No pictures today.

Arrived in good shape mid day. Hung around the hotel for a couple of hours, then went out to "The Barn."  Set up my work space. Put up all my motif designs. I'm nervous as a cat. Welcome dinner was at 6. It was a very nice light meal. Then we went around the room and introduced ourselves. There are 40 people there these two weeks -- 20 downstairs taking a composition class from David Hornung, and 20 upstairs with Nancy Crow. She's exactly as I expected.  She said the first exercise, which we'll get tomorrow morning, would separate the boys from the men. We'll see.

I'm on my way. I'm spending the night just east of Louisville, KY. Should be there by lunch time tomorrow.

I finished shopping for the cloth I'm taking to the workshop. The assignment was to bring as many colors as possible in five values -- light, medium light, medium, medium dark and dark. When I first started collecting, I sorted them into colors -- like all the blues together, and all the greens. But then someone on Facebook said it was useful to sort them according to value. When I did this, I noticed some major gaps in my collection. I think I've filled them in. It all comes to 135 yards in 83 colors.

I'm going to a Nancy Crow workshop in a couple of weeks. It's a two week class and promises to be demanding and challenging. I'm thrilled by the prospect of rubbing shoulders with the likes of Nancy, herself, and the serious students who will be my classmates (nancycrow.com).

We have homework. I've been working on it, on and off, since February, but finished just this week. We were supposed to sketch out ideas for simple and complex motifs in black and white, then make them up in cloth. I did three sets of 16. Here are two sets. The first ones are based on shapes. The second are linear.

We were also assigned the task of collecting lots of fabric. More on that next time.

New studio

In November last year I moved my sewing room into a studio at Central Presbyterian Church a few blocks from my house in Mobile, AL. Their congregation is dramatically smaller than it used to be, so they've rented out the unused Sunday school classrooms to artists to use as studios. Mine is beautiful. It's on the third floor (no elevator) and is full of light. It inspires

me just being here.

Also notice the new long arm quilting machine.  It's been a few months now that I've had it. I practice every day and am gaining some competence.

I'm back

It's been another year, but this time, really, I am going to try to be more regular.  Here is a summary of my work in 2017.

More on the shell quilts -- I finished up the series at 13. Here is the ultimate piece.

Then I spent about 6 months experimenting with different ideas. The pieces are small, in the 18" x 25" range. The results are various.

The piece was the result of a Katie Pasquini Masopust online class on creating quilts from water color paintings.

This piece and the next few are the product of a really great online class I took with Katie PM. Called Color and Composition, we had biweekly assignments and turned in pictures of our results. Katie PM critiqued our pieces and gave some feedback.

In January 2017, I attended a workshop with Judy Coates Perez on painting on cloth with acrylic inks. In class we worked on small pieces, but later I experimented with a larger format, about 20" x 25". Here are some results. 

And finally, looking through the Quilt National 2017 book, I noticed the work of Niraja Lorenz. She uses hexagons surrounded by intricate piecing. Her quilts bear a resemblance to some earlier work I did with the interior of domes, although looking at her work I realized that with the background on my domes I was missing a big opportunity to create pattern and interest. This led me to a new series where I create intricate patterns using solid cloth. For the first time in 20 years, I didn't hand dye my fabric, but used commerical Kona cotton. Here are the first few. They haven't been quilted yet. 

So this is where I'm at now. Trying to work my way back to the hand dyes and continue in this vein without making the same quilt over and over.

Catching up

Another year has slipped by since I last wrote.  I've been busy.  Last spring I started making quilts based on the patterns in shells. The first few in this series were shades of brown and beige and gold.

But I tired of that pretty quickly and moved on to other colors.

While the colors depart from the true shell colors, these newer quilts retain the complex gradations that appear on real shells.  I see myself doing more along this line.