What a Surprise - Northern Birds!

Since the weather was warming today, I decided it would be a good time to get down to Lake Ontario and take some pictures of the ice formations which can be pretty spectacular this time of year. Here are bunches of people just hanging out on the frozen Irondequoit Bay. The temps were close to 50 so there was a lot of melting going on but no one sunk while I was there -- there were tons of cars and I felt like I was in Minnesota - yah.

Trying to get to abovesaid ice formations was not possible!! I felt like I was back at Crater Lake, climbing piles of snow to get the best view. My big surprise was that there were all kinds of birds just sitting there on the lake waiting to have their pictures taken!! These were quite a distance away on the Lake, but I believe they are Ring Necked Ducks (the females).

This was my first sighting and they didn't cooperate by getting very close. This is a duck called an Oldsquaw. I saw many of these. They have a very long tail which you can see in the back.

These I believe are Lesser Scaups -- a male and a female. They were not hanging out with a flock but were in amongst the swans near the outlet.

These I believe are the male Ring Necked Ducks which have a ring around their bill and the white eye patch. It was difficult to discern these different breeds but hopefully I haven't screwed up too badly!

This was looking south over the frozen bay. On the other side of the street is Lake Ontario.

These are our year-round residents -- the mute swan which is an invasive species from Europe. We saw lots of these in Switzerland on the fresh water lakes. They may be invasive but they are beautiful I think. This is the outlet where the Irondequoit Bay meets Lake Ontario. The bridge crossing this intersection is only open from November through April 1 because of boat traffic. When we first moved here, there was no opening between the bay and the lake!

This is another view of the swans. I have taken pictures of these in the spring nesting on their new eggs. They build nests in the marshy areas along the lakes and bays around here.

Everything You Wanted to Know about Glass But Didn't Know Enough to Ask

When I asked my husband where he wanted to go for his birthday dinner the day before his birthday, little did I guess that he would say Corning, NY and a trip to the Glass Museum! Over the past few years, we have made this yearly pilgrimage to probably our favorite museum next to the Metropolitan in NYC! It is also the ONLY time my dear husband will stay in a hotel that doesn't border on hostel! It is really a lovely Radisson that has a nice pool and an outside hot tub -- now keep in mind that the outside temps were below 10 but we enjoyed the hot tub even though we took our life and limb in hand to get back inside (even our hair 3 inches above the water was frozen solid!!). You couldn't touch the railings as you would stick to them!! I HIGHLY recommend this hotel and it was listed in Frommer's 100 best budget (defined as less than $250/night) hotels in the US.

This is Warren standing in front of my very favorite thing in the whole gallery part of the Museum (http://www.cmog.org/). It is of course a Tiffany window which is such a strong influence for me. I was amazed at the quality of the pictures I got today changing the Sensitivity on my camera so that it imitated high speed film (ISO = 800). I wanted to get pictures of the hot glass show which is basically almost in the dark. I usually keep the sensitivity at 100 which is what mimics slide film and gives you very high quality pictures.

Anyway, our usual day consists of going to every one of the Hot Glass Shows (demonstrations) and visiting the rest of the Museum in between those shows. A lot of people don't know that the shows are different all day and have different glass artists doing different glass objects. We were lucky enough to be the only two in the gallery for the show where they gave away a piece that was made the day before!! So we have a nice cobalt blue vase hand blown from the show! The pieces yesterday were totally awesome and we became a bit of a joke to the gaffers and the narrator as we were ALWAYS there! The following are a couple of the pictures I took of George and Eric who are both the highest level of glass artisans.


This is the "glory hole" where the 500 lbs of molten glass is kept at a consistent temp of 2100 degree F. This is one of two ovens on the stage. The assistant gathers the molten glass from this oven and the gaffer uses the other oven (which has a camera somehow mounted on the inside so you can see what is happening) to keep the vessel heated while he is working on it. He can only work on it for 15-20 seconds at a time before it gets too cool and liable to break.

This is Eric putting a handle on a pitcher with the assistance of the narrator who is also a trained glassmaker but more junior.

This is the finished pitcher which they recycled as it had no color and they recycle the clear glass daily.

This was George working on evening out the bottom of an object that eventually became a bowl. It is amazing how symmetrical they make this molten glass as they are moving it all the time. When they start, you are never quite sure what they are going to create. Sometimes the assistant isn't totally sure until they are along aways.



This may look like a vase now, but it will become a bowl. Here George is attaching the bottom from some hot glass that the assistant is holding on an iron. She has just taken this out of the huge "glory hole" containing 500 lbs of molten clear glass. The stripes are made by overlaying the original clear glass with a thin strip of colored glass and then George works his magic, moving the glass around almost like marbling. The molten glass at 2100 degrees has the consistency of honey and can be worked easily as it is extremely flexible. They have to keep heating it to keep it at these high temps so they can work it. They make it looks so easy although it takes 6 to 8 years to learn and practice the craft well!

This is George working on opening up what looked like a vase until now into a bowl! You can't see the striping because the glass is so hot but the bowl will be black and gold when finally done.
This was the final bowl with zig zag design on it right before going into the annealing oven which cools it slowly from the over 1000 degrees it is now. If you cool glass too quickly, it causes stress (the outside cools faster than the inside) and this causes cracks and eventually breakage.

These are just some of the thousands of examples of glass art through the ages that you can find in their extensive glass galleries. You can spend several hours there as well as in the main part of the museum where they have all the technical and historical information on modern glass making. It is absolutely fascinating and I always learn something new. I tend to like the modern studio art the best, but these I believe dated back to the 1800's . I should have taken notes about what these were specifically but I just liked them!

These are my favorites next to the Tiffany glass (of any kind). They were blown glass made during the latter part of the 19th century and are precise depictions of botanical and zoological specimens. They were made by the Blashke family. Harvard University employed them to make 1000's of these scaled models for teaching purposes back in the 1800's. If you EVER get to Boston, a visit to the museum where these specimens are is a "have to". You can't believe they are not real, they are so lifelike -- incredible!! All out of glass!

This is a Tiffany mosaic. I can't get enough Tiffany and his glass is definitely an influence in my design and color pallette for dyeing.

These are two examples of snails from the Blashke father and son. Thought this was appropriate with my passion for shells!

A trip to the Museum is not complete without spending at least an hour wandering through the Museum shop which is easily the best shop in a museum ever!! It is a show in itself and features glass artists from all over the world. The prices range from affordable to $44,000! Incredible but then Warren and I both love glass art!!

Trying Dyeing or Die Trying - Snow Dyeing!

Starting off by saying that "blocking" my Bird of Paradise on my design wall certainly did the trick and it now lies nice and flat with no ripples or bumps. Now to put on the facing and the sleeve and it will be done (without pleats!!). I think it will look perfect over our brown sofa at the beach.

There has been a lot of talk lately on the "Dyegest" lately about snow dyeing so as we have a sufficient supply of snow, thought that this would be a fun little exercise to get me back into dyeing and painting. So I snowboarded through the internet for instructions and found various approaches:

1. Sprinkle dye powder on the snow and then take snow and glop it onto prepared fabric (presoaked in soda ash but don't know whether they let it dry or not). After glopping, let it sit until melted, removing water along the way. Either finish it off in the microwave or wait a few days (the temps would be too low for quick reactions) and then wash out.

2. Squirt dye liquid onto the snow outside and let it sit (I would assume until frozen) and then scoop up the colored snow and glop it onto fabric and do as in #1.

3. Glop bunches of snow onto prepared fabric inside, then squirt the dyes on top of the snow and let melt and then do as #1 above.

Now the approach I decided to take was 3. I wanted some simple way to get the water out without having to deal with lifting up the mass so I inverted one plastic box on top of another and piled two yards of fabric on that inverted box. I figure (we shall see how it works) that the water will melt and will slide off the sides of the box into the bottom box. A screen would be a lot better, but I wasn't up for a trip to Lowe's and construction at this point! The picture above is what it looked like after I threw the liquid dyes on. I used (Pro Chem) Sun yellow, golden yellow, mixing red and intense blue. The yellows were a pretty hefty concentration (around 10%), the blue about 5% and the red around 2 %. I tried to get about 10 grams of dye altogether on the 2 yards of fabric. All that water will dilute things a bit. I scrunched the fabric as evenly as one-layered as I could across the top of the box, put about 5 inches of snow on top (at least in the middle, less on the sides) and then squirted the dyes with squirt bottles. I intend to let it go until all the ice melts, get rid of any puddles of dye and let sit several hours and then nuke it. I like to get it relatively dry before nuking so that there is not a lot of migration of the dyes.

This is the side view of the fabric, snow and inverted clear plastic box on top of the white box. The box was probably 18" x 24" or thereabouts.

First February Fun Day!

When Jeanne and I left Webster to go to Marcia's, the sun was brightly shining and there were blue skies. The closer we got to Palmyra, the foggier it got (what a switch from our usual story). I couldn't resist taking this picture from the door of Marcia's studio looking out to the barn. It was a black and white world!

This is one of the two "I Spy" baby quilts that I have bordered and basted and ready to machine quilt! The back of this one is covered with pigs doing all sorts of things. The other one (my grandchild's) has dinosaurs all over it.

This is the Depression Extreme Sampler with it's borders. It has a 1/2 inch yellow border, then the green and the lavender and I think it calms it down quite a bit. The hand quilting is coming along and it may actually get done in time for the quilt show!!

This is of course Suki helping me out while I am making tick marks on the heron! She only goes to the places I am specifically working on!

The heron has been drawn, redrawn, marked, traced, ticked and I am still not entirely happy with it. I am working on a lily now and tried a different approach which is a little better but still not totally okay. The heron was difficult because it is shades of gray and so very hard to keep track of where you are and what color pieces should be. When I originally started drawing my lines, I didn't first break the picture down which was a big mistake and caused much redrawing but this is a learning process -- how to abstract very realistic images. My biggest lesson was that "if you can't break it down easily into sections, the beginning composition might be the problem!" Both my pelican and the Birds of Paradise were fairly easy to break down. Even though I have spent many, many days on the heron, it may never see the light of "quilt".

Both Nancy and Marcia were working on pieces to be donated to Women Helping Girls for their auction. This is Nancy's piece with a camel she drew as the main motif.(www.communitywishbook.com/WomenHelpingGirls.html)
This is Marcia's piece with zebras. I think we have an animal theme working here!

Jeanne was working on finishing a piece from the Sharon Craig workshop we took a year ago. Her colors and choice of fabrics were exceptional. I did love this workshop also and it is too bad that Sharon Craig will no longer be teaching as she is fantastic!

A New Inspiration!

Well, it has been one of those "wonderful" days of staying inside and watching the snow pile up outside my window. However, I did manage to get one much dreaded task done today which was to add the borders to the Depression Extreme Sampler. I literally didn't have an inch of fabric to spare for one of the colors. Everything in this quilt except for the natural muslin and the backing is vintage fabric so it is not like I can go buy more! It took most of the afternoon but it is done so there is some hope that I can finish it for our quilt show in June -- I am actually hand quilting this thing as I just couldn't bring myself to machine quilt a quilt of this genre.

I can't believe but I managed to get the borders onto the two "I Spy" quilts as well as pin basting one of them for future machine quilting!

But sometimes I just get inspired by reading the notes I get daily from the various digests (I was about to type dyegest and that would have been very appropriate!) They have been talking about the dangers of sprinkling dye on snow and then doing snow dyeing but another lady spoke of doing it using some other technique which she didn't identify. A little web search came up with another technique and some pretty examples of what people got sooooo...... drumroll please -- more dyeing will be coming forth these next few days! It just looked like a fun thing to do and when you are "blessed" with a foot of snow.....

So onward to "prepare" some fabric for dyeing and to make up the dyes to do it!

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!!

Dreary Depressing Day....

This is a piece that Marcia has pulled out of her UFOs and done some additional work on! I really like this one and think the addition of the greys on the sides works really well.

Cold and gray does nothing to improve my attitude or inspire me to get moving on various projects. My instinct is to climb under a blanket and sleep! However, I have managed to move forward and almost complete the Bird of Paradise. I have quilted the heck out of it and it still doesn't lie flat. I have measured it, ironed it and done everything but take pleats in it (I am not beyond doing this extreme measure). It should be flat on front -- the back is flat. That will teach me to mix those pesky high thread count balis in with the nice stretchy stuff! I used some nice firm balis to make the stems which go diagonally across the piece and I think therein lies the problem!

Onward to the next piece though. I had a wonderful day at Marcia's last Wednesday working on the drawing for my next endeavor which will be capturing a great blue heron in fabric. This one will not have any real curves in it and I hereby make a promise to myself to carefully mark the grainlines on all the 8 million pattern pieces! I almost finished the drawing although I have not yet decided what I will use for background. I will take my freezer paper and my crayons tomorrow so I can mark all the tic marks and outline the major areas for piecing. It is a little difficult to see but here is the beginnings of the drawings on a 3 foot by 4 foot piece of tracing paper.

Tomorrow I will take my Bird of Paradise piece for some serious consultation with whomever shows up along with Marcia! It will be another day of basically drawing though which is a great use of Marcia's wonderful studio space.