Just Shoot Me!

(LMAO Disclaimer: I wrote the blog post title this morning before finding out that today's photo class assignment is a self portrait. I swear I didn't know! )

It's funny how the drama of sunrise is so etherial. Five minutes and gone. A reminder to do something wonderful today.

Summer has turned my brain to mush. I want to be free of my obligations (as much as I love them all) and just work in the (literally) blooming garden. "But wait," you say, "it's just now Spring!" Well tell that to this crazy record breaking climate. The birds are going totally nuts around here vying for territory and mates and building nests like their eggs are ready to drop at any second. The poor kitty who lives here has had several breakdowns over the commotion. The first day the wild noise began outside he ran about from window to door, howling all day.  I was ready to call the vet for a tranquilizer (for one or both of us). By day three, he'd setting to just excited watchfulness, and my nerves could settle too. But this last Saturday, when the whole world exploded into summer weather, the "air traffic" was out of control with dive bombing cardinals at the front door and my poor baby moaning and backing up the stairs like it was a Hitchcock movie and he was the blond heroine under attack.

A woodpile, underexposed, speaks of decay
 and the lost promise of time wasted.

Just one week ago, there was just barely a hint of spring in this overexposed shot of my back yard. Today the green is bursting out.

Because I was already enrolled in or completing projects for at least four online activities, plus a wagon load of things to prep for for my quilt guild show in two weeks, I decided it was necessary to enroll in yet another class. Photography is becoming an essential tool in my art arsenal of mediums, and for both practical and pleasurable purposes I am determined to learn some skills with my camera. I am again taking a two week intensive session with Steve Sonheim, Photo Silly Advanced. We are at the halfway point, and I can say I am once again making discoveries of what can be done that I would never have thought to try without a good "silly" lesson.

A naturally backlit still life in the sewing room.

Late afternoon sun and a kitty chasing shadows and reflections.

Husband on a mission and captured in the light of sunset.

One thing I learned last week is that a husband who works an 80 hour week must be caught on "film" to prove he really exists. But like Peter Pan, he was more elusive than his shadow. Our only date of the week was a quick trip to Home Depot for wooden dowels, and plywood for an upcoming drawing class (more about that another day, except meanwhile you may want to check out Carla Sonheim's new class offering in April.) The best discovery was how much I like black and white photography, and that, yes, a digital camera can be set to shoot in b&w rather than removing the color in editing. Who knew? Steve's assignments usually include doing something scary, like photographing strangers. I got to do a portrait series with a workout friend I barely knew previously, and found the experience to be tough, but exhilarating and liberating for both of us.

A portrait is a moment captured that reminds you who you were just then.

Hippos gather for "Bedtime Stories."

Charm and imagination lost in the color and light.

The scene of the crime showing alternate light sources I tried: holiday lights, candles, cell phone and the small flashlight in the middle that was used.

I've been doing quite a bit of stitching lately, some creative, some routine, but all quite satisfying. No matter what, needle and thread will always be my natural choice of writing medium. Probably because it has been with me since childhood, and has become so natural a part of my everyday life. Drawing will take a lot more time, but my ease with it grows every week. The shrine book from Arlee Barr's class is in its final stages of construction (mostly waiting for the Man to cut the dowels). The TAST challenge continues weekly with worldwide inspiration and friendship from fellow stitchers. And that quilt show. It's a rather big affair for a small local guild, and I find it's the perfect way to force myself to complete whatever is on the back burner from the previous couple (or more) years.

Horizontal sashing complete, vertical choices await cutting.

My biggest challenge has been turning a mixed media piece (my first ever) from a class last year into something more polished and connected to my recent artistic mission. I have begun to let my creativity flow in all directions as it will, and be more accepting of what emerges. Having spent quite a bit of time writing this blog the last year and a half, that direction is starting to be more verbal. The theme of the unfinished quilt, "The Time Machine," was based only on the visual impression of the paths and pendulum-like arm that appeared in my freely drawn quilting design. For over a year  I have stared at it and tried to find a way to complete the thought. One night last week as I was waiting for sleep, a small simple poem came to me and I knew it was the answer:

If you will only listen carefully

the universe will show you the way...

Follow the Time Machine

back down the path to lost hopes and dreams.

Rediscover Yourself.

Adding the embroidered borders.

It is the truth of my life and it summed up my recent artistic journey as a time travel to reclaim something I left behind. Additionally, with the usual synchronicity of such moments, a perfect piece of fabric had been plucked that week from the stash of a dear friend who purchased it with good intention, but died last year without giving it purpose. Her contribution now rings the quilt with a freely lettered and stitched piece of the poem. If you will only listen carefully...

Full Speed Ahead

Since last we spoke, the holidays came and went, the new year slipped in on little cat's feet (maybe not my cat, cause he usually enters howling), and the whirlwind of my plans and expectations for continuing at the "University of Cheryl and Her Internet" became a new semester.

We're paddling as fast as we can, fueled by enthusiasm and caffeine.

 In December I celebrated the shortest days by frequently photographing the night in it colorful raiment from the perspective of my cozy living room. I especially loved the beautiful sunsets framed by the icicle lights around my living room window. Sometimes I painted with the blur of their movement and I was sad to see them go back to storage so soon.

Dispensed with a tree this year and just added enough
 twinkly lights to warm the night.

White icicle lights are so passe!

Intentional blur is fun to do.

Let's not forget the most meaningful lights of the season.

 The weather has been unnaturally warm and clear to end and start the years, and it seems a sign that winter expects us to just continue with whatever we were doing before the distraction of spending and eating disturbed the creative flow. The last of these wreaked havoc all through 2011, as I quite forgot in the midst of my studies and practice of drawing and stitching that eating was not one of the skills I needed to learn anymore. In fact, moving enough and eating properly became my first refresher course of the New Year. Let's hope I get an "A" in that one.


Most of what drives me from waking to sleeping these days is ongoing from all I started in 2011. Once experienced it is hard to say "no!" to an interesting challenge. I may not be an athlete, but I am a team player in my Internet world of art, and so I've been completing some races, prepping for others, and standing in great expectation of the starting gun of the new challenges.


One of my long time real world commitments is to my local quilt guild. While I haven't been active with the monthly goings on for some time now, every two years I become immersed in the group show. I am working to finish quilts that may have been started last summer or as long ago as 1999!

Last summer I was still completing the embroidered ribbon.

Perseverance payed off. After a mere 12 years, the quilt is finished and hanging, and ready to be my star entry at the quilt show in March.

My association with Australian embroidery teacher extraordinaire, Sharon Boggon, has led me to join many hundreds of other fans worldwide to participate in a weekly lesson/challenge to learn or practice 52 different stitches and their variations this year. Everyone involved comes from a different background of skill and interest, so we are all completing our projects to suit our own needs. I am following the lead of a small group blog where members are doing color themed monthly pages to contain all the stitches from that month. At the end of the year, my pages will be sewn into a (hopefully) beautiful fabric reference book.

Two facing pages ready for the first week's challenge stitch. The completed size of each will be 9x12.

On the Aida cloth side I will be practicing a row of the four or five stitches in basic forms.

On the right side will be a collage of interesting fabrics to encourage stitch variation and exploration.

I am a newbie to any kind of drawn and painted art, but last year I was especially taken by the fun of mixed media explorations. I took a class with Jane LaFazio in mixed media for textile arts, and I also participated in two of the Strathmore Online Workshops. Currently we are in week two of the four free lessons with artist, Traci Bautista. Having spent last year collecting many drawing and painting supplies, I am having a ball learning to actually use them effectively. What I am loving about this workshop is that there is no pressure to do anything but have fun, and that is why I am in this game at all!

The first layer of media set up basic lines and forms to work with by using liquid acrylics sprayed over stencils and other resists.

This is the left side of the page as seen above. I stopped layering the media and designs after the paint layers.

This is the right side. Here I continued with several more layers of markers and inks.

In my ongoing lessons with fiber artist, Jude Hill, I am currently playing catch up with a course she taught in 2010, before I knew how wonderful it was to learn this way. So I am working at my own pace to learn to develop story with characters of my own design in her Patchwork Beasts class.

This photo collage (not to scale) shows the various bases I made in my first two lessons to use for the development of the beasts.

Finally, I am spending some time adding to my "Frankenstitch" class samplers from the fall, so that I will be up to speed when the advanced class begins this weekend. Can't wait to begin, since we will have the opportunity to create textile art for three dimensional formats.

In this photo of the buttonhole sampler you can see I have concentrated on the upper left quadrant, adding padding and woven stitches.

A closeup of the plain weave and raised buttonhole.

Encasing the padded ridges in buttonhole lace and a woven cap.

Have I tired you out yet? Not me. I'm just getting going. Let's see: which pile is calling me with the loudest voice this afternoon? Maybe lesson two of the mixed media (we're doing watercolor backgrounds this week), or my week two stitch for the January page? No, I think it's that hunky Beto Perez and my Zumba DVDs. After all, we have our priorities.

The Space Between

This morning they sucked up the last of my gathered fallen leaves, clipped vines, and denuded brown stems, to cart them off to the community composting field. I watched them earnestly through my front window until finally satisfied that I had put the garden to bed for the year, and could now move forward to welcoming the winter break.

Once again, my surroundings feels stripped clean and new. Sunsets are more intense this time of year, maybe a change in the angles and the clouds, or maybe they just appear that way because their competition is on holiday. In any case, I treasure the occassional showiness of the earlier setting sun as a sign to stop and appreciate what is given freely by the world. It makes me turn a critical eye to the inside clutter. Time to divest, clean, and think about a new fresh color scheme.

The fire of a November sunset echoes the emotions I feel
 toward the new year to come.

This year we are simplifying our holiday celebration. We have decided to welcome the dark with lights both indoors and out, but dispense with the tree. Instead I created an evergreen display in the urn by the front door. It has already drawn notice, waves and good cheer, and that is the real purpose of this time. Connecting with others and our own personal gratitude.

Preparing for winter solstice with a bit of evergreen and bright red berries

Having recently written and thought about the successful conclusion of my "first" year in art mode, I have been pondering where I go from here. It is so easy to fall out of habits you try to establish when there has been more time in a life not doing than doing something. And yet each day only has so many hours to embrace the myriad goals and pursuits I enjoy. The one thing that stuck me most strongly in this evolution of my creative life is that I need to work on giving up the guilt. I need to fully embrace the philosophy of not owing anyone my time or life. That I don't need to be doing anything that doesn't bring me joy or fulfillment, or why I am doing it?

 Let me be clear here: we are not talking about responsibility to family or society, this is purely about my personal life goals and pursuits. As much as I am loving learning to draw, I came into that mode with a purpose: to give up the guilt about not doing it! To get passibly good at it so that I could use drawing as a basis for designing textiles and jewelry when it served me. Finding out that I loved to draw everday objects and scenes to document my life, or that I could actually draw passibly from imagination, well so much the better! But I was starting to feel that I could not just sit and meditatively stitch one loop into another because that was not "creative enough". Says who?

A new wardrobe of bead crochet bangles 

I decided it was okay to set aside my pens and journals for a break and return to some of my other obsessions like bead crochet, bead weaving and knitting. I also have been continuing to engage one of my larger goals from the past year, which is the development of my embroidery skills. I have taken three classes so far this year that were partially or fully about developing story and design through hand stitch (with or without applique). Thanks to Jude, Arlee and Sharon, and please check these links for the their wonderful new year's class offerings.  I will be continuing with all of their teaching and inspiration in 2012 as well.

In Arlee Barr's "FrankenStitch" class we have learned
 to embrace textural embroidery. 

My buttonhole stitch sampler is still at a stage far from complete.

The straight stitch sampler has made some progress, but will continue to be layered and developed.

This place I inhabit between my reality and my goals recently took inspiraton from a trip to visit family in Philly and Jersey. As I am normally too far from these people to see them more than once a year, it was so wonderful to have the opportunity for not just a visit to the close circle, but a bigger life event that drew cousins to celebrate a rite of passage. At once I was trying to accept the issues of the narrowing possibilites that age and age-related infirmities may impose on our options, and on the other, the endless opening doors of youth into adulthood. A cousins' eldest daughter was called to the Torah, and with the family and community gathered about in an inspirationally beautiful sanctuary, and with the help of her spiritual advisors and the cantor's angelic voice, she proudly and admirably took her place in the world of awareness of the "other". Her Bat Mitzvah project was involved with feeding the hungry in her own community. In addition to raising money and awareness for her local food pantry, she had collected donations of food that, made into beautiful gift baskets, served as centerpieces for the celebration that followed, and a reminder to the guests to be gratedful for our personal bounty. I thoroughly enjoyed my family reunion and danced my tush off.

Still life with party favors

Since returning home, I have completed my knitting project and pulled from the stash of UFO's a "blingy" wonderful bracelet with seed beads, rivolis, and drop bead fringe. I did some further work on the two machine quilting projects that I hope to complete before year's end, and pulled out the silk kimono from Jude's "Magic Diaries" class to work on. I was inspired by Melly Testa to join a December challenge project in "Rockstar Boro."

The linen stitch knit scarf truly looks hand loomed.

This bit of bling has been waiting patiently for a year for me to return. I think it will be finished this week.

This space between the years is filling up fast. Almost no break at all. But then I don't really want one. My years are too few, my loves too many. The colors of sunset are in that scarf, the colors of spring in that bracelet. I plan to fill the clean quiet space of winter with the color of joy.

Practice Makes Perfect

There is so much to tell about my recent travels out West, but first I must catch you up on my summer of art.

I have been doing some sort of visual creative expression all my life. If you have read my blog in the past, you know something of my history of the pursuit of art vs craft. Every day there is a project (or three, or ten) that I wake up to and look forward to working on. And just as surely as I continue to "work" every day, I constantly hear from whose who do not, how talented I am, and how easy it is for me to achieve success. I use to just thank them for the complement and move on, but lately I feel the need to clarify the reality. No, it's not all innate talent, it's about passion to try and try again. And it is also about work and practice. Something over fifty years of daily practice surely will improve and refine many skills, and passion for the process as well as the results will show in the final product.

I have been a quilter for twenty years and with every quilted project I did, I included new techniques and skills. In quilting as in every other visual art, I make the project my own. This means that every time I start something, I must use my own ingenuity to figure out technical aspects, and how to best alter them to fit the needs of my vision. Above all, I strive to improve my own artistry and express something important to myself.

This first image is from a photo of my husband that appeared in one of my first blog entries last year. I am learning to interpret a photo in fabric without being entirely literal about color and detail. I show here phase one, where the basic color values in the self-imposed rule of only four gradations is maintained. Should I decide to add more details, they will be added in free-motion machine stitching. Right now I am contemplating the needs.

I am in a collaboration with the "subject" who would like to see this made into a panel of three different colorways, each building in intensity, and finished without a binding, but with something "more modern". My husband is an engineer, not an artist in practice, but he is every bit as creative, because he sees, and feels passionately about his vision.

This next photo shows how I was kidnapped by a yarn shop in Ashland, OR, a couple weeks ago. I had vowed that I wasn't going to knit this fall, but after being dragged in the door kicking and screaming and made to sit on the floor sorting out the endless choices of color in this Koigu yarn, I had to buy the pattern too, and of course, a new size needle missing from my vast collection. Even though I have been knitting since childhood, I have never done the Linen Stitch. I think the approximately 28,000 stitches in the completed scarf will give me enough practice to master it.

Here is the completed, but yet to be mounted, bordered and framed first piece from my Sumptuous Surface Embroidery class last month. I was sad not to have the time to participate as fully during the class as I would have liked, but learned so many new stitches and have acquired so many new resources to go forward, that I am glad I signed up when I did. The best part of the class was getting to design the piece from the ground up, and use a visual journal as a design tool for the first time. It now makes sense to me how to use one.

When I last left you at "Art Camp," with Carla Sonheim, I had completed week one of "Imaginary Creatures." Week two was even more exciting as we had a super intense practice at drawing faces. "Faces 101, " was literally drawing at least 101 faces in five days. Practice Makes Perfect! (Or at least it begins to free you and take away the fear of what you can't do.) I loved drawing faces so much I can't wait to get back to it. Each day we would warm up with expressive lines and then move on to two complete and different techniques and mediums.

One liners are "ten second" sketches you do by not lifting your pen from the page. They capture the essence of your subject.

Cheater blinds are blind contour drawings done with just a little bit of looking. We used two sizes of felt tipped pens, and no erasing. These are from pictures of high school teachers in my yearbook.

These "eraser faces" are drawn with the finger and a kneaded eraser using pastel powder: lay down the colors with your fingertip, then erase in the highlighted potions of the face. Repeat as necessary. Just a couple minutes for each.

Ink drawing done with the dropper from the bottle, and blotted with toilet paper. Wonderfully fun.

Extra Credit: Tea box drawing. We used gessoed tea box or other packaging as a base, and drew in markers. My first experience with Copic markers (the grey shades). I'm collecting them now.

The final week of art camp with Carla was the "Junk Mail Artist Book". This was an opportunity to create the paper media for a storybook from gessoed and watercolor painted junk mail, and then draw a storybook of about five two-page spreads with a front and back cover. All in one five day period!!

While creating the physical book we practiced the technique of creating interactive drawings: drawings that connect from one page to another.

My tied together book with offset pages  waiting for the story.

A look at all the page spreads before they had the story added. Some of the papers were bubble wrap liners of envelopes. Some had plastic windows. Some printed ads. All sorts of colors and textures showing through the layers of water colored gesso.

The completed front cover.

The completed back cover. I hope you will take a look at the rest of the book and the rest of the faces by checking out my photostream on flikr.

And so it was an intense and productive month. Practice may not make perfect, but it will lead to self-discovery and wonder.
The things we can do when we just: Do It!