- The jury's still out

Retrospective (7/24/2016)

Patch #198 Weather wise

I guess the new patches are here to stay.

Original Post

I'm reserving judgment on the newest weather patches made from the thrifted linen dress I bought last week ...

They're the Sunday, Tuesday, and Saturday patches in the last row, meant to depict overcast mornings followed by blazing hot Texas afternoons. I may keep them ... I may not. We'll see.

Meantime, I indulged myself in a look at my current works in progress ... which are all too long to show in their entirety, so they've been strategically draped and folded ...

Clockwise from the upper left:

   - Unnamed (2016 weather patches)

   - Georgia's Window

   - Land of Flood and Drought (2015)

   - Remember 2016

And I'm thinking I need a design wall ...

- Backlit

Retrospective (7/18/2016)

Patch #197 Georgia's Window Scraps II

Original Post

How Georgia's Window will look once it's hemmed and hung ...

and another look at the original ...

- Learning as I go (it's all about process)

Retrospective (7/20/2016) 

Patch #196 A patch of blue sky

An early piece of embroidery from the 1960s, when I was on the first of many learning curves.

Original Post

Georgia's Window is coming together slowly, but surely ...

The sash bars of the window surrounding each pane proved to be the biggest challenge, requiring front seams to be sewn on both sides of a very narrow strip of maroon linen ...

created by overcast stitching each seam (14-18 stitches per inch) with the front sides facing out ...

After which the inside edges are trimmed ...

leaving the lower-most edge twice the width of the other three interior edges ...

Finger-pressing the top two interior edges downward first ...

the wider of the lower interior edges is then folded over the narrower edge ...

so the sandwiched lower edges can be folded over the top edges ...

pinned in place ...

and stitched over the upper edges (which I believe to be akin to French or felled seaming) ...

All that so that the front can continue to look exactly the same as it did before ..

while the back goes from looking like this ...

to a much tidier finish ....

This reimagining of Georgia O'Keeffe's painting Door through Window (1956) was influenced by looking at pictures and videos about Pojagi, a form of two-sided quilting used to make wrapping cloths in Korea. Any wonkiness introduced by my idiosyncratic methodology leads me to categorize this as "Pojagi-influenced" in my blog index (with an additional entry for "Bojagi" as there are those who use an alternate spelling).

- Georgia's Window reimagined

Retrospective (7/18/2016)

Patch #191 Georgia's Window Scraps I

Original Post

When we went to Santa Fe in 2014, one of my must-see spots was the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.

Granted it was small, but I give a lot of credit to the guards who let me stand, hands behind my back, close enough for my nearsighted eyes to truly appreciate each piece. Which was close indeed.

The painting that really grabbed me was Door Through Window ...

That it was done in 1956, the year I was born, seemed as good a reason as any to reprise its patchiness in cloth. I started on a version last year, but my supply of linen colors was less than robust and dyeing colors to match using local flora didn't go too well. So I stopped.

My recent discovery of pojagi rekindled the idea and I was delighted to find that my thrift store finds had improved the range of colors I had on hand.

So I broke the original down into component parts ...

selected a range of colors ...

and totally surprised myself at how quickly it started to come together ...

Granted, my lack of quilting and patchwork experience have left the back looking a bit worse than I'd like ...

but I'm thinking by tomorrow I'll be seeing some improvement as I get the hang of it.

- Inspirations and considering what's next

I found this when we were picking up trash along Ranch Road 12 a couple of years ago ...

It's a chunk of armadillo road kill and I love it ... Don, not so much. I keep trying to convince him it should go into one of his assemblages, to no avail.

So today I had a brainstorm. I've been combing parking lots ever since reading bottle tops and stitches on Alice Fox's blog (and yes, I already have her new book on order). Not wanting to be imitative, it's been a puzzle how best to use them. Now I'm thinking I may combine them into a rust and stitch reprise of my beloved armadillo relic ...

My current bottle top collection

But then again, I've had another project cooking on my mental back burner for months. There was a painting titled Door through Window that I photographed at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe last October (and yes, I did ask first if I could). I couldn't get enough of it, especially after realizing it was painted the year I was born ...

In my mind it has become"Georgia's Window" and I've been searching out (and dyeing) linen in order to make a stitched impression ...

Thank goodness for thrift stores ...

So now that I've gathered my thoughts and my stuff, what remains to be seen is which project will come next.