"Demo at Jackson Hole 2015 3"

Click Here to Purchase

I am back home now. Yellowstone was breathtakingly beautiful. I took tons of photos. I hope some day I may paint from all of those beautiful references.

This painting was done on the 3rd day of my Jackson Hole workshop. Because I didn't have wifi in side the National Parks, I had to delay the posting of it. This is one of best floral paintings I have ever done. Painting orange colored roses was my first time, but I immediately fall in love with it. I also like the leaves. I don't know the name of those leave, but their color and shape are much of fun for painting. The cool green color of the leaves enhances the flower significantly. I just love it. You can see I hardly painted any rose leaves. Those flowers were from a grocery store. The rose leaves are all folded badly. I can hardly use them for the painting.

You may have noticed that my composition for these kind of floral demo is lack of variation. They are pretty much the same. I am aware of that, but I have do one thing at a time. I am concentrated on dramatize the shapes and texture of the flowers and leaves now. The time will come and I will progress.

This painting is available for purchase.

Buy my book or I'll kick this puppy

I am delighted to announce that my book, long in the making, is finally published and ready for purchase!  I've written about it in the past but to recap, the premise is that you don't need to use other people's patterns to make beautiful quilts.  Instead, I start with a traditional quilt block -- the Rail Fence -- and use it as the foundation for a bazillion variations.

So who needs to buy this book?

It's been my experience that millions of quilters are willing to invest lots of time and effort into improving their technical skills.  They attend workshops, buy tools and equipment, read blogs, magazines and books to learn better technique.  But they don't invest commensurately in design skills.

As I write in the book:  "Why are so many quilters willing to learn and stretch when it comes to execution, but not when it comes to planning?  I've known women who have been quilting for 30 years and turn out exquisite quilts by the dozen, but still use other people's patterns.  No matter how many state fair ribbons they've won, they're still not confident enough to make up their own designs.

"To me that's sad.  My great joy in making a quilt is not that I've sewed straight seams and gotten it to lie flat -- heck, any Third World sweatshop worker can do that -- but that I've made a pleasing design, and that my quilt is unlike anybody else's.  This part has the creativity and the joy, and I want to do that myself, not buy it from somebody else."

If you know somebody who needs a bit of a kickstart for the confidence to develop design skills, get her a copy of this book!

Or if you enjoy making the occasional non-art quilt, whether it's for a new bedroom, a new baby, or a charity, maybe you'd like a copy too, for a new take on how to whip out attractive and unique quilts.

Click here to go to the bookselling site.  If you're in Europe, hold on for a couple of days; we're still arranging for publication there so you won't have to pay for shipping from the U.S.

I'll be giving you some little sneak peeks from the book in the next couple of days, and giving away a free copy of the book to people who leave a comment before midnight, August 10.

Photo suite 188 -- toys in the alley

August!

Time to change your desktop calendar for the month of June! 

Click on the image below to download from there. 

 

Dumb on the internet

A dear friend of mine is just about perfect except that she keeps sending me friendspam email -- you know, the gee-whiz articles, jokes, photo arrays and heartwarming stories that somebody sent her.

Usually I just delete such messages without reading, but for some reason I looked at this one.  Here's how it started:

OH, HOW TRUE THIS IS!! 
Subject: Fw: How old is grandma?
Stay with this -- the answer is at the end... It will blow you away.
One evening a grandson was talking to his grandmother about current events.
The grandson asked his grandmother what she thought about the shootings at schools, the computer age, and Just things in general.
The Grandmother replied, "Well, let me think a minute
I was born before:
  television
  penicillin
  polio shots
  frozen foods
  Xerox
  contact lenses
  instant coffee
  Frisbees and
  the pill

There were no: 
  credit cards 
  laser beams or
  ball-point pens

Man had not yet invented: 
  pantyhose
  air conditioners
  dishwashers
  clothes dryers
  and man hadn't yet walked on the moon

I'll spare you the very long middle part of the story, in which grandma smugly carries on about how life was so much better in the olden days and people were more patriotic, more moral, etc.  But the punchline is that grandma is only 72 years old, born in 1942.  We're supposed to feel all gee-whiz at how fast the world has changed, plus (if we're on the old side) pretty smug ourselves for having grown up without all those newfangled contraptions.

I'm still jet-lagged from my recent trip halfway around the world, so I was sleep-deprived and crabby enough to look at this list of allegedly post-1942 inventions with suspicion.  So I looked them up.  And discovered:

  television -- invented in 1925
  penicillin  -- discovered in 1928
  frozen foods -- commercially available in 1929
  Xerox -- invented in 1938
  contact lenses  -- invented in 1887
  instant coffee -- invented in 1890
  ball-point pens -- invented in 1938
  air conditioners -- invented in 1902
  dishwashers  -- invented in 1893
  clothes dryers -- hand-cranked, invented in 1800; electric, invented in 1938

In other words, the story ended before the grandson says in response:  Grandma, you're full of crap.  You're wrong about 10 of the 17 items on your list.

But what I find intriguing is how these founts of misinformation start their endless journeys through cyberspace. Who writes this stuff anyway?  Obviously somebody too old to understand about Wikipedia.