13th Steet Studio

Bird Watching

Hope everyone had a good day yesterday. We celebrated Mother's Day with donuts for breakfast and pizza for supper here. Not fancy, but it works for me!
I finished sewing a blouse that my mother started for herself back when she still had a sewing machine and the space to use it. When she gave up her house, she gave me the half finished project and said maybe I could finish it. It finally made it to the top of the pile last week, so I was able to pass it off as a Mother's Day present. It had been a long time since I have tried to set in sleeves and make buttonholes! Guess it took me too long to get to it....Mom didn't remember giving it to me. (I used to get out of mending my kids' clothes by just waiting until they had outgrown them.) Anyway, she was glad to get the blouse, and I was glad to get an old project out of the sewing room.
I've been doing some bird watching via the internet....
There is a pair of falcons that have successfully raised families for several years running in a box on a tower in Rochester, NY. Some of the offspring have been sighted raising there own families in other areas lately. This year Mariah, the mother falcon, has hatched out five babies-a large group yet again. You can watch them in all their fluffy white glory here. The photo updates every few minutes. Falcons are a good solution to pigeon over-population, but I do hate the bird-eat-bird aspect of it all.
I've also been watching baby barn owls in Texas again this spring here. They are just about to fly out of the box, though, so it will be a sad empty nest soon. This nest has a video camera on duty, so we can watch all of the action. Some nights it is just incredible how many mice and rats the mom and dad owls bring in for their family. What a good way to control the rodents!
Closer to home...yesterday just before sunset, we saw Ruby-throated humming birds enjoying the flowers on our chestnut tree. They seem to pass through here in the spring and the fall...although I have been told that if I'd put out feeders, I'd have them for the whole summer. Here is a photo my husband took of one of them. I guess it would take a pretty speedy shutter setting to get their wings to not look blurred.

Beachcombing

Several years ago, my daughter and I watched a Jim Carrey movie called "The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind". I'm not very good at summarizing plot lines, but two things about the movie made a big impression on me. The first thing was a new invention in the movie that erased memories. When couples broke up, they could pay to have the memories of their time together erased. When parents lost children, they could have the memories of their loss removed. Aspects of this service really appealed to me. Eternal sunshine, indeed! Jim Carrey's character is distressed to learn that his former girlfriend is erasing her memories of him. The one thought that he gets her to remember is "Meet me in Montauk"....a fragment of a trip they took together to Montauk, NY. I think they do reunite in Montauk and start over at the end of the movie...the typical happy ending.
Well, when my daughter decided to attend college on Long Island (Montauk is on the most eastern end of Long Island), we would occasionally kid each other about meeting in Montauk. She is just finishing up her Junior year, and it became obvious that if I was going to meet her in Montauk, time was running out. Plus, this has been a long, sad winter for my family, and I was looking for some Eternal Sunshine. So, last week we met in Montauk....and while I was not expecting it to be warm and sunny, I didn't realize just how bone chilling the wind off of the Atlantic Ocean can be on a gray rainy day. There was precious little sunshine. Not zero, mind you... there was enough so I could see why the rich and famous love the Hamptons, which are back west a bit on the island. The highlight of our weekend in Montauk was probably watching "Baby Momma", which is an enjoyable movie that will probably NOT stick in my brain.

Artists' Trading Cards: My Backyard...the return

Here are the artist trading cards I got back in the "My Backyard" swap! They are all so different. But you know...I bet if we really looked at pictures of our backyards, there wouldn't be a whole lot of difference. Its all in how you look at it, right?

Just for Fun

I made this quilt last week just for the fun of sewing it. Just ignored all of the unfinished works in progress and gonna-do plans and started cutting narrow strips from some left over bright colored Fabri-quilt fabrics. Then I sewed wider strips of navy fabric on each side of the bright fabrics and cut the resulting strips into six inch squares. As I was sewing the binding on, I kept thinking about what to do with this quilt.... and didn't come up with anything. It was too big to donate to my guild's mini-quilt auction, and too small for several other uses. Just as I finished it up, I got a request for a donation to a fund-raiser auction for Women's Transitional Care Services. Off it goes, and a perfect ending!

Spring Quilt Market

It is almost Quilt Market time again, and once again I have been rounding up quilts made by members of Kansas Art Quilters for Fabri-quilt. The folks at Fabri-quilt send me the fabric that they want used for quilts for their booth at market. They usually pick a theme for the quilts and often a size. This time there was no theme, but only a size requirement. All of the quilts were to be 30 inches square, and...well, they also asked that we not use any 3-D embellishments. Both of those rules are enough to make the project challenging, though. Soon, all of the quilts will be on the Kansas Art Quilter website at www.kansasartquilters.org, but for now here is a picture of the one I made. I call it "Atomic Flowers".

Sunday School Chagall

I volunteered to come up with a group art project for a Sunday School Family Education Day last Fall. Naturally, I could only think of things to do with fabric. Inspired by Susie Monday's project shown here, I thought that it would be fun to take a famous Chagall painting "I and the Village", shown here:
And then "cut" it up and have everyone do the coloring on their own individual rectangular piece of the picture. When sewn back together, the differences in technique and colors used would make for an interesting mosaic effect. I think Susie drew her own version of the artwork that her group used in this type of project, but being rather lazy, I took a shortcut. I found a Dover Chagall coloring book that had converted "I and the Village" into a line drawing, ready for coloring. I scanned that page and then divided it up into 25 pieces, using a very cool free software program called The Rasterbater. (Seriously, this is a fun way to produce a GIANT picture!) Using white fabric that was attached to freezer paper and then cut to 8.5 by 11 inch pages, I printed out the coloring book page that had been blown up by Rasterbater. I also printed out two copies of the original artwork in color on paper....in a small size, about 8 by 10 inches. On both, I drew in the lines where Rasterbater had divided up the image and gave each section a number. One of these color images was left intact, but the second one was cut up along those lines, and each little piece of the image was stapled to its corresponding fabric/freezer paper page that the computer had produced. That way each person could see where their part of the image was located, and what color it was in the original. Then we set the group loose with crayons and markers. I also provided some strips of fabric for the participating families to sign and decorate. When they were done, I sewed the colored pieces together and quilted the black parts with black thread. The finished product is about 40 by 60 inches. I am rather proud of how it turned out...take a look!

Artists' Trading Cards: My Backyard

The March theme for the Artists' Trading Cards swap that I am part of is "My Backyard". My backyard is a heavily shaded slope that never gets enough water. The grass has more or less given up, but there are big patches of a volunteer vine that I think is Euonymus. This slope overlooks rental housing for college students. I like living in a college town, as having a large population of young people keeps things....well, young. But they party and make noise and everyone of them seems to have at least one car. Anyway, my backyard connects with backyards that have the rubble left over from a plastic chair crushing contest that some of the guys had last week. (Rules of the game seemed to be: see how much damage can be done to a plastic lawn chair by throwing a cement block down on it from the deck.) And the remnants of a beer bottle batting practice that was held after the chair contest....
But back to the ATCs. Reality would be difficult to show in fabric, I decided. My cards have my fantasy backyard. English style gardens full of flowers and wrought iron fences. Lots of rain to keep everything blooming. So lovely!

Listing

For some reason, I volunteered to write a monthly article for Ragged Cloth Cafe. Well, I guess I was looking for something to force myself to look at art outside of my little world, and I am enjoying doing that. My article for March looks at the work of three male artists; two that spent a large portion of their lives in mental institutions, and a third that has been diagnosed as autistic. The work ranges from humorous to creepy. My favorite of the three is Gregory L. Blackstock. I just love his careful, detailed visual lists of everyday items. A book of his work has been recently published...check it out! Yes, I suppose a book cover filled with birds did catch my eye quicker than one with, say, cats.

Whatever.

Trash Walking

As my previous post might have suggested, I have trouble not hauling home usable items I see put out for the trash truck....
Several years ago I had the opportunity to visit friends temporarily living in Tokyo. They had an apartment in the suburbs of the city, where nearly all of the housing was in what I would call medium to large apartment buildings. One thing about apartments in Japan, though, they seemed to all have balconies... which I think is an apartment life life-saver. It makes the apartment seem much less like a college dormitory, and having a personal door to the outside air is a wonderful cure for claustrophobia. These balconies are an important energy saving device too, since they were used to dry laundry.
Anyway, my friend had found the best motivation for a brisk walk every morning! She would check out the dumpsters for treasures as she circled the neighborhood. Apartments are small in Tokyo, and there is no storage space for extra belongings. There didn't seem to be any demand for second-hand items, either, so the only thing to do with unwanted kitchenware and decorative items was to toss them into the trash. If one piece of a set of dishes was broken, the rest were thrown out, it seemed. My friend did not have to ask me twice if I'd like to come along on her rounds. This was the first and only time I have looked forward to exercise! We found such great stuff! Some days, we could hardly carry it all back. I didn't end up spending much on souvenirs on this trip, but I still had trouble getting all of my treasure packed into my bags for my return. Here is one set of plates that I brought home from Tokyo. They were recently hung in my new "yellow room". I don't know how many were in the original set, but five is good enough for me. They all have gold metallic accents, and three of them have birds in the design along with the flowers. So, you know I think they are fabulous. Thank you Brenda, for a great time in Tokyo! Every time I think about going back there, I think...well, if I'm staying in a hotel...how can I dumpster dive?

Seating for One

While bouncing around the internet I found an inspirational blog by fabric store owner J.Caroline that has some great "how-tos". My favorite of these are the chairs that she recovers using beautiful fabric from her store. Just look at this thrift store find that she redid:
She also did another chair in a large black and white floral print that can be seen here. Not bad for a $3 Goodwill find!
A while back, I saw a chair that had been put out in the trash for the garbage guys to pick up. It was in front of a house that I had to drive by several times in the course of the two days before trash pickup, and finally, I just had to stop and put the poor thing in my car. It has such great "bones"! It had these curly metal elements that made it look like patio furniture, but it also had an upholstered seat and back, which made it seem like an indoor chair. The upholstery was beyond dirty, but both the seat and the back were easy to remove and recover. I spray painted the metal frame a bright yellow, and they did some shaky hand painting in green and red. I have a poster from Israel that features brightly colored "curly" chairs, and I thought that this chair would look good sitting in front of that poster. It would be a fabulous decorator accent, not a single chair that didn't match anything else in the house. Well, somehow, the look just wasn't what I hoped for. The chair was nice looking in a gaudy sort of way, but it didn't "draw your eye" to the poster. But it is a nice addition to my newly yellow painted room. I collected large amounts of that Hoffman Sunflower fabric in a variety of colorways back in the day....thinking I'd do a "Sunflower" room someday. It could still happen.