Last Saturday, I was wanting to just mess around with mark-making in my sketchbook. As I opened my pen case, I spied a dip pen that I had purchased, but never really used. Grabbing a bottle of Sumi ink, I got busy. It was fun! After I had marked up the paper quite a bit, I added some watercolor crayon for color, and spritzed water on sections.
That exercise left me warmed up and wanting to do more. I turned to this photograph of Mogadore reservoir that I had taken while visiting Ohio in November of 2020.
After blocking the scene in pencil, I used watercolors to paint the background. The dip pen and ink came into use for the foreground branches.
This little 4 x 6 painting will be a nice postcard to send home.
Last month at Open Studio, expert watercolorist Cheryl Bryan presented this example to our group. The lesson was about painting in shadows.
I wanted to do this lesson, but felt that painting five cherries was not enough subject matter to keep my interest. So I chose this reference photograph, to supplement Cheryl’s example.
Initial sketch:
Lots of masking fluid added:
First washes, background and beginning to paint the subject.
To get this subject to work, each cherry must be painted individually, with multiple colors of paint worked in.
Most of the painting is finished, masking fluid removed.
Finished:
The cherries look luscious, but my favorite thing is the bowl. What a dreamy color!
Today I’m writing to let you know how much I am enjoying the materials and tools I collected from your sewing room in May. You were so generous to let us kids have whatever we wanted.
It’s interesting to see how just a few tools have made my work so much easier. Let’s start with your big purple Martinelli self-healing mat. I can cut whole yardage into strips with ease and accuracy using this mat. Another thing I am grateful for is the tabletop wool pressing pad. I recently used both of these tools to cut, sew,press and square-up a whole bunch of half-square triangles.
Let me tell you about a few projects where I used some fabric from your stash.
I found about a quarter yard of striped cotton with black warp threads. It turned out to be just right as a binding for my Shell Lake Story quilt.
I worked the free-motion quilting on this piece wearing a pair of your quilting gloves. They fit me perfectly. Looking down at my hands I imagined how your energy, which these gloves retained, radiated back to me. I felt loved and powerful.
My next project is a baby quilt for Jasmine and Stephen’s son, expected in August. I’m certain that, if you were able, you would be working on a quilt for this baby already. In your stash was a crib-sized batt still in its package and a yard of buff color solid quilting cotton – very high-quality stuff. (I know it was a yard because you had measured and labelled it so!) It is just enough for a baby quilt background.
After speaking with Stephen’s mom, Debbie, I learned that the couple had chosen teddy bears for the nursery room theme with a color palette of blues and neutrals. Using the buff and several stash fabrics, I put together a quilt top from a pattern called Elena. It features a nine-patch block with two corners of half-square triangles.
It was May, and the weather for patio-sitting was perfect. But I didn’t finish my painting – I had become obsessed with the Shell Lake Story quilt, and could think of nothing else.
Now that the quilt is finished, AND lovely patio-sitting weather has returned, I got out the fabric paints to work on stage two of the painting.
At the end of stage one, I had a 15 by 30 inch canvass with a nice background on it.
The lovely green-colored folds already looked like geranium leaves. The blank-looking orange blobs will become geranium blossoms.
Using Jacquard Textile paint in colors green, ruby red and goldenrod, I started working from the right side of the canvas to the left. Here is the painting after my first two sessions:
Only one more blossom to go. Today I finished it up,
Hm, it’s pretty obvious that I got better at painting as I went along! While the far left blossom is more carefully painted, it lacks the bright highlights of the first two. This was caused by the tone of the underpainting, which was predominately violet instead of yellow, like the other ones. The only way to fix this is to apply opaque paint. The risk in doing that is overworking the painting.
So I guess I will leave well enough alone.
My next steps are to square up the fabric and staple it to the back of the frame.
Starting back in January with some musings over passed-along weaving samples, today I celebrate the finish of a fiber object unlike anything I have done before.
Margaret Howard wove her samples on a small loom that she kept at the family’s summer house in northwestern Wisconsin. When I first saw them, I felt that these pieces could be compiled into a cohesive fiber object. As I began working with them, my mind traveled to the little cottage on the edge of the lake with the big stone fireplace. What might it have been like for Margaret, to do this work, at that place?
Before long, my own experience while visiting that same cottage began to overlay the story of Margaret in my imagination.
The resulting quilt is a consolidation of her history, my experience and skills, fabric from assorted cast-off shirts, fabric from my mother’s stash, and prompts from the 2022 Stay-at-home round robin quilt challenge.
The little cottage is represented by the center block.
It holds the heart of the Shell Lake story.
Each corner block on the quilt represents some aspect of the experience a trip to the lake house may bring. Let’s go there now.
To reach the cottage, one travels through a piney wood along paths lined with ferns.
Crossing an ancient and overgrown tennis court, the visitor encounters the path to the lake. Turn right and follow the dazzling rays of sunshine to get there.
As the day turns to dusk, all camp visitors are again drawn to the lakeshore, where the sun is saluted before it disappears over the horizon. Sunsets at the lake are relaxed, and sometimes, if you are lucky, meditative.
When the air becomes chilly, a fire will warm the body. While fires on the beach are jolly, often the stone fireplace is brought to life, usually in the cool morning hours.
Here is a final look, showing the fabric chosen as the backing.
This little flower print has no special association with the Shell Lake story. I simply thought that the colors just looked nice.
I truly enjoyed making this quilt, and am a little sorry that the work is done.
And so ends the tale of a weaver, a fiber artist, and the quilt that grew from their intersection. Where will this object end up? I am not sure, but at some point soon, it will be released into the world. Fifty years from now, perhaps another artist will have something to add to its story,
Daily Fiber 