected? He said, snow in late June would be... so...

a calendar page, sun with snowflakes... 

Now for some examples of things I tried on the embroidery lessons... I brought down some supplies to have next to the computer where I was watching the teachers...

I like the DMC variegated floss set my friend Cindy sent me,  but admit I like perle cotton best and I have a set of colors from precensia (on amazon) and some DMC balls that I like too. 

this teacher had us cut applique circles of fabric, and use running stitch to tack it down. I used silk scraps so this has quite a sheen in person. I put in two buttons and used a bit of green scrap to work on, it's all learning... with the cutaway scraps of silk, I tried a machine embroidery piece, took 5 min to do on a scrap of black felt

white cotton thread, some hand daisy stitches in yellow floss and a couple french knots. 

I often try lessons on the jeans from DH that I've cut up into various shapes... this was just practicing stitches in pattern

this was a reminder of woven rose... I tried lazy daisy for leaves, then stitched one long straight stitch inside each one... I like the effect, hard to see here but pretty way to use more color

this was an attempt to try something like sashiko... not a fan of stop and start of this pattern. I might make bags out of these or might piece them together into something quilt like, for now they are useful to try one little motif

It's not pressed, but this lesson was in making an olive branch

my favorite lesson was in various weaving techniques. The stem was effective, I love the texture of the flower center. It's done of a bit of denim, and some weaving stands away from the fabric very well

you weave the petals onto a straight pin joining them at the base to the fabric. The technique for the leaves was very different from anything I've done.

This is supposedly a style from hawaii of happy whimsical things, this time flowers with faces... onto watercolor paper.

you pierce the paper from your pattern creating a place to stitch but...

not fun

not fun nor easy to find the holes while holding your big piece of paper, then sometimes the thread pulled through as you worked, and not such smooth lines...

after stitched I painted the background with watercolors

very primitive to me, but I see doing my own thing on paper would be better, and I tried it... that's what learning is, 

I enjoyed watching a lesson on hand embroidering around a  photo printed  onto fabric.... I see myself doing that pretty often actually. I've done machine embroidery around printed photos but I liked the look of big flowers sewn to them. There's a winter scene with really texturized trees I want to follow up on too. 

I finished one petal in browns, one in oranges, now this in blue/greens

 

All in all, worth the time, and it was free. On to other sewing when my back improves, for now, I'm sitting in the family room, hand sewing small hexies for a fall star as I catch up on season 5 of the Outlander on netflix....

Happy arting y'all. 

https://superscrappy.blogspot.com

patchwork Sunday   

oh Scrap Sundays

slow stitching Sundays

design wall Mondays at smallquiltsanddollquilts

https://songbirddesigns.blog/monday-musings-6-26-23/ 

http://www.inquiringquilter.com/ Wednesday wait loss

Midweek makers wednesdays  

http://www.myquiltinfatuation.com/ 

https://confessionsofafabricaddict.blogspot.com/ 

off the wall Fridays 

face off 

peacock party

tgiffriday

finished or not

https://myblog-lunchbreak.blogspot.com/

watching paint dry plus stitching one little fabric to another until it's done

 I did a lot of medicinal arting this week.... you know about bodies turning on you don't you? Welcome to this week's artful round up...starting with one of the index card prompts which I got quite behind on...

I usually do the day's prompt in the morning but I ended up having to catch up a bit doing four at once

she encouraged us to use printed script this week while doing the daily prompts. Generally I need to stay away from chemicals so I love watercolor, pencil, pen and ink. These can be interpreted in so many ways... xylophone for instance... could be just rainbow of colors , or what do you think of? 

I remember having one of these I could drag around as a kid, the tinkle, the way the bars bounced just a bit when hit with those tiny mallets.

 Sea Glass... I grew up near beaches and still love sea glass with it's depth of glowing color, I like sea glass jewelery...but how to paint it? I started with watercolor, mixing titanium buff + quinacridone gold for sand, lots of blues and greens, then tombow markers on top of that, and iridescent white 

I had a bit of trouble making it look 3-5 and capturing that depth but I like it. I used a kuretaki metallic gold brush pen to imply seashells. Thank you to Helen at https://wordweaverart.blogspot.com/for our discussion of making something appear 3-d  I'll work on it! 

I've painted and quilted many sunflowers but never one in such a hurry... I just wanted to catch up and didn't think or plan, just dropped watercolor on this absorbent cheap index card... I wanted a van gogh like brushstroke and can't easily use acrylics that would give me that (allergies) so I used my acrylic ink pen posca in neon yellow and scratched the color over the painting. 

 

ahhhhh violets, natures delicate petals I mixed  purple, red violet, pink in an impressionist blur of color, used a pen and ink to imply petals, daubed on a bit of brown and that yellow posca pen. Some dashes of muted green imply stems and leaves. 

I am catching up on some of Tamara La Porte's workshop lessons this week, again sadly I can't use the supplies suggested as they cause migraines for me, but I did this one by Effie Wilde and I just love the economy of line, the tiny pen marks that together make up a face...

I sketched the lines with stabilo crayon  like using a piece of coal it's so blunt! It's highly disolvable so with just a tiny amount of water on the water pen, I can shadow the lines

Oh isn't she lovely???

Shame to possibly  mess it up with color... but... how can I resist?

She's done on a half sheet of watercolor paper, Dick Blick brand. Not great but fine for learning on

ooh my, I've carried this from painting area up to studio, back and forth this week. I love her. 

the best way to learn something is to immediately try it again, so on my latest index card, interpreting alphabet, I started with an image printed from google in color I liked. trimmed and overlapped bits onto a card, I then used the stabilo to sketch a face over the existing image, letting things fall where they would.

daubs of watercolor, gold kuretaki brush and ink... she looks like an online friend of mine... artist 

Gillena https://myblog-lunchbreak.blogspot.com/

Quilt making

I worked hard to quilt, and join the sections of this quilt  too...The original blocks done for RSC last year...The hearts made this year also from repro fabric scraps

I made it work, found fabric from stash to do borders and backing pieced... I don't like to show them before they are done, but this is taking a long time to finish. I quite hurt my spine trying to finish it to this point. I used a bamboo/cotton blend batting and it's heavy and bulky.

The quilting came out so pretty, and I like how feminine it all is. Soft yellow and pinks remind me of granny's quilts all made from old clothing, by hand, hand quilted, the way she learned on a farm in Alabama as a child.
 

it's a mix of  even feed foot, and hand sketched free motion stitching. The final trim just before a pink binding 

left small orts finally too small to keep, but this quilt is a testament to the beauty to be found in scraps... the mix of color and texture making the whole richer. 

I'll take better pics when it's truly done, but wanted to show you I'm still sewing this summer.

Happy arting y'all. 

https://superscrappy.blogspot.com

patchwork Sunday   

oh Scrap Sundays

slow stitching Sundays

design wall Mondays at smallquiltsanddollquilts

https://songbirddesigns.blog/monday-musings-6-26-23/ 

http://www.inquiringquilter.com/ Wednesday wait loss

Midweek makers wednesdays  

http://www.myquiltinfatuation.com/ 

https://confessionsofafabricaddict.blogspot.com/ 

off the wall Fridays 

face off 

peacock party

tgiffriday

finished or not

https://myblog-lunchbreak.blogspot.com/