A rail fence quilt

There's nothing more gratifying, if you have written an article or a book, given a speech or taught a class, than to have somebody tell you they used what you said to make something nice.  So it was great to find an email from Diane Lewis with a picture of a quilt she made from the ideas in my book, Pattern-Free Quilts. 

She wrote: "I stacked fabric rectangles and cut them into four pieces, them swapped the fabrics around and reassembled them to form diagonally striped blocks, which I laid out in an abstract mountain lake pattern.  Thanks for the inspiration!"

I like the three different ways Diane has arranged her striped blocks.  In the center, the mountains are made with a regular pattern to make peaks and valleys.  In the sky, the diagonals all slope gently in one direction or another, but two down-slopes might be adjacent, giving the impression of clouds and breezes.  In the lake, the diagonals go every which way to make waves and currents.

Subtle, and very effective!  And thanks to Diane for reading the book, and making such a nice quilt, and  sharing the photo!

October!

October is here :)

Time to change your desktop calendar.

Click on the image below to download from there:

 

"Demo at Shaxi 2017 2" --- Sold

I found this group of old houses under the sun. It was a good example to demonstrate how I dealt with perspectives. So I did this demo, and our artists painted with me. In the middle of our plein air event, a movie director passing by. Well in the afternoon, a few of our artists have been selected as actors for a movie. You will never know what can happen when you paint outside.

Guilt and construction work

We're now starting the fifth week of construction work on two projects: rebuilding two decks and combining two small bathrooms into one glorious big one.  I think we're past the midpoint on both projects, but who knows?  I can still access my studio, but guys are sawing and pounding right outside the window, and more important, I need peace and quiet to decide what to work on next.

new tub in place -- everything else yet to come

So I've been going through piles of old newspapers, some of them dating back years, reading all the art reviews that I had set aside, clipping as needed, throwing away what's left.  Reading books.  Spending time with the new grandchild.

Most of the time, I'm not really needed here, but every so often there's a decision to be made.  Who knew it would take a half hour to determine how to install the lights and switches in the bathroom?  Should the light over the sink go on when you turn on the room lights or be on a separate switch?  Should the fan come on automatically with the room lights, or automatically with the shower light, or on its own switch?  Should the light be directly over the tub, or centered over the floor area between tub and shower?

Meanwhile, I'm reading about projects that many of my blogging friends are working on, and feeling guilty that I'm not doing anything useful.  I can't even concentrate enough to decide what my next project is going to be, let alone start staging up for it.  And the year-end tasks -- photo calendars, 55 Christmas ornaments, Christmas stockings for the new baby and maybe others -- are looming.

Maybe I won't do anything important till next year, and would that be so horrible?  Well no, except for the guilt....

My favorite things 40

When I was a senior in high school I saved up my babysitting money and bought a record player, which meant I needed to acquire records.  For some reason, I decided that what I wanted to hear was classical music, and having joined the Columbia Record Club, with its infamous negative option membership setup, I soon amassed lots of music.  Despite flirtations with Motown and Broadway, I remained a classical girl at heart, and was delighted to learn that my husband-to-be also loved classical music and had his own bazillion records.

Records, of course, are hard to integrate into your daily life, because they require tending, even if you have a turntable with a changer to drop a new one into place when the old one is finished.  You can only reliably hear the music from the same room, which doesn't work if you're doing housework or tending children or making dinner (whoever would have put their record player in the kitchen???).

Fortunately we've been blessed in Louisville with great classical radio.  For several years in the 1970s, we even had two classical stations!  If you didn't want to listen to Hindemith, you could flip the dial and see if you could get Tchaikovsky on the other station!  We're down to one station now, but it's 24/7, so we turn on the radio when we get up in the morning and turn it off when we go to bed.

#2 of 5

Some years ago we stopped at an outlet store on our way home from vacation and bought a Bose radio for Ken's office.  It was a splurge, but what a quantum leap in quality from the previous radio (a pale green Grundig that Ken had bought 50 years earlier) in that room.  I immediately became jealous, and a couple of years later I stopped at the same outlet store and bought one for my own office.

Meanwhile our radios in the other rooms were getting old.  The radio/stereo system in the living room was getting increasingly unreliable.  We own more than 1,000 CDs, and I realized that CDs are an almost-obsolete technology.  I worried that one day the system would refuse to play a CD, and this would occur two weeks after every manufacturer of CDs in the entire world had decided to stop manufacturing CD players.

A Bose outlet store had just opened less than an hour from us, and as Christmas approached one year I announced that I was going to buy a Bose radio with a CD changer, in the hopes that it would outlast both us and our CDs.  When I got there, I decided to buy not only the radio plus CD player for our living room, but one for our bedroom and one for the kitchen, a total of five.
 
Ken accused me of over-splurging, but I pointed out that if you listen to the radio during every waking moment, why not have great quality?  All the radios are equipped with remote controls, and the three new ones also turn off and on if you simply touch them -- a great boon when you're walking through the kitchen with greasy hands and can do the honors with your elbow.  I'm not sure whether this works through temperature, pressure or ESP, but it's pretty neat.  As is the ability to have music throughout the house throughout the day -- wouldn't Bach be jealous?