Yes, I am a Pack Rat

Santa Barbara elementary school photos from 1955 through 1961

I Wish

Now that I've starting writing poems again (for the recently self published Blurb book "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blue Jay")  http://www.blurb.com/b/8507763-thirteen-ways-of-looking-at-a-blue-jay, I started going back through poems I've written in the past.  Most were done for a family writing collective called "Round Robin."  Here's one from 2000 I found particularly relevant to today:

I wish for a fish
A fish of green and violet stripes
In a warm ocean pool
I can swim in
while I'm on a vacation
That lasts forever
In the sun, having fun
Staying eternally young
And in this unrealistic fantasy
The fish will talk to me
And give me words of wisdom
That bubble up through the water
And dry in iridescent drops on my skin
Where everyone else can read them
And learn something

I still wish for an eternal vacation but more realistically, what I'm wishing for today, is a better government! 

What's maybe more interesting is how often one does get what one wishes for.  I had totally forgotten this poem, but realize now my trip to the Galapagos last year, where I snorkeled with beautiful fish, was exactly what I had wished for 17 years earlier.

"Sewing Tools Used and New" - a Recently Finished New Art Quilt

This quilt happened for a couple of reasons: 
1.  I started collecting old scissors on a trip to Indiana in 2013, after enviously noting my artist aunt Reva's scissor collection.  This forced me to take a class on flash photography, and buy a flash attachment for my camera, in order to accurately photograph my old scissors.  That done, the scissors were photoshopped into a polka dot star pattern I designed.
2.  On a trip to the Galapagos in 2017, a fellow traveler was always sewing and I spent a couple of hours doing a watercolor of her pin cushion, which I liked a lot.  So I printed it onto fabric.
3.  I made the mistake of going into Britex Fabrics in SF (before they moved this year), thinking I would only look, and exited with scissor and pin cushion fabrics plus some complimentary blue and white fabric as well.  I needed to do something with them.
Once all of the above happened, I thought I'd put all the elements together and make a quilt I could enter into a cool quilt contest.  The problem is my craft abilities are inferior to my creative abilities so the finished quilt, being slightly imperfect, would probably never get accepted in a craft quilt contest.  Additionally, after photographing the quilt, I transformed it in Photoshop to neatly fill a unified space and find it now looks slightly more warped than it really is.  So the only place this quilt will be featured for now is here.  It will be live for viewing at my Marin Open Studios this coming May, however.

Art Quilts In Process

I now have so much fabric, I feel obligated to do something with it before it takes over the entire house.  So I am doing a lot of quilting these days.  One of my self imposed guidelines requires each quilt include some original art and/or photograph, which further expands the fabric library.  The top two images are for a giant quilt tentatively called "Birdmen of Marin," because it will ultimately include 80 2x2 photos that I shot in and around Marin County, combined with 4 wooden artist model photos done in an applique rose fabric + some original bird art.  The third image down is for a different quilt of funky birds in primary colors.  The one featured here is blue.  The final in process quilt depicted here is called "Magnolia from Bud to Flower" and includes magnolia photos printed on silk, then cut up, together with some applique magnolia buds and flowers in a mix of cotton and silk that is still being worked on.

Shooting Suburbia at Midnight

The flickering screen of a neighbor's giant wall TV, seen from a distance at night, has always fascinated me.   So when the rain cleared last night I was motivated to capture the scene, then modified it with various color filters.  It spookily reminds me of a scary TV show I watched as a child at my grandparents house (we never had a TV in our house) which gave me nightmares until my mother discovered my secret vice and cut me off.

Some New Winter Seattle Art

Top to Bottom:
1.   Pen & Ink and Watercolor portrait of sulky grandson Cole Taylor.  His nose is too long in the painting, as can be seen from the photo below it.  That might have been because we were reading the book Pinocchio!  Cole was not as willing to pose as his twin brother so this is the only time I had to paint him.
2.  Watercolor painting of Wilson, which doesn't do him justice, as can be seen from the photo of him above the artwork.
3.  Pen & Ink and watercolor and pastel pencil portrait of Wilson in his sport shirt.  He looks a bit like a Nazi youth in this picture, which Wilson said was "creepy."  It does not look much like the photo of Wilson above the art, holding up the world with his dyed red Mohawk hairdo. 
4.  An Abstract, inspired by going to Discovery Park in Seattle, one of my favorite places to hike
5.  A Memory Abstract of my week in Seattle ends the tableau.

Pink Diamond Owl Trees

My first wall hanging quilt!