Move over Fairfield, Here Come the Batty Binders

I am fortunate to be able to quilt with several quilt guilds, but the local one in Troy is called the Batty Binders.  Last week was our Christmas gathering.  This year, which started in September, they have deemed "the year of giving."

These two tables, and the packages on the floor is what was brought to donate to the Battered Women's Shelter, the Homeless Shelter, the local Food Pantry, and the Animal Shelter.

While it may not look like much, you have to understand that only about 35 women brought all these items, and much of the items for the food pantry were personal hygiene products which don't come cheap.

In addition, there are more blankets for the homeless shelter and Project Linus which are not seen here, nor the 15 dog pillows which Gwen delivered to the animal shelter last week.  Several of these piles are actually pajamas...some of which were home made.  I'm working on finishing mine.  I was really pleased when they announced this as I had cut out three pairs of high quality flannel PJ bottoms for Meg last year before I realized that I had cut them too small.  The waste of all that fabric made me sick, but I didn't know what to do with it...so I set them aside.  Now, I can finish them and get some t-shirts to go with them and someone will have some nice pjs from my error.

We always have show and tell....and this is a Christmas Tree skirt one of our members made...Gwen, in typical silliness, decided to model it for us....I think our Batty Binder's runway is certainly a challenge to the Fairfield Fashion Show....or maybe not....

Cool Recycled fiber piece

My quilty friend and former neighbor in Meriden, Connecticut just sent me this really cute fiber pin.  The pink backing is just a piece of paper the pin was mounted on...the bird itself is made out of felted sweater wool and the zippers were recycled out of old stuff as well.

I look at designs like this and think  "Wow...how did they come up with it?"  I don't think I'd ever think of something as clever as this.

And I thought this was Supposed to be Easy.....

Carillon, left side by Lisa Broberg Quintana, right side by  Sue DeSantis

Last week Thursday, Sue DeSantis, Carroll Schleppi and I went to David Lorenz' studio to take the photographs of the "slice" quilts we did for the Dayton Landmarks Project with the Miami Valley Art Quilt Network.  Ronnie Doyal took photographs of places in and around Dayton which are familiar landmarks.  We divided the photographs giving each quilter a portion of the photograph to interpret in cloth.

Most of them are finished.  Since we are waiting for three segments to be done, we decided that we would shoot them as individual slices and then Ronnie showed me how to merge them using Photoshop.  I have Photoshop Elements(PSE)  7 loaded on my computer, and had purchased PSE 9 in June but hadn't loaded it because I thought that this computer (c. 2003) was going to die at any minute.....it still might...  I had Barbara Brundage's "Missing Manual" for PSE9 so I thought I was in pretty good shape.

Not.

For one thing, I spent hours trying to get PSE9 to load, chatted on line with Adobe techs, and finally called to find out why it wouldn't load.  According to the telephone guy, PSE9 has some incompatibility issues with PSE9.  So....back to figuring out layers, magic extraction tools, making a blank document and joining the segments....  I decided that I would do Sue DeSantis and my piece on the Carillon in Dayton as it only had 2 segments.  Sue had completed hers first, and I did mine second.  

Well....I don't like the job I did with PSE7....and I certainly don't like the 18 hours of time it took me to make the join...but I'm hoping that the next segment might work better...You'll notice that I matched the tops OK, but the bottom overlaps and I can't seem the grab that part and move it over..there's only so much that that little hand tool will do for me!

There's nothing so painful as banging ones head up against a desk trying to figure out the method while hearing all the other things I need to do snickering in the background.  Harumph.

Carillon, photograph which the above was based on, by Ronnie Doyal

You can find information on Carillon Park in Dayton  here.http://www.daytonhistory.org/

Juxtapostion

I took this picture on October 21, 2011.  On the one hand, I was disgusted by the fact that the Christmas trees were up and available to purchase that early.   On the other hand, I was amused by the sign which hung merrily over them.

I wonder when they will grow up....

My daughter is home from college.  While she has picked up a part time job, she's bored.  So bored, she decorated the Christmas tree the weekend after Thanksgiving.

We were wondering when we set the tree up (an artificial one--a long story behind that as we always cut our own until 2007) if Lemmie at age 3 would have grown out of his habit of climbing up through the middle of the Christmas tree.

The answer is a resounding no.  Sometimes you're surprised as you walk by the tree and discover a grey head sticking out among the ornaments.  He's also managed to bend some of the branches as he weighs 12 pounds.

I'm also wondering if they have a special class in college which teaches freshmen to act as if their parents have no brains....and all of a sudden, she has become hyper critical of my housekeeping.  Although I dusted yesterday, she decided it wasn't good enough and plans to dust again tomorrow.  Sigh.  If only it weren't accompanied by attitude.  I think she's too old for coal and sticks in her stocking.

On Line Quilting Courses and my experience with Pamela Allen

Back in July, I saw that Pamela Allen was offering an online quilting class.  Part of me wondered how in the world one could take an online quilting class, but then, since Pamela titled her class "Think Like an Artist" and said that it would be focusing on design, I thought that it should be fine.

I admire Pamela's work. Go to her website and look at some of her pieces.   I love the spontaneity, her use of color and texture.  I laugh at the almost cartoon-like abstraction that she uses.  Since Pamela doesn't teach in the United States and since I don't think I'm going to be making any trips to Canada soon, I decided I'd sign up.

After all....I was thinking we'd handle a lesson a week.  How hard could that be? I was getting my daughter ready to take to her freshman year at college, had to take her to orientation, and was still fatigued from chemo. But hey, it's quilting.  How hard could that be?

Ahem.  Well....I once again thought I was superwoman, only I seem to have misplaced my cape some where.

It was really hard.  In fact, it was so hard that I'm still behind one project, and haven't sewn down and quilted the others.

Pamela does a huge amount of work with her students.  We had a good group and several had had classes with Pamela before and so knew what to expect.  She showed us examples of what she's talking about, using her own work as examples as well as fine art pieces.  We critiqued.  Pamela critiqued and used photo editing to show us what she meant....and it was brilliant.

We were not to draw anything.  We were to free-cut our fabric and create our pieces.  The first work you see here is my self-portrait with our personal symbolism.  One of the things that Pamela reminded us about is not to make our pieces trite and cliche...so, instead of holding a cat (I have three...as I am an animal lover, not just cats), I'm holding a Dutch rabbit.....sort of a reference to cousin Maggie's dutch house bunny.  The swirl represents my mastectomy....and look at the plant at the side of the composition....can you tell what kind of houseplant it is?

The piece above is another lesson involving personal symbolism.  This is my first attempt, what Pamela recieved.  I was amused, and sort of surprised, when one of the class members thought it was a salmon run (it's koi or goldfish pond).

This is the first bit that Pamela did to improve the composition....why I didn't think of using it as a landscape orientation which seems so obvious, I don't know.  I think it is because the brocade I used had the large gold strip along the side so when I was looking at the yardage I got mentally stuck in how it was "supposed". to go.

This is far preferable to my original work....but Pamela had no idea about the symbolism, and took out the small goose at the foot of the iris.

Obviously, a goose is part of my identity....I've been Michigoose a very long time on the web and of course my blog name and my Amazon store name both bear witness to this.

When I explained this, Pamela lifted a goose from one of her own works which was more monumental and dropped it into my scene.  Pretty cool, eh?

I hope to get back and finish these.   Was it worth it? In true Michiganese, "You betcha!"  In fact, I enjoyed it so much and felt that I learned a lot from it that I have signed up for another course, this time through Quilters University, this time with Elizabeth Barton whose work I also admire....However, I have all intentions of clearing my calendar and concentrating solely upon the class.  At least that's the goal.

I think I'll do some more work with Pamela's style...but I don't think I'll stick with it.  As much fun as it is, it is Pamela's style, and I have my own style.

Spider....

Saturday, my neighbor came running over to the house to get me.  "Lisa! There's the great spider, and you've got to see it! Dave says you LOVE spiders."

Uh...no.  Actually, I don't like them.  At all.  However, I'm tolerant of them because of the important job they do.  They do, however, make my skin crawl.  Too many eyes, too many teeth, too many legs...and HAIRY.  However, I do appreciate their fantastic colors and the wonderful webs.

This was the specimen that I was told I HAD to see.  It's an orb weaver, the ones which make the really cool, very large webs.  She is a common yellow garden spider, Argiope aurantia.  One of the characteristics of orb weavers is that they tend to hang in their webs head down.  


I was a little surprised to see this one this late in the year....Cool colors, cool spider....as long as it stays outside.