Crafty Weekend

Top Three:   Simple Ecology brand organic cotton canvas grocery bags with original art quilted panels: Black Bird in Marin, Parrot with Baobab Trees and Tokay Gecko
Bottom Two:  Two new T shirt applique designs (not yet embroidered):  Blue Jay and Crow

Anatomy of an eBook Part II

Little Cloud drifts away from the Tall Mountains and meets a Blue Jay named Jack, in my Kindle Ebook story for kids called Little Cloud.   So where is Little Cloud going, and what are Little Cloud and Jack up to?  Again, we go to the top of Mount Walker, this time looking south at the panoramic views of Puget Sound and Green Hill, Turner Mountain and Buck Mountain.   On the hazy day in August, 2014, when I took the reference photos, it was difficult to make out much in the distance.  In referring to Wikipedia and the Free Dictionary some interesting facts emerge:  Puget Sound is an inlet of the Pacific Ocean and part of the Salish Sea.  In an unusual precedent, it was explored by Capt. George Vancouver who, rather than name the inlet after himself, named it for his aide Peter Puget.  The illustrations for Little Cloud and Jack surfing the breeze in the sky, had a more high tech birth, requiring a Photoshop filter from Alien Skin’s Eye Candy 7 software, called Motion Trail.  This plug-in was used to illustrate the meteorological phenomenon known as thermal lift, which is used by soaring birds (and Little Clouds) as an energy source.  Despite this energy aide, Jack got worn out playing in the sky with Little Cloud and expressed a wish to return to his home on Small Mountain.  More about this in Part III.

Two New Small Quilts

Top:  Aspen Poppies 8"x10"
Bottom:  SF Bay Birds 24" x 20"

Note to self:  Maybe best to stay away from stripped bindings!

California Blue Jay Map Art

I've become very fond of the blue jays in my backyard.  The other day I set up my camera and took a series of photos of them at the bird feeder.  When I heard about a new contest at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts on "The Map as Art," I used one of my bird photos as a pattern and digitally repainted it with the bay area section of the map of California.  I wanted to try some map art since buying the book by Katharine Harmon on contemporary artists who explore cartography.  One of my favorite pieces in the book is a map collage titled "Swimming" by Brazilian artist Joao Machado.