Saturday 16 February 2013

As one door closes another one opens....

Last Saturday on my birthday I had the opportunity to spend the day with Katie Pasquini Masopust taking her From Watercolour to Quilt 2 day workshop.
 Katie is just full of ideas and direction and you get a lot accomplished in the first of the two days.
 I decided to chose a limited palate of colours and soon realized that the red was not going to be included.    We used both rubber cement and masque pen as resists.  We blew bubbles across our pieces and had lots of fun seeing what evolved.
 Bubble wrap and plastic wrap were applied to add visual texture to your piece.
 This simple exercise of painting the rims of different sized cups made the above technique.  On Sunday we switched it up and did a one day Fractured Landscapes class, here are the fabrics I brought along and sorted into the seven steps Katie likes to use.  The flash went off in the second picture so the colours are a bit washed out.
You might notice they are the same colours in my watercolour class...I had a plan.  The photo I'll use for the landscape will not be in these colours, but I will use them in my practise piece.
This is the piece that I will fracture and make into a quilt.  You might notice the sun peeking out from a very foggy low cloud day.
Monday we were back to the painting workshop.  We had cropped and traced onto acetate our images we wanted to enlarge.  My original tracing was about 1" x 4" and it was enlarged to 9" x 37".
 Katie shared with us some of her images both painted and photographed so we could see how she turns the edges and then machine appliques them onto the background.
 Occasionally she might use some Ultrasuede but almost all the images you see here have turned edges.
 I had some fun choosing fabrics for my piece and by the end of the second day I had some great progress made.  I'm going to choose all my fabrics before stitching any down.  Mine was made from a resist piece and it will have some strong white images.  The black is from the 0.01 Pigma pen being enlarged and will not be part of the quilt.
 At guild on Tuesday Katie did a great PowerPoint program and then shared some of her quilts with us.
 The blue/green fern leaf one is one of my favourites.
 Friday was a glorious day with sunshine and crocuses in full bloom.
One of my favourites, the orange witch hazel is all of its glory.
 
 Yellow witch hazel being visited by a bee.
 Fresh snow on the mountains.
 Snowdrops in Rita's Garden.
 A double drop.
 Low tide on the river as the sun is getting low on the horizon.
The door that closed was on my job, Friday was my last day of vacation and I have decided to open the door to retirement, excuse me while I check what is on the other side...