Creative Life Sampler

  Balance of Light & Dark In this composition the image area has been roughly divided in half vertically. The dark contours on the right have been repeated in the light color and reoriented on the left, creating a tension between light and dark shapes. The quilting for this piece, continues my experimentation with textures to enhance the project’s design. Gentle arches and a subtle, directional flow in the background quilting provides some motion across the surface. For a contrast, the traditional treatment of echo quilting the shapes gives them a more solid, steady feeling, even as they are stacked and precariously rest on thin lines. So, we have a balance between light and dark, solid shapes and graceful line, movement and stability. Here is a detail of the quilting from the opposite side: Seeing the seed and running stitches in multiple colors against the solid fabric from the backside gives food for thought on possibilities for future projects.  Stay tuned to see mor...

Embroidery Sampler Many years ago my grandmother gave me a cigar box filled with embroidery floss in a wide range of colors: whole skeins, single strands, and many short lengths. Though I had never used a needle in this way, I was thrilled with all the color at my fingertips and my imagination went to work on how to put them to good use. At the time, the margins of my school notebooks were brimming with doodles of patterns and concentric circles of patterns, so this design was a natural progression from a doodle to a textile. It gave me an opportunity to use all the small pieces of thread and to try this new art form. For this project I had no instruction or reference book; either it didn't occur to me to seek one out, or an author had yet to compile a step-by-step encyclopedia of stitchery like the ones you can easily pick up today. So this was an experiment, a needle work sampler, filled with fabric stretching and puckers, inconsistencies, mistakes, and happy inventions, ...