More Progress

Today’s whale count: 10 Yet I managed to wrest myself from gazing out to sea long enough to finish piecing this quilt top:

Sunday Whale Count: Seven

In answer to Kirsten’s question, I have not yet tired of delighting in seeing whales. Here are some snapshots from today’s viewing:
  
  

Whale Watch

The combination of clear blue skies and relatively calm seas provides ideal conditions for looking out for whales. Yet whale watching is an unpredictable and tricky exercise as they often surface only momentarily leaving you precious little time to grab or refocus the binoculars before they disappear again. This is yesterday’s whale watch report:

• Number of whales spotted: 6 I mean 4, no 5 (I think)
• Number of times distracted by passing pelicans: 3
• Number of waves or watercraft mistaken for whales: 11
• Number of splotches on the windows easily mistaken whales: 1,020,031
• Number of times I thought about cleaning the windows: 7
• Number of times I actually cleaned the windows: 0
• Number of fine excuses for dirty windows: 4 (and counting)

The whales I see are mostly humpbacks, with a distinctive dorsal fin, making their way from Antarctica to the Great Barrier reef for breeding as shown on this whale migration map. If I was able to hitch a ride, I could go and visit Kirsty.

A Day in the City

Try as I might, a visit to the dentist does not make for a compelling blog post. I arrived in the city with a few minutes to spare so ducked into the Museum of Australian Currency Notes which definitely looks worthy of a return visit when I have more time. Afterwards, I headed for the gallery of The Arts & Crafts Society of New South Wales in the historic Rocks precinct in search of some small house gifts to take overseas with me. I didn’t find anything suitable for my purposes but, as always, the shop has a lovely array of quality craft items (including clothing and textile pieces) at most reasonable prices. A must-stop-place for the discerning visitor to Sydney.

Finally, I was able to catch up with my brother before he heads off next week to work as an audio technician at the Beijing Olympics:

Making Waves @ The Cottage Quiltworks

Apparently I missed a spectacular breaching whale display but I was Making Waves of a different kind today with my students at The Cottage Quiltworks. Here is a selection of student work, from Japanese fabrics to batiks, brights to soft romantics:
.
I will next be teaching this workshop at Midsomer Quilting near Bath (United Kingdom) on Sunday, 12 October. It would be wonderful if you could join me. (Helen will be there too.)

Closer to home, I will be teaching the following workshops in July and August:

• Wednesday, 23 July - Colour Rhapsody at The Cottage Quiltworks;
• Friday, 25 July - Power Stripping at The Horsley Patch; and
• Wednesday, 13 August - Serendipity Circles at The Cottage Quiltworks.

Contact the relevant shops directly to book your place.

Utopia: So near & yet so far

After a highly acclaimed season at the National Museum of Art in Osaka and the National Art Centre in Tokyo, the exhibition Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye is coming to the National Museum of Australia.

I was looking forward to seeing her paintings in person while I am in the capital for the Canberra Quilt Show (7-10 August) but unfortunately the exhibition doesn’t open until 22 August and appears to close before I get back from France. Sigh.

For Marie

Back in the early 80s, when I was in 10th grade, I made my first trip overseas and travelled to New Caledonia on exchange with my French class. I stayed with a wonderful family for three weeks and my billet came to New Zealand to stay with my family for a month. Although I have never returned to Noumea, Fabienne and I have remained in regular contact and have seen each other many times including a memorable trip to South America together in 1993.

Anyway, last month Fabienne gave birth to her second daughter - Marie. This exciting news was a very good reason to finish off this quilt:


I was very happy with the heart vines in the centre that I quilted in variegated pastel thread in April. With some very generous guidance from Patsy Thompson, I quilted the balance of the quilt in white thread with a plume filler design. Despite some tension troubles, I couldn’t be more thrilled with the results. Now off to the Post Office…

The Gees Bend Quilts Are Coming !

Back in mid-2006, when I was in Seattle, I was fortunate to view a selection of quilts from Gees Bend together with prints by Gees Bend artists Mary Lee Bendolph and Louisana Bendolph and a collection of other works influenced by the tradition of patchwork and quilting. I did not anticipate that the Gees Bend quilts would ever make it as far as Australia but they are coming this November to:

I’ll be back from overseas by then and plan on going to Canterbury for another look.

Copyright & Royalty Free Images

As participants in both the creative and online communities, we should all take the time to learn the basics of copyright law and to act in a respectful and responsible way towards our fellow creators. The website of the Copyright Council of Australia is a great starting point and includes useful information sheets of a general introductory nature. (The Quilters’ Newsletter website also has a series of articles on Copyright for Quilters from a US and pre-blog era perspective.)

Quiltmakers as copyright owners have a number of rights, including the right to control the reproduction” (eg photography) of their work and the right to control the “communication” of that material “to the public” such as via the internet. Thus, even if a quilt show allows photography, this does not extend to permitting you to publish those images online.

Furthermore, even when you do have permission to publish images online, care should be taken not to infringe the creator’s moral rights. Moral rights are:
• the right to be attributed as the creator of the work;
• the right not to have the work attributed to someone else, or as the creator’s unaltered work if it has been substantially altered; and
• the right not to have the work treated in a way that would be prejudicial to the creator’s honour or reputation.

There are steps that you can take to protect images of your work online including watermarks (blerk!); using low resolution images (they load faster anyway); including explicit copyright notices; hotlink protection (if the images are stored on a personal server); image-locking and right-click disabling (doesn’t stop screenshots and often results in non-standards compliant websites). However, in the end, the only safeguard against copying is never to publish online and where’s the fun in that?!

Unauthorised, unattributed copying of text and images will always occur and the “damage” suffered will often be minimal. Nevertheless, I take the view that it is important to do the right thing yourself and educate others where possible. If you really admire someone’s work, it’s an easy matter to include a link and not much harder to seek/obtain consent to copy an extract online. Similarly, most artists will respond favourably if you request their permission to reproduce their work in a textile medium. (See, for example, Diane’s Twelve by Twelve water quilt based on a photo found on Flickr.)

There are many royalty-free image databases available online such as Wikimedia Commons. What is your favourite source for free content images?

Whale Tracks

Time management is all very well but I make no apology for spending a lot of time gazing out to sea, especially at this time of the year as the whales head north for winter. (I’ve seen four today.)

I love the ever-changing patterns created on the surface of the water by the wind, waves and currents. Here at Casa da Praia, we call these patterns whale tracks.

This is a detail shot of my latest quilt inspired by my surroundings. It shows some of the shibori dye work that I did along the way with the Twelve by Twelve Water Theme Challenge.