Planning ahead

I have said before that anticipation is one of the most delicious parts of travelling and the prospect of a holiday is certainly helping keep me sane through this busy lead up to the Guild’s 25th Anniversary Quilt Show. Anyway, it’s coming up to crunch time for booking some internal travel in the United States for our trip at the end of the year. Our broad itinerary, based around visiting family, is as follows:

• San Francisco Bay area (early-mid December)
• Denver (mid December)
• Pittsburgh (mid December to 7 January)

Do let me know if there are any interesting textile or other art exhibitions on around these dates. Details of any great new restaurants or boutique breweries would also put a smile on the face of my travel companion. (Since stash enhancement is not a priority right now, I don’t need quilt shop details.)

Triad Dyeing

I have been asked to expand upon my earlier post about triad dyeing. I don’t think this is a technical dyeing term but it does describe the triangular arrangement that arises when you take three initial colours (not necessarily primaries) and apply the following dye ratios:
8:1:1
5:4:1     4:1:5
1:8:1     1:5:4     1:1:8
I use procion dyes and this approach can be applied to both low-immersion and bucket-dyeing techniques. Simply arrange six dyeing receptacles in a triangle and measure out the dye solutions like so:

The ‘corner’ lots will be predominantly red, blue and yellow respectively but you end up with some wonderful cross over colours in between. Here are some triad-dyed fabrics. Remarkably, the set of fabrics on the right started out with a bright red, blue and yellow. Ah the serendipity!
   
For more detailed step-by-step dyeing tutorials and heaps of other information, see Fabric Dyeing 101. One day I would love to do a workshop with Carol Soderland just as Diane is doing right now!

Minisynchronicity

Finished! ( I wish I could say the same about my quilt show entry which is going to take weeks.)

90cm x 112cm (35in x 44in)

Legacy

When we depart this mortal coil, we all have the potential to leave a legacy whether it is fleeting or enduring, public or intensely private. When I attended a workshop with Nancy Crow in Ohio last July, I met Betty Goodwin whose daughter had died (from cancer as I recall). To celebrate her daughter’s life and love for textile art, Betty’s family established the Lynn Goodwin Borgman Award for Surface Design as part of Quilt National - a biennial juried exhibition of contemporary quilts. You can see the winners of this and other awards on the Quilt National 07 gallery.

Gulp

This afternoon I pulled out my entry for the Sydney Quilt Show which opens on 26 June. My entry still needs to be quilted so I was more than a little dismayed to find that the quilt top at 170cm x 100cm is twice as big as remember it! I have my work cut out for me.

Meanwhile I can report that autumn has officially arrived at Casa da Praia. Flannel sheets have made their way onto the bed; heaters have been pulled out of storage; a pot of hearty bean soup bubbles on the stove and we expect our first whale sighting of the season any day now. I love this time of year!

My head hurts

I now remember why I haven’t updated my contemporary quilts website for a while. It’s because I wanted to use some better quilt images which means spending more time nutting out Photoshop Elements which has to be one of the most frustrating software applications around. Take this photo of my latest quilt, for example:

You will see that I have done a facing finish on the quilt (see my facing tutorial). Now to show this finish to its best effect, I would like to crop out the grey/white background. I know about the magic eraser and magic extractor tools in Photoshop, and I’ve watched this video tutorial and this video tutorial many times, BUT whenever I try to use these functions I end up with shaggy bits hanging off my quilts. So then I try to clean these bits using the manual eraser function except it doesn’t have the precision I’m looking for and I end up nudging the quilt so that it looks like Pac Man got loose. Of course the manual is of little or no assistance with the questions I have and I seem to waste vast amounts of time experimenting to no avail.

In the end, I usually retreat to the Arcsoft Photoimpression software that came with my camera. It’s pretty basic but it lets me do most things I want including cropping, resizing, fixing colour and lighting and adding text. However, I really would like to get on better speaking terms with Photoshop Elements so if anyone can recommend some useful online tutorials, please let me know!

Project Hat Trick

My third published project for this month is Single Star Wreath which appears in Vol 15 No 9 (July 2007) of Australian Patchwork & Quilting:
 
I am pleased with how the magazine photos clearly show the butterfly motif in the quilting which I achieved by quilting from the back and outlining the butterflies on the backing fabric. Here’s one of my details shots:

Personalised banners in [New] Blogger

At long last, Blogger have introduced a “header widget” that allows you to insert your own image, from your very own computer hard drive, as a blog banner WITHOUT having to fiddle around with any code. Further more, the widget has two settings. One where the image replaces your blog title and description (in which case your image should include text). The other setting floats your image behind the blog title and description - this is ideal for those of you who have a favourite photo but are not sure how to add text to a photo.

I will be updating my banner tutorial shortly. In the meantime, Carol has added a tutorial on the new process to the sidebar of her blog.

New Quilts

Congratulations to Caityquilter who has taken the plunge and is in the process of setting up a new website and a self-hosted wordpress.org blog under her own domain. As highlighted in Lorelle van Fossen’s article, When Is It Time to Leave a Free Blog?, this do-it-yourself approach is not for everyone but it has its rewards.

Of course, ongoing maintenance and fresh content is vital to any online endeavour. I’m in the process up updating my Contemporary Quilts website which has been neglected since January. Here are a couple of new, never before published quilts:
  
These were my two entries for the recent Down Under Quilts calendar competition. I had design issues with both quilts (not the least, forcing them to be 100cm square!) so I wasn’t surprised to learn that neither quilt was selected for the calendar from the 54 contenders. Janine and Tracey had better success and I look forward to seeing their calendar quilts later in the year.

Shared Rhapsody

I was joined by a small, but enthusiastic group for my Quilt & Book Talk today. Glynis and Sian (spelling?) came all the way from Sydney and brought along their splendid quilts they started in a Colour Rhapsody workshop with me last August:
     
I still have spaces left in my Colour Rhapsody workshop at Terrigal on 5 June. Contact me to reserve your place.