Yay! LightBox Expo September 11-13, 2020. Tickets now available at http://lightboxexpo.com Fantastic event!

 

 

Last week on Art With a Needle

I began the week worrying about the coronavirus.  We were scheduled to get on an airplane Tuesday to go to Monterey for a jazz festival, and as recently as a few days earlier I had been looking forward to it, even as my sons tactfully suggested that maybe it wasn't a good idea to go.  It's still safe, I assured them, and we might as well get a week of fun and vacation before the virus started to shut down our social life. 

But reading the Sunday morning paper about cases in California -- yes, the same county where we were planning to fly in and out of, and spend at least one night -- changed my mind.  I gingerly suggested to my husband (who was the one who REALLY wanted to hear the music) that maybe the risk was too great, and to my surprise, he didn't need much persuading.  We canceled our trip, and I immediately felt a lot better.

What surprised me was how quickly my perception of risk changed -- less than a week from what-me-worry to let's-stay-home.  I hope I'm overly pessimistic, and the epidemic will fizzle out.  But I fear we will have some difficult days ahead.

The silver lining to this cloud was that I was able to attend our twice-a-year retreat after all.  I did mostly hand stitching, sewing my machine-stitched pink pyramid houses together and making progress on my newest cross-stitch piece.  Look at that almost empty table!  I don't find clean work surfaces like that at home.

More on Vickie's quilts

Last week I wrote about Vickie Wheatley, whose quilts are on display at PYRO Gallery in Louisville  through March 21, and promised to show you some of the interesting ways she finished and mounted her small pieces. 

She made a lot of little four-block quilts with leftovers from her much larger "Anxieties" series, finishing to about 12 inches square.  Some she finished with dense black zigzag stitching, then mounted on a black canvas, with maybe a quarter-inch of canvas showing around the edge.  If the light isn't exactly right, you can barely tell where the quilt stops and the canvas starts.

Some she faced, then mounted on a pale wood panel.

Here she zigzagged the edges with a variegated thread, which gave the effect of a striped binding.  Again, mounted on a pale wood panel.

Vickie also made a bunch of quilts with a wonky circle design, like these:

Rather than quilting the leftover circle blocks, she used them as the base for intricate hand-stitching.  Some were mounted in fabric-backed frames with raw edges. 

Others had black binding, again in frames.

If you can't find a piece that fits your particular decorating vibe, you aren't really trying! 

Fashion for you

Whenever I see photos of the fashion shows I wonder if any of these clothes are wearable by actual people attending actual activities and events.  But in the newspaper, an outfit that seems potentially very useful.

You know those invitations where you aren't sure whether you should go casual or dress up?  Here's the perfect solution:

Outfit by Off White, photo from New York Times

Watercolor Demo!