What a Beautiful World!

As promised here is a wrap-up from my vacation last week.

The purpose of the trip was that my friend had signed up to take a workshop from Susan Else who is a soft sculpture artist. We started our trip by going to a needlework exhibit at the Filoli Estate. This estate is part of the national trust and has been used in movies and TV shows. A great place to add to your itinerary if you visit this area.

The glass balls and flames are part of a sculptural exhibit

This is a reproduction of the front of the estate done
using an embroidery technique called Blackwork

A needlepoint reproduction of gardens at Filoli

The ballerina's tutu is done using a
technique called Stumpwork

I love the light that the artist
has captured in this needlepoint

After a lovely lunch we drove on to Mendocino which is about 3 hours north on the coast. The town looks like it is in Cape Cod and was used in Murder She Wrote as well as many other TV shows and movies. We were blessed with fabulous weather. Usually it is cold and foggy on the California coast until September but we mostly had blue skies and warm temps.

While my friend was in her workshop I tromped around Mendocino and Fort Bragg which is about 15 minutes north. I went to Glass Beach which has loads of beach glass washed in from the old practice of dumping garbage into the ocean.

The white, brown and green are glass which
you can find anywhere on Glass Beach

And I went to the Botanical Gardens. There were so many beautiful gardens that I have to restrain myself here.

Part of the Heather Garden 

The dahlias were in bloom and I had to include
the sign keeping people out of the dahlia beds

This sign was on the railing of a bridge over one of
the creeks. Somebody has a sense of humor!

I couldn't resist including these two pictures:

What's an artists' colony without an art car?

And this because of my love affair with trees

I also spent some time working on a few art projects that I brought with me. I had this fabulous old desk to work on in our hotel suite (the house was built in 1878).

I decided I wanted to develop a piece I did in my journal a while back. So I drew a version on tracing paper and then transferred the design to paper so I could cut out patterns and make a felt appliqued version. I really enjoyed the process.

Last but not least, this week's Diva Challenge was to use the Rio Olympics as inspiration for a tile. I used a picture of Rio and Sugar Loaf as the string for my tile and I used tangles starting with the letters R, I, and O.

Tangles Used: Raindotty, IndyRella, Insydout, and Ojo

Lightning Round

I'm on vacation this week and the wireless coverage here leaves a lot to be desired. So I will just post my response to the Diva Challenge and return with more details next week. The challenge was to use Meer and Auraknot in a duotangle.

Intersectional Art

Last week I went to see the 20th National Exhibit of the Embroiderers' Guild of America. This is a traveling exhibit and I certainly had to travel to see it...three hours each way. But there are some really amazing pieces and I am glad I got to see them. Here are a couple of pictures I took.

Beautifully beaded box top

This is all stitched!
by Lee Ann Kleeman

A stitched Zentangle by Catherine Jordan

Magnificent embroidered box also by Catherine Jordan

The exhibit has moved on to Iowa now and will finish up in Wisconsin so if you get a chance, check it out.

This week's Diva Challenge is to use the tangle pattern Knightstar by Daniel Lamothe. Daniel has taken inspiration from mathematical graphing. I love it when artists independently come to similar solutions. There was a needlepoint designer who also loved to play with graph paper and developed some needlepoint stitches that use the same concept. The stitch equivalent to Knightstar is called a Crescent Stitch. And if you stitch all the way around instead of just the two opposite sides you have a Jessica Stitch. (In the illustration of the Jessica Stitch I linked to, if you stitch only side 1 you have a Crescent Stitch.) I decided to stitch this week's entry and used some other needlepoint stitches that use the same grid base. The second square is made up of Rhodes Stitch and Waffle Stitch and I put a Jessica Stitch in the center.

Art Circles

I belong to a mixed media textile group and recently we did a mini-workshop about using fabric transfer crayons to create a background for a stitched piece. I decided to do a quick tangle on paper....

And then ironed it on to a piece of  fabric. There was some organza available that had various photos printed on the fabric and I selected one of a sunset and basted it over my piece....

You can see that the tangle image is the mirror of the one done on paper because of the transfer process. I'm planning on adding some simple stitching to make the tangle more visible. It's an experiment but I really fell in love with the photo-transfer on the organza and hope to use that idea in future pieces.

I had so many ideas for last week's Diva Challenge but just never executed any of them...so on to this week. The challenge was to use a string made out of circles and tangle away! I was decided to use a TanglePatterns string that I have admired for a while and kept it pretty basic.

String: TanglePatterns 116
Tangle: Reticulated

Hopefully you've all found someone to "art" with at least virtually. So much inspiration out there!

One Love, One Heart

After the turmoil over the last week I thought that the challenge posed by Suzanne Fluhr, the Diva's guest blogger, was very timely. The challenge is to give expression to "Give Peace a Chance." As I was thinking about how I would approach the challenge I happened to hear the immortal Bob Marley's song One Love. I am also sort of geekily interested in various map projections. Just as a matter of physics you have to distort something to flatten a globe onto a piece of paper. The Mercator Projection that most of us a familiar with is great for nautical navigation but not so great at accurately representing the actual size of the land masses. The Peters Projection is an accurate representation of the size of each continent but distorts the shapes of those in the tropics more than Europe and North America. I was thinking that it would be cool to have the globe projected in a heart shape...and lo and behold someone out there has already done it! So I used it as a string for my response to the challenge.

Tangles Used: Curl, Amaze, Beadlines, Nekton and BB

"Let's get together and feel all right."

Architecture of Change

We had a lovely holiday on the 4th, grilling burgers on the patio, watching the fireworks display down the hill from us and sipping our Sangrias. Sadly my camera isn't really up to taking pictures of fireworks but this will give you an idea.

I had to take my car into the shop this week and while walking back to pick it up I had a chance to take a picture of this very interesting wall. I've admired it for years and this was my chance to get a good picture.

There are other elements to the left and right and much of it is blocked by the trees that have gotten large over the years but it is a really intriguing architectural design.

This week's Diva Challenge was to use the flag of your country as an inspiration for a tile. I decided to do a Mandala because I wanted to focus on an image of unity and a prayer for peace. Little did I know how much we would need this during a week of horrific violence.

Tangles Used: Miander, Capell, Diva Dance and Gra-vee

32 1-derful Years!

This was a busy week what with attending a Stitch-N-Pitch event at the SF Giants (baseball for those who don't follow sports), volunteering at the EGA table at the Fair and last but most certainly not least, celebrating our 32nd Anniversary. Where has the time flown? Oh, and my daughter announced that she is engaged!

I didn't get around to posting last week's Diva Challenge which was themed as, "Black and White and Red All Over." It was fun deciding which bits I would add the red to.

Tangles Used: Batumber, NZepple, Tagh, Fission, Star Map

This week's Diva Challenge is to do a remix of an older tile. I choose this tile that I drew in November 2014. I always felt that the foreground needed something distinguish it more from the background.

Original Tile: November 12, 2014

For the new version I drew the Huggins pattern in the background much smaller than on the original tile. I also used a heavier pen for the Trio and more shading (which doesn't necessarily carry through in the scan.) I think this version works better.

Remix Tile
Tangles Used: XYP, Trio, Huggins