A Class With Pamela Allen!

My days have been pretty busy here between printing and art quilting. My Year of the Horse prints are drying and will show them here after they're off and running and corralled at their new destinations with members of The Baren.

But there's been lots of art quilting fun! I'm taking an online class with one of my favorite art quilter's, Pamela Allen.  She has a new Etsy site that's worth a trip over to see at https://www.etsy.com/shop/Pamelart.

It's a very exciting class that's a constant challenge, with new lessons every day. It's called ABOUT CONTRAST and  nothing is quite finished yet but I can show the beginning stages.

I started out cutting and laying in some of the basic shapes and realized before long that I needed a lot of different values of B&W fabric - more than I had.  So, up I went and printed up some new fabric with old hand-carved soft block....and as you can see below, it worked!

The entire foreground is my hand made on the fly fabric as well as the back of the chair on the left.

Finally, the top is finished with the "piecing" of it...it's actually fused on so it's really a fabric collage.  To finish it I will Free Motion Quilt it and then go in with some hand embroidery before  binding it in some way.  I'll probably stretch it onto some stretcher strips.   And I'm on to the next!

Putting Our Best Foot Forward

Once again, we proceed into the future in a new calendar year.  It never ceases to motivate me to take stock and look with fresh eyes at the path that I'm on.  Do I want to make any changes?  Do I want to shift any gears?  Am I satisfied with how how I'm handling things? What improvements do I want to make?

Last night I looked back and found that I had finished 20 quilts!  I was astounded at the count!  It's true that some of them were only about 8 to 10 inches, but only a few. Four of them were full sized quilts with backs that were up to the challenge of serving as fully reversible.  So, I'm pretty pleased with my level of productivity and did, indeed, succeed at my main goal going into 2013, both in terms of quantity and quality. I learned a tremendous amount and grew pretty ably into my own voice!

I still have a distance to go at a few unmet goals.  I'm slowly working on my 100 small quilts but toward that end I did create over 100 new digital images (!) to get my digital skills up to par (which still needs work) and to start a new library of my own digital images to use in my art.

This year, I will create my own website.  Although I've been slowly working at getting it together, I'm going to pick up the pace and throw myself into it. An important measure of success for me in the coming year will be to sell some of these products I've been laboring on.  Hence, the website is a critical component of the coming year's efforts.

I have a zillion ideas floating in and out of my head.  I never know which ones will land and demand attention, but I've already invested some time into digital art. This is one of these photos that has already sprouted some wings and you should see transformed into fiber this year.

Happy New Year to all of you who listen to me, watch my progress and take the time to comment on what I'm doing here.  Thank you for your participation and support! May we all put our best foot forward and reap the rewards that come of it!