Having Phun with Photoshop!

Well, Monday during the day was spent at lovely Marcia's studio and of course Suki was there to help me with my drawing by keeping it stable. You can see a new quilt of Marcia's in the background - a really nice variation of her jet trails.

This is my troublesome Bird of Paradise with all its quilting done but still not sitting straight. The ladies suggest I soak it and really pin it tight to get it to sit straight. If you double click on the image, you can see the details of the quilting. I also must add that I have made the transition to using Photoshop for all my pictures.

Last night was the first night of Photoshop 102 taught by the very excellent Jan Klapetsky at our local high school adult education. He coincidentally is the husband of one of the members of our quilt club! He does a really nice job of simplifying this very complex and rich piece of software. I may just have to upgrade my version to take advantage of some of the new features!

Well, scrubbing the kitchen floor is keeping me warm but is very boring so I thought I would present my first attempt at collage with Photoshop! I forgot to do some things like feathering the edges of things but managed to get a bunch of shells superimposed on the beach even with a title!

You can see that I just started my second more advanced Photoshop class and because of my computer problems, I hadn't gotten to practice my lessons from the first class -- I was really fuzzy on layers but think I am beginning to get it with a little trial and error.

Some of you may subscribe to an art newsletter by Robert Genn but thought it was worth posting one of his latest entries:

http://clicks.robertgenn.com/compositional-keys.php

You can subscribe to his newsletter which comes out twice a week for free and I think it is worth reading. Sometimes it has no relation to anything from an art quilting standpoint, but many times the advice can easily be applied to what we do. (End of commercial!)

It is a letter he sent a few days ago about composition but just as interesting were the many replies he got from some of his faithful readers. I thought there were some great suggestions about artistic composition which is my weakest area so I literally read everything I can get my hands on.

Well, will have to work on something other than the Bird of Paradise as I managed to leave it and my winter jacket at Marcia's yesterday and there is a snowstorm heading our way tomorrow so won't be able to get it til at least Thursday now! Marcia and Bill have a rule about things left hanging on their design wall for more than three days -- something about it belongs to them after that much time! Hopefully, the snow storm will be a good enough excuse so they don't invoke that rule!!

The Top is Done and So Am I!

This small piece was the original piece I did using this drawing. It was appliqued onto a hand dyed piece of brown. I think this newer version below is a lot more vibrant than the original. If you look closely, you can see some of the actual changes in the drawing as well!


Well, the groups of pieces went together just fine but getting the piece finally put together was not pretty at all... I may have made one change too many or one too many Y-seams but many seams were stitched and re-stitched and it still doesn't sit as flat as my pelican did. I am hoping that quilting will bring the piece back into line!

The piece measures about 36 inches by 42 inches right now. It uses some of my marbled and hand dyed fabric as well as commercial fabrics. Who knows how big it will be after I do the "real" cropping.

I am relatively pleased with how the piece looks now that it is done. I re-pieced several parts completely that I had already done so that took extra time. I HATE undoing stitching and redoing it but I wanted this to look how I envisioned it so there was much restitching!

In my defense, I must say that I did the drawings for this piece long, long before I took the Ruth McDowell class and didn't redo some of them until I was into the piecing. The changes I made won't be obvious to most but made me happier! These involved basically undoing leaves that I had finished piecing. Instead of using two or three prints in a leaf, I decided to piece the leaves so that there were many greens making them up. Now, this is NOT what the leaves looked like but I did maintain the shape!! I also took out several of the leaves that were in the original drawing, taped them back together and made background instead adding stems where appropriate.

As everything else around here, we have a free-spirited "Christmas" cactus and I use that term loosely as it has never bloomed for us on Christmas but this year came the closest so we didn't have to call it an Easter cactus or Memorial Day cactus -- this year it is a Chinese New Year's cactus. It certainly is filled with blossoms though!! I am thinking that it has a hippie karma left from my youngest daughter!

Moving Right Along!

Well, staying inside yesterday was definitely a good idea! It snowed most of the day and then more at night although light and fluffy but it is sooooo cold, the roads are not good. The sun is brightly shining this morning so hopefully the roads will be okay for the Opening Reception of our exhibit at the Rochester Area Council for the Arts.

However, the house is warmer upstairs on days like yesterday so I spent most of the afternoon and evening working on the Birds of Paradise piece and make some significant progress. Of course, I am now at the stage where I wish I had done some things differently and did an "audible" yesterday afternoon and changed one aspect. There are some other things I may change today as well. When I work and touch a piece, it really starts telling me what to do after awhile. As following directions as never been my strong point, it is amazing that I do listen to the pieces I am working on!

As you can see above, I have finished the upper half and am now struggling with the middle and the lower right corner where I am making a lot of changes as I go along. Hopefully, it will all fit back together again at the end!

10 Degrees and Falling!!

My tan does look a little weird when there is snow piled everywhere and where the high today was a whole 10 degrees. That will be considered warm, we are told, by Friday....


Anyway, it was a great day to work in Marcia's studio on my Bird of Paradise piece. I made some progress today plus helped solve some of our world's problems (probably the ones of lesser significance!) We had a good group of four plus our gracious hostess and host. Poor Marcia had to work again on real computer stuff so that put a damper on the day for her. Not a lot of piecing got accomplished at her end of the room but she did help solve the world problems between customer calls!



This was a piece that Priscilla (our resident non-quilter -- haha) made and which the ladies convinced her to send to SAQA. It has beautiful beading on it which is hard to see unless you double click on this image. Thanks heavens she has lots of fabric from Thousands of Bolts.com to work from!!


This is a piece that Marcia had hidden away but which she is resurrecting. She is adding some more grey to the white areas on the side -- I really like this one with its unusual color pallette.

This was the piece that Jeanne started in the Nancy Crow workshop and I really liked the colors in this one as well! Unusual and very striking.

Priscilla was working on the wolf quilt which is getting finished plus starting on a Parrot Quilt -- all of us had an opinion on the direction that should take but I know Priscilla will pick the best solution and will come up with a great composition.

Pat had used one of her pieces as a pattern to create a new piece that is more in Pat's style as opposed to Nancy's plain colored fabrics.

I was of course working on my Bird of Paradise which was derived from a couple of pictures I took in California of my favorite flower. I had used those pictures as the basis for an applique version of this quilt about 7 years ago. I had always wanted to do a pieced version and change things a bit. I am trying to use many of the techniques I learned in Ruth's class but am unquestionably adding my own way of doing things. In Ruth's class alot of time was spent auditioning fabrics -- I really don't do that at all. I pull out a few, see if they go together in one small spot and go for it!! If I don't like it later, then I applique over in small areas or rip it out if I haven't gone too far. I tend to work in sections as you will see from my photos.

Above was my piece as it started the day. The bottom right corner had been finished and I had pinned up background fabrics around the rest of the piece to get some idea of whether I liked the mix or not.

This is how the piece looked at the end of the day with the bottom left corner filled in and progress made on the leaves and one of the flowers. It is really like a jig saw puzzle when you start putting some of the curvy skinny pieces back together again. Seems okay so far and definitely better than my earlier version of this drawing!!

Have to decide what to do next as I am getting down the home stretch with this one and I have three or four days of freezing, freezing cold and I will just sit inside and work on it!! The leftover pot roast certainly tasted good tonight!