“The Road Ahead,” pre-quilting, fused cottons, 8 1/2″ X 11″

This is my piece for the January Take It Further Challenge. The challenge was to use this color palette:

or the concept of admiration for a person.

I started with both, sort of, in working from a spot on the road between Los Alamos and Santa Fe where it seems one could go anywhere, thinking I could create the landscape in an abstract way with embroidered words describing people who make it possible for individuals to make a new beginning, such as “mothers, artists, teachers, dreamers,” etc. As I worked with the fabrics, though, I abandoned that idea and focused on the shapes and proportions and colors instead.

Here it is with quilting:

It’s not finished at the point, because my plan involves supplies that I don’t have on hand. I have not yet decided on an edge finish, but I will mount the whole thing on an artists’ canvas, painted with the title and a couple of poetic phrases yet to be chosen. Oh, darn, I’ll have to go to the art store.

Assuming this turns out the way I would like it to, it will be my donation piece for the silent auction held by the Empty Bowls Project here in Los Alamos, to benefit Self Help, Incorporated.

tree root, or remains of a stump, on the Canada Bonita trail at Pajarito

There was something about this root, or knot, or remains of a stump that caught my eye in the woods last fall. It’s the beginning of something, much larger under the surface, perhaps. Or the end of something that was once more giant than one small being can imagine.

It brings size to mind, for some reason. What do you think?

I meet with a group of women every Wednesday morning to work on a new medium for all of us — altered books.

We pick up books from the county library’s bookstore that they give away for free, and cut and paint and rip and otherwise change them into other things. I’m working on two different things, to allow one to dry as I pick up the other, one of which is “desecrating” a Precious Moments board book.

I have to admit that I work on this with much glee, altering these little saccharine watercolor figures to my own purposes.

Here are the first three pages. I’m not yet sure where it’s going, and I’m sure I’ve been inspired by Lisa Snellings Clark’s fabulous poppets, and I’m loving it so far.

Page one of “Precious What?”, paper, acrylic paint, fabric, and glue

Page two of “Precious What?”, paper, acrylic paint, sari-remnant ribbon, and glue

Page three of “Precious What?”, acrylic paint, fabric, and glue. Still in progress on this one.

This morning was hilarious, because one of our members recently returned from a trip to visit family in Nebraska, where she was asked what she was working on recently and couldn’t quite bring herself to tell them, “Well, there’s this woman in my group working on desecrating a Precious Moments book, when she’s not ripping apart a math book with an Exacto knife. . .”

Am I getting too much pleasure out of this?

fused cotton fabric collage, in progress

This is where I am so far for the January Take it Further Challenge, after pondering a rough sketch for awhile.

The mountains are all cut from one piece of striped batik fabric, fused with MistyFuse to the sky. The colors are more jewel-toned than this photo suggests.

I’m really happy with this so far, but don’t see it relating much to my initial concept. Since I’m not sure what to do next, I figure this is a good place to stop for now. So, now to ponder — paint, embroidery, machine quilting? Does the road fit into this at all? How to build out the bottom of it to give more depth?

from The Library of Congress.

The Library of Congress has put two rich collections of photographs on Flickr for public commenting and tagging, in a section called “The Commons.” I am just loving the 1930s and 40s in color — so much great history and color and eye candy, and all without copyright.

*note: this is a test post blogging directly from Flickr, so it may go through some variations.