The Polka Dot Debutante

I thought I had the top done for the Route 66 quilt, but now I'm wondering if I ought to applique a very large 66 in the upper left hand corner. I guess I should cut them out of paper and stick them up there and see how they look. I'll try and get that done soon and post a picture.

I took a class all day yesterday and today called "Line Dancing" with Jeanette DeNicholas Meyer. Saturday we spent the day doing several exercises using line including drawing, making a image using wire, free motion stitching and cutting lines into paper. All the lines/drawings were made using just black and white. It was very stimulating and I was utterly exhausted at the end of the day. Absolutely useless. Here are some pictures of my/our exercises from the first day. By the end of the day, when we had a design that we liked in paper, we reproduced it in fabric. We did it twice, switching the position of the black and white so it was like a positive and negative of the same design. Here is mine. There was a lot of interesting information about what feelings a simple line can evoke depending of whether it is thick or thin, vertical or horizontal, jagged or curving. It certainly gave me a lot to think about, especially since I use lines all the time in machine quilting. I mean, I think about lines a lot, just not in that terminology. Anyway, I'll post all about the second day tomorrow. I'm really tired and off to bed.

Okay. So on Sunday we took the copies we had made of our positive and negative designs and then cut those up and made a new design using the cut pieces. I had a really hard time with this process, and when we were supposed to be done for the critique, I didn't like any of the three designs that I had made. You can see why. They are all too busy. So after seeing everyone else's designs and hearing Jeanette's comments, I went back to my table to work some more with paper until I could create a design that felt good enough to actually construct in fabric. Jeanette suggested that I look at the designs I already did and find the sections that I liked within those designs. That really helped and this is what I eventually came up with. The last step of the process was to use tracing paper and create a quilting design that would enhance the piece. This part of the process was much more comfortable for me. I don't know if you can see it very well but the quilting design I liked was topographical lines. I think they will look great and I'll do them in a colored thread. Maybe red or lime green. I didn't do this in class because I wanted to come home and do it on the long arm. The class was really wonderful and Jeanette is a great teacher. She really has a way about her and has lots of great information to share.

My long absence from posting is because I was in Boston visiting the art school daughter. We had a great time together and saw lots of art. My favorite two pieces were by the same artist, Tara Donovan, with one at the Museum of Fine Arts and the other at the Institute of Contemporary Art. She does these amazing prints of rubber bands. That doesn't really describe her work well enough because they were wonderful. Another exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts was called SMFA Traveling Scholars and one of the artists in that group was amazing, Elizabeth Wallace. Her work was a combination of print and paint with a very map like feeling. I just love looking at art. These pictures were taken looking out from the big glass wall at the ICA. The art school daughter!