Virginia Greaves

I am waiting for some supplies to come through the mail so I have spent today setting up my quilting frame. It was good to see it not lying on the floor — but it takes up a good chunk of space & now I want to rearrange everything — including where the cable line is. Nothing in life is ever easy.

I also took my latest quilt into Photoshop & removed all of the color. This is a great design trick to do when you are evaluating a piece before committing it to quilting. You want a good range of values — darks to mediums to lights — and a good flow across the piece. This piece has that — but I expected that since its theme was centered around values. I can also see a few spots that fell a little shorter of the mark than I realized — but overall, I think it holds its own.

I have been working on my profile. When I had finished all of the applique sewing, I was stuck on how to assemble them. I wasn’t interested in a traditional setting but had no idea what I wanted to do. I went to the bookstore & stumbled upon a great book — Art Quilts: A Celebration: 400 Stunning Contemporary Designs by Lark Books. It shows several years of quilts from Quilt National, a very prestigious art quilt exhibition held every other year.

There was one quilt in particular that caught my attention. It was many blocks of applique set on a wholecloth with words behind it. Voila! Great idea. I didn’t want words, but complex cloth for a background sounded perfect.

I laid out a couple of card tables in the garage & covered them with plastic. I laid out the background PFD fabric and started painting. I considered dyeing it, but since I’ve moved, I no longer have a shop sink — only my kitchen sink — and I’m not quite ready to christen my new kitchen with the spoils of dyeing. So I painted — blue & green — and it looked very good — and very dark. I knew that the piece would have to be a light value to hold up the blocks. I considered finishing it and then doing another one — but I am running low on my bolt of PFD, so I brought it into the kitchen, plopped it into the sink (carefully that is), and ran water over it until the color was more of a sky color. Perfect. I then hung it outside to dry — which it did very quickly. I went to eat lunch, and when I was done, it was almost dry. I place it in the dryer to finish it.

I should also exlain that I had played with the layout on the computer — in CorelDraw. I knew that I didn’t care for the horizontal orientation — and having the bright yellow in the bottom right didn’t read right — so I took my digital picture, made a layout in CorelDraw, and set it all up. Then I changed the layout from vertical to horizontal, and then I flipped all of the blocks so that the yellow started in the top left and the black ended in the bottom right. I would show you the CDW files, but I set them in pages in one file & CorelDraw won’t let me export the pages. Oh well.

When the background fabric was dry, I laid it out, marked the middle, and drew boxes with light pencil marks for each block. And then I started thinking about this great stencil that I bought 8 years ago of an iron fence that I intended to use in my daughter’s room & never did. At first I was afraid that I had thrown it out in the move, but it was waiting for me in my work-in-progress stack. I measured and placed each rail, marking it with a black Pentel FabricFun Dye Stick. When I was done, I set the dye with a hot iron. This is my first time to use a stencil on a quilt.

Then I started trimming my blocks. The original was 6 1/2 by 10 1/2 — so I grabbed my large square ruler & lay masking tape along those dimensions. It seemed like a good idea — but really was more irritating than helpful. Then I placed the overlay of the profile that I used to make the blocks on the top of the ruler & taped it down. I turned it to the back and cut off the 2 sides along the top and right side that stuck out. This became my guide for cutting.

Then I placed it over a block, aligned the image on the plastic on the top of the ruler to the block beneath it, and then cut the top & right side. Then I flipped the block over and cut the remaining 2 sides based on the 6 1/2 by 10 1/2 inch finished measurement.

When I was done, I pinned all of the blocks to the background on my design wall so that I could see where I was going.

I love CorelDraw. I used to use Photoshop to lay things out, but CorelDraw is really better for this. This is the first project in which I have exclusively used CorelDraw. Thank you Julie Duschack for introducing me to the wonders of using my computer for design work.

Which is to say that the design wall is very close to what I had done in CorelDraw.

I am currently sewing the blocks on. There are many ways that I could have done this, but I decided on the easy way — more fusing.

Now I want to add keys and I have been looking for key stamps. Sounds easy enough — and I live in a big city now so I should be able to find a stamp with a decent key. I have been looking for 2 days. At this point, I either have to order it from the internet or I can go down to Dick Blick and get the materials to carve a stamp myself.

Why keys? I don’t really know.

My oldest daughter asked me to take her to WalMart the other day so she could buy supplies for a school project — a model of an atom. She bought gold jewelry wire, a large styrofoam ball, beads, and air dry clay. I could see the creative spark in her so I let her have whatever she wanted. (Thank goodness she didn’t ask for a pony.)

Isn’t it cool? I was so impressed that she could dream this up in her head. She used the wires to hold up the styrofoam ball, but she ended up using hot glue to attach the ball to the wires — and then had a blast making jewelry with the wire, beads, and glue. The styrofoam has a section cut out of it. She marked it with black marker and then I cut it out using a knife — carefully. It wasn’t as easy as florist’s foam, but I marked the outside & wedged it out in sections.

She used the beads and some of the air dry clay to make parts of the atom — and then used the wires and round green circle stickers folded in half to identify different parts of the atom. I think she added the beads at the bottom because they looked good there.

I can identify with that.

I was getting ready yesterday to write about my trip to the beach and about some books I had read recently — but I got distracted by upgrading WordPress. Sometimes those mundane tasks are comfortable and keep us from moving forward.

And then yesterday, I watched that old movie Reality Bites with Ethan Hawke and Winona Ryder — an early Ben Stiller movie. Much more serious than his later stuff.

I am a member of Generation X — and that is what this movie is about. At one point, Winona says that she was supposed to really be somebody by the age of 23 — and Ethan tells her that all she has to be is herself — and she says that she doesn’t know who that is.

Another theme in this movie is about selling out. Ben Stiller’s character (he cast himself in the movie) is Winona’s corporate boyfriend — and he has sold his soul. He takes her heartfelt documentary about her friends and their problems and changes it into a puff piece about how silly they are in order to impress the TV networks. When she finds out & gets upset, he promises to have them delete the pizza image — as if a silly fix like that would undo the damage that has been done.

And Troy, Ethan Hawke, Winona’s live-in friend who wants to be the boyfriend — he lives on the edge. He has been fired 12 times and his passion is singing nights in a band. That is the only thing he can commit himself to — unless Winona will change her mind and dump her boyfriend for him.

There is a great scene in which Winona accuses Troy of having sold out just like everybody else — except he doesn’t get paid for it.

And I think that that is what has me stumped.

Anyway, last week we went to the beach. I took a picture of my foot:

I went to all that trouble to paint my toenails, I thought that I should preserve them for posterity. I also did my girls’ toes and intended to take pictures of their toes in the sand, but good intentions don’t usually get us very far.

This is the view down the beach at SanDestin last week:

The first 2 days were beautiful and I burned. I always burn in Destin no matter how much sun block I put on. The last full day I spent under shelter.

I’ve been trying to improve my photography skills. I think that the hardest thing is just composition. I know my camera fairly well at this point — but the outside world is another thing. Maybe I’ll get a friend & go out one day next week just to take pictures. I could use the inspiration. I have felt burned out lately — the move took a lot more energy than I expected. I have almost all of the applique done on the cloned profiles I’ve been working on — and I finally got a good idea about setting it all together — but it will involve paint and stamps and foil and playing. I am thinking about setting it up in the garage. We don’t have a shop sink at this house, though. I didn’t realize how nice that was until it was gone. A wet studio is harder to set up than a dry one — although my dry studio is still a mess.