Monochromatic - A Study in Red

The latest challenge from Art Quilts Around the World was titled "Monochromatic". 

I had so many thoughts that I wanted to do, but they were all in blacks and grays and I really felt that I needed to do something with color. My normal go to color is blue or blues and greens or purple...all nice cool colors. 

So then I had to start thinking about what I wanted to depict. About this time my mom gave me a book about different art quilt techniques and different ideas for fabric manipulation. As I looked through this book I came across the instructions for weaving and I knew that is what I wanted to do, which just left my color choice. 

I knew that I had a little bit of red mottled yarn left from scarf I knitted last winter and knew that is what I wanted to be my base....so now I needed to figure out the weft (or the warp, I can't remember which is which and in my world that is okay). I ended up going to Etsy and purchasing a bunch of recycled sari silk ribbons. Once those arrived it was a matter of just doing it. 

In the end, I decided to leave the extra ribbon hanging and just did a satin stitch around the edges with the same variegated red thread that I quilted with. Here is the finished product: 

Here is a close up of the quilting. I started with the Sanskrit "Om" and then shadow quilted around. 

And, just to give you an idea of what I started with, here is a shot of my "loom" with the first couple of rows of woven ribbon. 

Now, on to the next challenge... 

Mom Trip Days 4 and 5

We have been in "the studio" for two days now and have really been able to unleash the creativity and are learning a lot. It is all really great fun to learn a new way to express yourself using paint on fabric. It is also incredibly tiring. I can't express how tired I am by the end of the day, but I do want to try and get this down before I slip off to Never Never Land...

We start each day with what the instructor, Susan Shie, calls "Library Time". This is a time where we take 10 minutes and just draw or journal without talking just to clear our minds. Actually, let me back up a bit... Susan is an artist that does almost folk art pieces and they are all covered in writing and tells a story and journaling her life and/or what is happening in the world at the time that she is working on a particular piece. But, to unleash the creativity in us we all have to start off drawing as if we were 6 year olds without stopping and thinking whether it is realistic or what anybody eels thinks about it and just let the juices flow. 

So, we draw or journal for 10 minutes during Library Time. Then we decide what the theme for the day is going to be. Yesterday, we made a list of things from which to draw inspiration from and then we go from there. Yesterday, our theme was "Time". That is pretty broad and left everybody open to do whatever they felt like doing. I got to thinking about the passage of time and settled on the Riddle of the Sphinx. Here is my outline drawing that I started with before I started adding color: 

And here it is with color added:

Here is a picture of our instructor and my mom's piece on the table on the lower right:

Today's theme that we were to work on was "Family". This is what I drew thus far:

I've just started adding color to it and will work more on it tomorrow, along with our next theme. 

On top of the class during the day today, this evening we went and saw a lecture from Amy Tan, author of "The Joy Luck Club" among many other books. It was in interesting talk about the "Heart of a Writer". She talked about her family and where her writing comes from within her. All really neat stuff to hear. Now, however, if am struggling to keep my eyes open, so will wrap up for now. 

Mom Trip - Day 3

We arrived at the location for our art quilt workshop and are pretty beat, so this will be a short post. 

We drove pretty much all day from Bowling Green, KY to Wooster, OH. We got stuck in construction traffic in Louisville, KY and game traffic in Cincinnati and then accident traffic in Columbus. 

The folks that we are staying with and learning from are really interesting and I'm looking forward to unleashing the creativity, but first I need to get to sleep and get rested. 

A couple of high points for the day, though were 1. Neither the subject or I realized that we would be driving into a different time zone so imagine our confusion when I looked AT&T the clock in the car and noticed that we had lost an hour. And 2. My dog walker, house sitter extraordinaire may have acquired another stray dog for me....but we will just have to see if he is still around when I return....

In the meantime, off for some much needed shut eye. 

Mom Trip - Day 2 (The Setting of Rules)

Day 2 and the subject and I are still getting along. We awoke to a lovely day in Little Rock at our pleasant Holiday Inn Express. As per custom, we partook of the free breakfast including having a cinnamon roll, which I really want to know if I can order those from somewhere and just keep them in the freezer to heat up when I'm feeling the need for a pick-me-up of flaky crust and cinnamon surgar. 

We got away only slightly later than we had planned. I started as the driver and got us as far as Memphis. We pulled over and checked out the tourist and welcome center where there is a statue of Elvis and B.B. King. They also had karaoke with a live band going on across the river at Mud Island that we could hear. We walked along the shore of the Mississippi River for a few minutes and remembered the times that we had when we lived just south across the line in Mississippi. We also texted a picture to my sister and asked her to guess where we were...this later became a theme for the day. 

Eventually, we got back in the car and continued east. Mom was behind the wheel at this point and remained the driver for the rest of the day. I was comfortable relinquishing the reins, so to speak. We drove on for another hour until I saw a sign for the Casey Jones Railroad Museum and tourist center and insisted we pull off, not because I wanted to go check out the museum, but I figured they would have a decent bathroom and, well, I really needed to use the facilities. We ended up going through the museum because it was free and sort of interesting. The museum is all about Casey Jones, conductor of legend who saved a train full of passengers from certain death in a train crash in 1900. I'm still not 100% certain about the whole story! but there is a song out there about it and he has a museum, so must be important. We did send another picture to my sister from this locale but she was flummoxed as to where we were and to be honest she was a little more concerned with watching college football, specifically the TCU Horned Frogs. 

Mom and I considered having some lunch at the restaurant there at the museum, however, upon seeing the food (sorta cafeteria/buffet style) I knew that it wasn't anything that I could stomach. They were serving good ol' home style Southern cooking (e.g., collard greens, black-eyed peas, hominy, fat back, pickled pigs feet...okay maybe that us going a little far, but you get the idea) and that is just not something my palette has ever appreciated. So, we opted for a scoop of ice cream and headed on our way. 

The next stop we made was at a rest stop just West of Nashville because for some reason today my bladder was on full output. And we got so tickled that mom almost killed us...okay, not really but we were laughing pretty hard at something that I'm pretty certain nobody else would find it quite as hilarious....building those memories. 

It was about this time that I'm looking at the atlas, because that is what the navigator is supposed to do, and I'm trying to find something. Mom looks over at the map as if she is trying to read it while driving. I calmly close the atlas and state "Here's the thing, we have to have a rule that the person in the driver's seat is not allowed to read the map as their job is to actually drive." This became the most recent thing thst got us laughing and now whenever we need to set a rule, we have to start with "Here's the thing... There will be no yelling at one another in the car" or "Here's the thing... If you need to go to the bathroom, state it calmly and with enough advance notice so that the driver can safely navigate off the highway to a clean, well lit location".

We got stopped in bumper to bumper stop and go traffic just north of Nashville and managed to go all of 1.8 miles in about 30 minutes. Luckily, mom was driving and she managed the situation with a much calmer attitude than I ever would have had. And once the traffic cleared it was clear sailing, so to speak, into Kentucky, where we pulled into the state information area to 1. Use the facilities, again and 2. Take another "guess where we are picture" to send to my sister. 

Shortly there after we arrived in Bowling Green where we checked into our hotel and walked across the street to a less than stellar dinner at another chain restaurant. I wrapped up the day by walking the halls to get my 10,000 steps in for the day and learning that my Aggies managed to come out ahead of the Razorbacks and the Horned Frogs whomped up hard on the SMU Mustangs. 

Tomorrow we have another semi long day of driving ahead where we finally arrive at the location for our quilting workshop.