Beautiful Idyllwild, CA

After my last day of teaching, we found out there was a free concert in the park in town, so after dinner MaryRose and I grabbed a bottle of wine and few few folding chairs from the garage of our cabin and headed to the park.

We ran into Laura from class and sat down with her and eventually got up and danced under the pines.

While driving into town we passed this construction project and had to stop to read the sign.

I love this!

Pine cones!

The pinecones were huge up here in the mountains.

So many choices!

The rock formations on the drive to and from Idyllwild were fascinating, sharp and angular rock next to soft and rounded forms. This looks like the Venus of Villendorf on the side of the hill. Which seems totally fitting for this place.

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Come play with Decolourant at Festival in Long Beach

I'm flying south to meet up with my good friends Leslie Jenison and Jamie Fingal today! Then we're off to Long Beach for Festival on Wednesday!

Thursday night July 28th, at 7pm, at International Quilt Festival, I am doing a Make it University workshop using DeColourant.

 DeColourant Discharge & Color Sampler

We'll make freezer paper templates and foam stamps to discharge fabric and add color all in one step without toxic fumes.

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Art Quilts: Painting and Surface Design at Idyllwild Arts

Our studio for 3 days, amongst the boulders and pines. It was lovely, Idyllwild Arts is such a fabulous retreat venue!

Day 1 Color Theory

Day 2 Painting

a few people kept working on their paintings after class and brought finished paintings the next day.

Day 3  Mixed Media

What a wonderful 3 days!

Noel, Erin, Me Darcy, Laura, Jan, Sue & MaryRose

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What fun I've been having!

I arrived in LA friday afternoon, met a friend for a drink in Santa Monica by the beach, then headed to The Los Angeles County Museum of Art to meet up with my college roommate Amy, who I stayed with over the weekend. Lucky me! Amy is the head designer at the museum and she gave me VIP tickets to see the Tim Burton exhibit, I am a huge Tim Burton fan.

After seeing the amazingly inspirational exhibit, I met up with several architect friends I used to work with 20 years ago as a graphic designer. Now, these guys own a successful architectural firm in Hollywood. We went to dinner at a fantastic Mediterranean Tapas restaurant called Cleo on Hollywood and Vine. After dinner, we had a drink on the rooftop patio and stopped to take a silly photo in the lobby, too fun, I love these guys!

In the morning, I went to breakfast with Amy and several of her friends, who are museum textile curators and heard about their amazing project designing a textile museum for the Queen of Thailand. These are a couple of their recent books.

While in Silverlake, I took a lovely morning walk and came upon this fence embellished with tiny painted chairs,

beautifully aged by the elements.

I miss gardens filled with bougainvillea, cacti and succulents,

I love this prehistoric grass!

In the afternoon, we stopped by my favorite art supply store in Glendale, Swains, to pick up some matte medium for my class in Idyllwild and had to admire the life size stuffed dogs in the window.

This one reminds me of a friend's dogs in Chicago :-)

You know you are in California, when the corner store sells pot!

My last night in LA, we ate dinner on Amy's patio and were visited by two skunks several times, luckily they waddled away with some gentle shooshing. They were so pretty, but I was a little nervous about getting sprayed the day before leaving to teach, lol!

Obviously we were disturbing their dinner plans, as you can see by the big raccoon who came by to eat the cat food, after we went inside.

Today, I fly to Northern California for the weekend with my mom, I'll post pics of my fantastic time in Idyllwild tomorrow. 

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Woo hoo! Just got notice

Oh Deer, Look What's Become of me! will be heading to Houston for International Quilt Festival!

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Have you tried Transfer Artist Paper?

My dear friend Lesley Riley has a new book out for how to use the transfer paper she developed called TAP. The book is filled with great information including the pro's and cons of using TAP on different substrates; fabric, lutradur, glass, metal, wood, paper, clay..., examples of all sorts of different ways to use it and project ideas.

Lesley invited me to create a project for the book, I have been a faithful user of TAP from the beginning. TAP is a coated paper used with an ink jet printer, the image is transfered to the substrate with a hot iron.

The cool thing about TAP is that after your image is printed out, you can draw or add color with a variety of media to the paper and when you iron it to your fabric it is all transferred permanently.

I drew my image on sketch paper, scanned it, changed my line drawing to a warm gray color in photoshop then printed it onto TAP. I used Cretacolor water soluble crayons to paint my image, then transferred it to fabric. I used Kona solid cotton leftover from another project, it worked great. I found when I used a tighter woven fabric like cotton sheeting it felt a little stiff. I did a little simple machine quilting and used embroidery floss to add hand stitched details.

My daughter Indigo (Nina) has also spent some time working with TAP. She drew directly on TAP with a ball point pen then transferred it to raw canvas.

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