SOLD

SOLD - what a lovely word. Be Very Afraid, © Eileen Doughty sold today.

Congratulations to Eileen and a reminder to all of us of the power of a single little disk making it's way around the world.

Whoo Whee

© June Underwood

Apologies to June Underwood

This is just a note to let the world know I am alive and functioning. June, please send a comment and identify this. My ID Card was too bleery.

Happy birthday, everyone,

There is a strange man named Petey Mesquite on KXCI.org radio. He did a strange, funny, long story of his childhood. When he asked about all the festivities his mother told him it was about this guy who was a pretty good teacher. Intertwined with the local botany and animals. He is a pretty good naturalist. He put it all in the context of living in the Sonoran Desert.

Like me, he has little room for suffering fools gladly. So he couched the craziness of this week as the birthday of a pretty good teacher. Hum, he happened to be the first peacenik.

So, a note to let you know I am home, I am vertical for small spaces of time. The surgery is successful. I am on my way to recovery. The people there were good and nice to me.

I'm glad to be home. I'm using my sitting up straight stamina to let you know I'll be better and have more stamina every day.

A Fork In The Road

Sorry about the poor condition of the scanned snap shot. The steel and steam bent hickory are the only art work that will stand up to the summer solstice intense light in my dining room. The last time we had an el niño year was a year of snakes. Snakes everywhere. So, when I had the opportunity to acquire another snake I did.

A Fork In The Road is by an Indianapolis, Indiana, artist. The initials are DKB. I think it is David Bellamy; I've contacted the Harrison Center for the Arts to be sure.

Fork in the road is an appropriate phrase for me today. Tomorrow I will go for back surgery. It's a situation of forty years of deferred maintenance. Life is very interesting when one has had forty years with no health insurance. So, I will risk surgery to live pain free.

I'll be back in a few weeks - not to worry. Just wanted you to know why I am going AWOL.

Bailey Curtis

Horseshoe Pass, © Bailey Curtis

Val Shields has been involved in the February Quiltfest at the International Pavilion, Llangollen, in Wales forever it seems. She very kindly sent me the CD for the 2006 festival.



Six Childhood Memories, ©Bailey Curtis

Please do go and check out Bailey's website. I find her work fascinating.

Connecting Cultures and Colors

This image of the cover of the catalog, printed in English, Kyrgyz and Russian is beautifully done. I find it particularly important in that the tri lingual text makes the works of women widely available.

Karen Musgrave has made several trips overseas. She arranges exhibitions where American quilts hang side by side with the works of women of the country where she is working. She is a one woman ambassador, talking one to one with women of all cultures. It is one of the best aspects of working as an independent curator.

The catalog is for sale and benefits the quilt artists in Kyrgyzstan. The cost is $25 includes shipping. Please email Karen Musgrave at freespiritdesigns@scbglobal.net

Sarah Louise Ricketts

The View From Here, ©Sarah Louise Ricketts

This lovely little wall hanging is Australian wool. I suspect it comes under the heading of nuño felting.

It is a process that I am wanting to explore.

A very belated Thank you ! ! ! !

This work is now hanging where I can see it every day. On reviewing this image I realize it is not nearly as well focused as I hoped. The felting is magnificent and much more crisp than this image.

Photographing what is, essentially, a black image without a tripod is not my best work. Never mind. The work itself is spectacular ! !

The Scud Missile System of Quilt Storage

This image is from a lo o oong time ago. It was my original quilt storage system. Since the work was about a foot deep on the bed, the bed and the room were useless.

I had been using sonotube concrete pillar forms for shipping tubes for a long time. I spoke with my husband and asked about building the design you will see below.

Seems it sounded like a no problem, problem. Here is the structure as first designed and installed. The resident engineer, construction worker is in the distance. His name is Sam.

Actually he can do, make, design, build anything. Decades and decades ago he designed and built race cars. He drove them as well. He finally quit racing for the Honda Motorcycle Team in the Baja California, Mexico 500 when he was fifty.

It has not slowed him down much. He is still nineteen years old between his ears. For all the implications of that.

Below is the completed scud missile system of quilt storage as assembled in the back bedroom. The long tube at the top was one of those design modifications that the contractors always charge an arm and a leg for.

This will show you what the storage system looks like from one end. Since the tubes are for construction and used to form wet concrete into columns the lining is an industrial wax. One must roll and wrap each quilt. I use a swim tube rolling core that has the slats and core wrapped in muslin. The quilt is rolled outside out. Then the package is again wrapped in muslin. The ends are tied. A label tag is threaded through the chinese cellophane string identifying each quilt. One can sift through the tags to find the quilt to take out and display on the dye board in the workroom.

This is fairly early on in the career of the storage system. The full compliment of twenty two Left Turn Lane quilts had not been created or filled the bins to capacity.

All the time this storage system was in the bedroom it was a jungle gym for all the cats in the household. One could take a velcro lint remover and sweep the cat hair off the muslin wrapping. The quilts were safe. The cats were happy. I was blissfully unaware of how much fun was going on in the back room.

Here, you begin to see the accretions of "quilt blanks," tissue wrapped, returned quilts, a roll of black batting.

The short wrapped works were the beginning of Snake Hands. They were three vertical, irregularly shaped, quilts. Hand dyed rayon challis was alternated with cotton velveteen. The Snake Hands quilts were among the give aways that happened last month.

Down farther were things just stuffed there waiting time to properly wrap and store.

It appears that this image was taken at a time when all twenty two of the Left Turn Lane were in transit to or from some exhibition or another.

The lovely basket comes from the mid east. It now holds black discarded clothing for Valarie James. I am collecting enough black cotton, linen, and rayon challis that Valarie may make another cloth fiber sculpture of the Las Madres series in "Widow's Weeds Black." The Las Madres - No Mas Lagrimas project is one I have been privileged to watch. I helped un-mold the ivory sculpture.


Here is the image of the storage system as installed in the garage. We had to contend with my little red Del Sol roadster that I refuse to give up. The channel for the garage door meant that one tube had to be reduced to four feet long at the top.

The very long tube that was at the top in the bedroom is now on the bottom. Although the cats are allowed in the garage on a random sort of basis, ends were placed on the tubes to discourage snakes, lizards, mice, and pack rats. Personally, I would prefer a jungle gym and a hunting ground for the cats. However, I do need to protect my inventory.

All this means that I now have retrieved the second bedroom in the small house I live in. It is less than 1400 square feet. The third bedroom has always been my office and my workroom. There is no way it will ever go back to bedroom. The dye kitchen puts it more in the category of wet bar.