Fibermania

Designing on the Laptop

Last Sunday when I was teaching in Yellowknife, the workshop was going along swimmingly and I sat there with not much to do. I brought my knitting for such a moment, but left my needles back in my room at the hotel, so I was stumped. Then it dawned on my pea brain that I had fabric, and Wonder-Under and the rest of the necessary tools to make a quilt of my own!
Since I am cheap I fused only one piece of my available for sale fabric, and made the quilt top pictured above.
I took a digital picture of it and looked at it in Picasa2
which has become a habit lately. I find I can 'see' my work better on the screen than I can in real life. It's like it doesn't exist unless it is viewable online. Weird, I know.

In Picasa2 I cropped the image once,

recropped and turned it on its side once,


reset, and recropped it again.

At this point I can't remember which side was up when I designed it originally.

I took one of my 'crops' and pasted it three times to see how a repeat might work.

This is a second version.

And a third.

So much of my work is fabric dependent and this would be nearly impossible to reproduce, especially with the dye effects in this specific piece of fabric. But I think that I have another idea...

One of my personal challenges is to switch from my old way of painting to a new non-representational style. But where to start? When I see these panels I think they would make neat paintings, and I could repeat the patterning of the fabric in paint! So yesterday I dragged out a failed work from its hiding place under the stairs and started to paint over it.

It would have been a lot easier to start on one of my many fresh unused canvasses, but I am being frugal these days. Plus I am eliminating the need to fix the unfixable original painting that I started this summer. It was too pictorial. grrrr.

Kitty update: Miss Socks had to return to Frieda's house. Popeye insisted on being the only cat. She was a lot happier back at home with George, I could tell immediately. sigh.