Mr. Love, by Gladys Love

Finally!!!  When this theme was announced I immediately knew what I was going to do.  You would think that would make it easy to be on time right?  Not so.  Life got in the way and even though I was consistently trying to sneak in moments with my project, it wasn't till this very minute that I stitched on the buttons and called it done.

This portrait was inked in a class at Empty Spools in Asilomar, California, with Lura Schwarz-Smith.  I did several in the four days, but this was the best.  I also discovered that inking wasn't the way I wanted to go about doing portraits.  But here I was with this little sample that Lura referred to as "Mr. Love". 

This is the photograph I worked from.  It was taken by his sister at a family gathering in evening light.  I liked the way his hair looks blue! But,  I feel I failed to capture him perfectly.....his chin isn't just right, but I decided I would finish it by stitching all over it in the style of Hollis Chatelain and many others.  

This turned out to be a great experiment for a larger project (the one I started in a class with Esterita Austin but have yet to finish).  

This is starting to look like an exercise in name-dropping, but it's not meant that way....I have a lot of unfinished projects and have decided 2014 is the year to not take classes and to finish a lot of what I've started and use what I've learned!  Wish me luck!  

But back to the decision to thread-paint my portrait of Mr. Love, who is indeed my husband.  

I asked Karrie, who has taken a class with Hollis Chatelain, whether she quilts the faces she does with the backing on or if she puts a backing on afterwards and re-outlines.  Karrie said she does it with the backing on.  This was my first try at this kind of thing and I thought the back would be a mess since I was new at it. So rather than putting a backing on it, I layered it with batting and a stabilizer to stitch on, planning to put backing on when it was ready to finish.  

I LOVED doing the stitching.  It is absolutely amazing how much difference the color of the thread and one little thread line in the wrong place can make.  I learned a lot with this exercise.  Mostly that it looks pretty neat on the back and I should have had backing fabric on there.  I didn't, and when I pressed it, one part of the stabilizer melted and messed up my iron.  So it's a little messy on the back.  But I liked how it looked enough that I put borders on it to make it 12 x 12 and left the back showing.  Not an entry for any competition, but a great learning project and teaching tool!  Here is what the back stitching looks like.  

The red border is a scrap of work shirt fabric and the buttons are from old work shirts.  I could only find three but would have liked five on there!  

Now, to focus on the next challenge with a shortened time frame (for me).  

Jan - Mar 2014 theme

Next theme is "put it in writing" - add a word, phrase, poem....  Enjoy, Margaret

LOVE - lots of ideas, lots of emotion (especially this period as my husband fell off our roof and did some serious damage - recovering well thank goodness).  That got me on to "emotion" and I thought music creates or accompanies every emotion it seems.  So, for me at the moment, love is music.  I must confess that I made this top (15x16) in the spring, but quilted it recently.  I could have cut it down but obviously didn't.  I think this is a case of forgiveness vs permission!  You get the idea....

... is a many-splendored thing

My quilt is on turquoise silk dupioni given to me by my sister a long, long time ago. Enough said about my sister. I love her.  Very much.

I also love rummaging through my collections of "stuff" and finding things that I started to make (?) or was thinking "what if",  or wondered "what on earth will I do with that?". This piece is loaded with those things. Pearls. Beads. Paint. Tyvek. Lutradur. Angelina fibres. Mistyfuse. Melty areas. Alcohol paints - I love how they interact with each other. Pearl-Ex ... and on and on.

Several months ago, I hand-quilted some random circles on the silk and forgot about it until I was looking for background fabric for the Tyvek. About that same time, I made the rectangular piece out of other "what ifs" (Lutradur, heat gun, paint Mistyfuse, Angelina fibres) and I like the way it looks on the top, with pearls, sequins, crystals and beads. 

The upper right corner of the Tyvek has been left open to let more love in and out - and I have purposely left the edges raw and let the Angelina fibres spill off the edges.

Happy 2014, everyone!

First Snowfall

There is something magical about stepping out your back door and all you can hear is snow falling. One gorgeous evening here at home the sky was a deep blue black, no cars, no people, everything out in the garden was covered in a pristine blanket of snow. All our trees had a soft fluffy blanket around them.

 I have been wanting to do a piece based on this photograph for a while now and this challenge seemed to fit the bill.  Many of my friends will tell you I love trees. I have loads of pictures of trees, of bark, of moss ect.
I had to edit the piece down as we are working in a 12x12 format.

I played with adding some "snow" to the branches but didn't really like it so I took it off.

So I added some snow to the bottom of my tree, and liked that better.

Here is the finished piece. This was a very interesting challenge. (getting a good photo of the finished piece was also a challenge) I hope you all "Love" it!

Love is at the Heart of all Things....

Write it on your heart 

that every day is the best day in the year.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our quarterly challenge topic is LOVE!  When I think of love, I think of hearts, in this case LOTS of hearts (64 to be precise).  This piece definitely took much, much, much more time than anticipated. The first picture is of the entire piece and each subsequent one is a close-up of a portion of it.

Chocolate Fantasy!

Chocolate Fantasy?! you are thinking - I thought the theme was love! Well at first I found the topic to be quite challenging. I had some lovely ideas but as always the issue was how to execute the ideas. Maybe I was over thinking this. So I asked my husband what image came to mind when I said "Love" and he said "I love Chocolate Cake". Feeling very inspired I raided Glady's fabric stash for the perfect piece of velvet and proceeded to make cake. This piece came together pretty fast and I have to admit I had a lot of fun making it. The hardest part was getting a decent picture! You would never know it was a cloudy day when I took these.

This picture isn't too bad but still a touch shiny so I tried again.








I think you can see the detail better on this one. The ribbon is from our favorite place to buy cake that you can actually eat! Its from Cakebread bakery so decadent hubby and I share a slice.



 So you may be wondering about the "Chocolate Fantasy" well in my very active imagination the background is dark chocolate wallpaper, the velvet cake with satin icing and chocolate sprinkles speak for themselves (I hope) and the plate is chocolate too!!! I hope you "love" chocolate cake too!!