"Noble Elements: Air" Exhibit

Nov 8 - Dec 24th; Noble Elements - AIR; Soft Expressions Upstairs Gallery, 1230 North Jefferson St., Suite M, Anaheim, Ca 92807714.630.7414 Hours: M-F 10am-4pm http://www.SoftExpressions.com/Opening Reception is Sat, Nov 8th from 1:30 - 4pm; featuring the work of fiber artists: Patt Blair, Cynthia Catlin, joanell connolly, Cindy Cooksey, Anne Copeland, Jamie Fingal, Stevii Graves, jo p. griffith, Rose Hughes, Stacy Hurt, Jeanette I. Kelly, Marcia Ann Kuehl, Carol McDaniel, Martha Nordstrand, Cindy Rinne, Cyndy Rymer, Julie Schlueter, Janis Stob , Mary Tabar, Terry Waldron , Susan Willen

Mixed Media Pages; Day of the Dead

These are the pages I did for Jamie's mixed media book. I did them a month ago but have been too busy to post them. Her theme was "Secrets of an Artful Life," and for my pages I did "Top 5 Tips for an Artful Life." It was a lot of fun. This is my last mixed media book to add to in this round robin. I loved it so much................ Many of these pages have been seeds for other things. For example, my "Hope is the Thing" quilt I just finished for Quilts on the Wall's Unfettered Letters challenge was inspired by the pages I did for Stacy.

Also, I submitted photos of some of the pages I did to Lark Books, offering to make mini quilts inspired by them for their upcoming Pretty Little Mini-Quilts. I'm thrilled that they asked me to make a mini-quilt of the heart collage pages I did for Joanell (you can see it a couple of posts before this one). Plus they want to use my "Flora del Coronado quilt," already finished. I'm totally excited about it!

I also just found out one of my fiber art balls, the one with Day of the Dead images on it, got accepted in the Day of the Dead exhibit at the Maude Kerns Art Center in Eugene, Oregon in October. Woohoo! I'll try to find time to locate a photo of it to post. If you live in Oregon, I hope you will check it out. There will be an opening reception on October 17 from 6 to 9. They promise music, dancing, food, excitement!

World Alzheimer's Day

September 21 is World Alzheimer's Day. I added a Virtual Quilt Patch to honor my mother, who died earlier this year with Alzheimer's. You can see the patch if you scroll down on the right side. Her birthday is coming up on the 18th, and I will remember her by eating a little chocolate. One of her greatest pleasures was visiting a See's candy store.

26.6 million people have Alzheimer's world wide. I am part of a traveling exhibit called "Alzheimer's: Forgetting Piece by Piece" that was organized by Ami Simms. Please visit http://www.alzquilts.org/ to learn more and make your own Virtual Quilt Patch.

mixed media pages

I've gotten way behind in showing the mixed media pages I've done for the round robin exchange we've been doing in Cut-Loose Quilters. So tonight I'm playing catch-up.

The first photo shows the pages I did for Julie. The theme was travel - I had a hard time deciding what to do, and in the end made my pages about bicycling. I made a rubber stamp for the bicycle frame, and added the wheels afterward. Can you guess? The wheels are simply stamped from the end of a plastic spool of thread that had "spokes" in the inner core. The photos are from my bicycling days long ago. I'm riding across the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco in the first one, and in the second I'm miserable during a downpour. This was taken up near King City, California, on a bicycling trip we took from San Francisco to Santa Ana - about 550 miles! - in 1973.

I did the red pages with the hearts for Joanell's mixed media book. Her theme was "Shapes and Colors," simple enough. I fretted that hearts were too obvious (I did them in February), but I think they turned out okay. I did a lot of different techniques here, including a polymer clay heart on the second heart. The heart on the upper right is made from red plastic webbing I got from some fruit product. I wish I could remember what kind - perhaps mandarin oranges?

The pages at the right are the ones I did for Annie. It's probably too hard to read, but on the top it says, "It's fun to be a gypsy girl on Halloween!" The theme of Annie's book was "Gypsy in my Soul." I was a gypsy a couple of times on Halloween as a girl, so that's what inspired me to make these pages. In real life my costume was cobbled together with things I had on hand, such as the red cape I wore as Little Red Riding Hood the previous year, and my mom's hoop earrings. I made an actual doll and embedded her into the pages. Her costume was also cobbled together with whatever I had on hand. It was really fun - I would like to make another gypsy girl doll for myself. I made her tiny "trick or treat" sack, too.