Tragedy for The Sketchbook Project

I thought I would give you an update on Starring William Morris today. When I found the following in my inbox this morning I had to take a detour.

On Monday, February 28th, the moving trailer that was transporting the entire Sketchbook Project collection from Brooklyn to St. Pete (Florida) caught fire while driving through Baltimore. We are incredibly thankful that everyone involved in the accident is safe and not hurt.

 We are pleased to report that around 70% of the The Sketchbook Project collection was saved by volunteers and firefighters who heroically moved the books off as fast as possible at the scene. Following, community members from a local church helped move each box of books into their parking lot one by one. The majority of the unharmed books arrived in St Pete today and are safe and sound. We are beginning to assess the damage, but we estimate we may have lost around 7,000 books of the collection and most of our supplies that helped us operate as an organization.

Those of you who have been with me for a long time will remember that I've participated in The Sketchbook Project a few times over the years. Most recently I filled in a Tiny Sketchbook with an abecedary. Prior to that I embroidered travel trailers for each page. Those are the two that stand out in my feeble mind. There were others. 

I found The Sketchbook Project community to be very welcoming. Participating helped me to see my own artistic vision more clearly. I value the growth I've experienced and their ongoing mission to foster creativity in others. My contribution to their GoFundMe drive is minimal, but every donation takes them one step closer to setting up a new library and starting up their programs once more. If this resonates with you I invite you to throw a few pennies in the pot along with me. 😊

2013 Sketchbook Project

Quilter's Attention Deficit Disorder has struck again. This time in the form of the Sketchbook Project for 2013. I received the email that the organizers were ready to send out the books for next year's project, and what must I do but respond almost immediately. In spite of my complete failure last year to create a sketchbook much less send one in. In my defense, I think I got spooked by the lined pages in the book I chose last year. When I placed my order I had lots of ideas but they seemed to evaporate once I had the book in my hot little hands.

This year the organizers have given prospective participants the option not to declare a category for their sketchbook when they sign up. They've always said the categories were more a suggestion or jumping off point than something to be strictly adhered to. They were meant as inspiration, not directive. I admit to being intimidated by the category labels in the past. When I ordered my sketchbook this year I went for "Undecided." Perhaps it will fit into a category when it is finished.

I also made the decision not to try to fill my sketchbook with line drawings or other forms of paper art. I am a fiber artist and I want my sketches to demonstrate that. I'm also trying very hard to keep in mind the origins of the sketchbook - or what I believe them to be at any rate. With the advent and popularity of art journaling I think the concept of a sketchbook has become obscured. It is my belief that a sketchbook was meant to capture and work out ideas, not be a formal presentation of polished art work. To that end I'm trying to keep my fabric sketches experimental and loose. This first one is simply rectangles of scraps stitched to the page. I like the juxtaposition of pattern lines in the two prints.

The next one is a bit of piecing I did years ago. I was playing with triangles cut from that same wavy stripe. It didn't turn into anything at the time but it is a perfect example of experimental piecing!

I still have that wavy stripe in my stash so I decided to work in a series, at least for a little while. ;- )

This one started with another tiny triangle, this time of the Hellbucket print. I just happened to find another print, in which I was able to isolate the word 'not.' I decided to introduce a bit of color this time around too.

Yesterday I created this page:

Once again I started with scraps of the Hellbucket print. Then I just worked out of my scrap basket to create my "house on a hill." I want desperately to embellish this with beads but there are restrictions for the Sketchbook Project. You may notice that this hasn't been stitched to the page yet. I'm going to wait a bit to decide whether I want to include it in the book or not. And by waiting I'm giving my subconscious a chance to figure out how to embellish the composition with decorative or free motion stitching on my sewing machine instead of beads!

Still More Sketchbook Project

There hasn't been much going on in this Magpie's Nest lately. Just one of those cyclical slumps. I've been reading instead of sewing. I'm fascinated by the way my left hand feels great one day and I can hardly bear to use it the next. All part of the healing process I'm sure.

Before the slump hit I made a couple more pages for my Sketchbook Project. This one was very simple, out of scraps from my Dr. Seuss and Reading Material quilts.

It may very well end up being the center signature of my book. I've debated whether to hide the lines of stitching on the backs of the pages but have decided to just leave them exposed. Here you can see the back of the house page you saw in the last post.

I began my sketchbook by playing exclusively with black and white prints. There's no way I could keep the color out though!

To make this composition more interesting and/or cohesive I played around with some of the decorative stitches on my sewing machines.

It was after this burst of creativity on my Sketchbook Project that I hit the wall. I kept reaching for something new or different to do on the few pages that are still blank. Nothing satisfied so that's when I turned to fiction. I think I'm just about read out for now so hopefully it won't be another ten days or two weeks before my next post!

The Sketchbook Project and Wm. Morris Updates

 Fire damage to The Sketchbook Project collection hasn't been as extensive as first thought but it's still bad. Books have been damaged by smoke and water as well as flames. So far I haven't learned what caused the fire. Some books will be irretrievable, others can be salvaged. The new library space in St. Pete has begun to take shape. Undamaged books are going onto shelves. Apparently the whole of the Tiny Sketchbook collection was safe (that's two year's worth of submissions I think). Those unloading boxes and assessing damage are wearing N95 masks to protect themselves from mold and smoke as much as anything else.

 

  The GoFundMe drive has raised about 2/3 of the monies needed to get The Sketchbook Project back on its' feet in Florida. Every little bit helps. 😊

Meanwhile, the quilt top featuring the William Morris style prints has been completed.

I'm very happy with the way it turned out. Hopefully the intended recipient will be too! 

I sashed and bordered the blocks with a blue+green Fossil Fern print.The top finished up at about 66" square.

 I took the easy road out and purchased a creamy extra-wide print for the back. 😁 

I've also purchased a new rotary cutter. Actually, I bought two but the first one didn't work out. I've returned to an Olfa cutter that has a slightly plump handle. Turns out you can wear out your rotary cutter, not just the blade - who knew?! The washer mechanism had so much slop in it that I couldn't tighten the blade adequately anymore. I'm having a much easier time cutting strips and patches now. Still have to pace myself to keep from aggravating the tendonitis in my left elbow and the carpal tunnel syndrome in my right hand and forearm but it's progress. As long as I stay out of toxic fumes I'm a much happier camper these days.

SAL in July

Needles have been flying here since the last Stitch Along check in. There's nothing like new materials to inspire new work! The hand dyed floss from The Victorian Motto Sampler Shoppe has been a joy to work with in my embroidery and needlepoint projects.

If you haven't visited since the last SAL you probably didn't see the friendship block I did in embroidery instead of applique, partly because I don't do applique but also because it was a good excuse to play with the new floss! For those who have been here to see that block take shape you'll note I added flower tips to the roof of the caravan. I think they fill in that gap nicely.

I've also completed the little needlepoint case you saw in my last SAL post. The focal "patches" are a commercially available floss (but not DMC). The background is done in one of Nancy's hand dyed flosses. It has a subtle variegation to it that reflects the more obvious variegation of the brighter colors.

I'm really pleased with the way this turned out. I was concerned there would be too much background relative to the triangles. The variegation in the purple floss creates just enough interest to keep that from being an issue I think. And now I need a new project...

That caravan/travel trailer block was so much fun to stitch that I was sad to have it come to an end. Several ideas for variations on the theme come to me while I was working on it too. In a bit of serendipity look what showed up in my mailbox in the last few days:

I'd forgotten that I'd signed up for The Sketchbook Project for 2018. I don't paint or draw but I'm always looking for a way to introduce folks to the idea of needle and thread as a way to express themselves. Mash these two things together and my new project for the SAL has come into being!

The Sketchbook Project's blank pages are 5" x 7" and have to remain that size. The original caravan block was a bit too big but it was a fairly simple matter to shrink it down some. I wanted to find some other trailer silhouettes I could use though, especially since I'm reluctant to draw my own. It didn't take long to find this on Amazon.com:

Most of them are just the right size to fit into this Sketchbook, which makes me very happy.  I'm planning to stitch on cotton as usual and then sew the embroideries onto the paper pages of the sketchbook. The books aren't supposed to be any thicker than an inch when filled so I probably won't use all of the pages. Nevertheless, this ought to keep me occupied for a while. :- )

There are many other wonderful things being created with needle and thread in this group. To take the tour, click on!

Avis, Claire, Gun, Carole, LucyAnn, Kate, Jess, Constanze, Debbierose, Christina, Kathy, Margaret, Cindy, Helen, Steph, Linda, Catherine, Mary Margaret, Timothy

Saturday Morning

It's been wet around here the last few days but this morning dawned clear and dry.

All the folks participating in our local Memory Walk to raise money for Alzheimer's research will be pleased. The Friends of the Library and the downtown merchants will be pleased as well because today is the day of their big annual sidewalk sale. I've done my running around for the week and need to stay home for a while now. Actually, I'm happy that I was able to get out and about this week without more severe consequences. :- )

I've been working on my journal for The Sketchbook Project. There are a couple of pages that aren't quite done yet and I don't want to share them until they are complete. (Now why is that? I took the Process Pledge, shouldn't it apply to the Sketchbook Project as well as my quilts? Hmm...) I can show you this one though:

It's that basic paper weaving technique you may have done in elementary school. I remember making woven paper hearts in February one year for Valentine's Day. I had to go online to find the directions for doing it though because that February was probably some 45 years ago! In this case I used a sheet of black paper and a couple of used Color Catcher sheets that had turned a soft shade of pink when I tossed them in with some new yardage.

I secured one half of the woven "blanket" to one page of the journal and folded back the other half to demonstrate that a woven blanket is reversible. Then I took another piece of the black paper, cut it to size, taped it into the journal and used it to define the bed covering we know as blankets. So now I have an example of both a quilt and a blanket in my journal.

I've also started work on the outside covers of my journal. The only real doodling I remember doing in high school - that didn't involve the names of boys I had crushes on or little hearts - was a straight line technique that produced a pile of triangles. When I thought of that the other day I also thought about crazy quilts. It was in that moment that I figured out what I would do for the cover of my Sketchbook Project journal. Participants are encouraged to decorate or recover the covers of their journals BUT you can't obscure the label with the bar code on the backside. So I decided to draw a crazy quilt on the covers of my book.

This is a piece of the back. (More has been done to it since the photo was taken.) This type of sketching I can do without too much angst. I do kind of wish I had made my "patches" bigger though. It's hard to get much patterning in on these. But that's why I started with the back. I figured I would probably learn a few things along the way and the end result would be that the front cover, the one more likely to be seen, would stand a better chance of being something I was happy with. We shall see ;- )

More Fiber for The Sketchebook Project

Faithful readers may remember that I signed up for the 2013 Sketchbook Project almost as soon as the new project was announced. I've shown you my first few pages; you can see them here. I've been able to fill up some additional pages this week.

This first page is made entirely from scraps from my Crowns quilt. Just raw edge applique straight stitched right onto the paper.

Still playing with the black and white scraps...

I used red thread on previous black and white compositions; this time I picked up the pink from the dog print.

But eventually I had to have more color...

I started out simply outlining the house shape with straight stitching. Then I "drew in" the chimney with some careful machine stitching and colored it in with pastel chalk. The cotton fibers of the fabric should grab that chalk and keep it in place pretty well. You can see that I also added grass with straight line machine stitching at the bottom. Double-clicking on the photos ought to make them big enough for you to get a better look at the details.

The last page I'm going to show you in this post was created with labels from men's neckties.

The vertical strips used to be the loops you find on the back of some ties, I guess to slip the tie ends through to keep them corralled. I really like this page. :- )

The pages in this sketchbook allow me to create postcard size compositions. It's a fun way to stretch my thinking to see how many different ways I can create an image or composition. The hard part is not being able to use beads and buttons! (The completed book cannot be more than one inch thick.) There's still time to sign up for the 2013 Sketchbook Project; I encourage you to consider it as a way to open up your own creativity!

Movin' On

I think my Sketchbook Project is complete. Originally I was going to continue the drawn "crazy quilt" onto the front cover from the backside. (You can see the beginning of that process in this post.) With so little time left before the postmark deadline I realized that wasn't going to happen. I thought seriously about trying to cover the front with pieced fabric. In the end I wasn't willing to put that much effort into it and I was worried about the actual act of sewing through that cardboard cover. Most of my book is comprised of collaged magazine clippings - which is ironic given that I can tolerate so few magazines anymore. Anyway, I had this image of an antique applique quilt left over and the colors were right so I just slapped it onto the front cover of my Sketchbook. It's completely covered with packing tape.

I'm pleased with the way it looks. Oh, and here's one of the inside spreads that I thought the quilters in my audience would appreciate:

"She stitched her fingers to the bone..."

Once I had all the scraps and bits and pieces from the Sketchbook Project cleaned up I took the house blocks off the design wall and put my Intuition Quilt sections back up. Then just for grins I put a couple of the house blocks up with them. Since the little house patch didn't make it into or onto the cover of my Sketchbook I added it to the mix on the design wall too.

There are definite possibilities here!

Let's try another configuration...

Yup, I like that too.

And what about this?

It just gets better and better!

A lot of what you see on the wall isn't sewn together - hardly any of it in fact. I expect the houses will get moved around more, maybe chopped down some. I might have to make a few decisions about the size and shape I'd like this quilt to take before I go too much further. For now though I think I'll just try to make some more compensating bits and strips. "Make more fabric," as Victoria would say. And I have to start another Intuition Block to send to Janet since I've firmly decided to keep this one!

Rollin' Along

It's been another rough week over here. It's warm enough to warrant having the windows open to keep the house comfortable but those open windows allow toxins to drift in, most of the time so subtly that I'm unaware of what's happening until it's too late. So, lots of headaches and less productivity than I would like. In spite of all that I have a finish to share!

The decision to do embroidered sketches to fill my book for The Sketchbook Project was a great motivator. First I had to reduce the applique pattern I embroidered in response to a friendship block request (see previous post) so a second version would fit in the sketchbook provided by TSP.

Several of the images out of the camper coloring book will need to be reduced as well, but not quite as drastically.

My original thought was to nearly duplicate the friendship block I'd stitched, just smaller. Very quickly it became apparent this would be a different trailer altogether.

Try as I might, I couldn't get the right side of that decorative strip to behave. Oh well, the window over it isn't straight either. This is my Quirky Victorian. (I've just christened it. I'll break a bottle over the hitch later.) Ta-daa:

A few detail shots:

The widow's walk/luggage carrier.

I went for an awning over the double window this time around. The window is just too small to put anything on the table though.

I used lazy daisy stitches for the hubcap instead of the wrapped rose . Part of the fun of doing a series of these for The Sketchbook Project will be experimenting with different stitches in different applications. I'm working intuitively too, not planning anything out very far in advance, mixing commercial flosses with Nancy's hand dyed lovelies. The decoration along the roofline of this caravan would be larger in scale if I'd left it for later in the process. I won't be putting any of the embroideries in the sketchbook until they're all done so I can pick and choose if I end up doing more than will fit in the book (the books have to be kept under an inch thick). There's always the chance I'll take out the first attempt and do it over again before then too. For now though, I'm contemplating the next caravan... ;- )

I'm linking up with others taking stitches by hand for the pure pleasure of it over at Kathy's Quilts for Slow Sunday Stitching.

A Blatant Act of Avoidance

That's what this post is. It's warm and very humid this morning and I feel like a slug. If I had known better I might have named this blog The Snail's Trail. It's Monday morning and there is no reason I could not be sewing or doing something else productive. Yet here I sit. Besides the housework, which I'm not going to do anyway, I have a raft of creative projects I could be engaged in. It's rather frustrating to be sitting here, apparently unable to pick up a piece of cloth or a pen, knowing there are deadlines to be met and deadlines that have passed. Arrgh!

One of those deadlines is my journal for The Sketchbook Project. It's not due until January but I feel compelled to work on it now, not later. I picked up a couple of old books at the thrift shop last week, thinking I would use them somehow. So far those ideas have not materialized. But I have not given up on them entirely. My little travel sketchbook is brimming with the various ideas I've had for my Sketchbook. I think what I need to do is to collate them onto one or two page(s) in my Studio Journal so I can see at a glance what I've done and what I might choose to do. Maybe that will help.

The other project I need to be working on is a new quilt for my Dear Husband. I made him a quilt for his birthday some 15 years ago and it's showing its' age. I think I've finally come up with a plan at least. He loved this print:

I thought I'd use big pieces of it with some fussy cut images from this print:

His first quilt is a strippy format; I believe this one will be also. Which means I only have to make about 14 blocks and that shouldn't take an awful lot of time. The thing is that my long-arm quilter, Heather, has me penciled in for a date in November so I have to have the top and backing ready by then. I figured I would use my 15 minutes of play to get these blocks made. I just haven't sat down at the sewing machine in what seems like forever! I consider the time I've spent coloring and pasting in my Sketchbook journal play, just of another type.

Is it all starting to feel like work now? No, not really. I think it's just the weather, the changing of the seasons... something along those lines. Miss Responsibility, sister to Miss Perfection and daughter of The Judge, may be the source of my discomfort. Not only am I feeling the deadlines for these two projects looming over me, I have unfinished commitments to the Bead Journal Project and others to fulfill. I know full well that the best and perhaps only solution is to take action on any one of these projects. Just a tiny baby step, and that will lead to another and then another... And eventually this miasma will pass.

A Tiny Sketchbook

Those who have been visiting The Magpie's Nest for years may remember that I've participated in The Sketchbook Project a couple of times. I don't draw, but fill my sketchbooks with fabric, stitches, and words. Once the sketchbooks are filled up (whether or not they are full) they get sent back to the Brooklyn Art Library to become part of their permanent collection. Some of the sketchbooks have gone on tour around the country. The Tiny Sketchbook Project was introduced to facilitate taking sketchbooks over the pond to Europe a couple of years ago. I was very tempted to try one of the little sketchbooks but life kept it from happening. I was delighted when they offered a second round. 😀

Themes are suggested but artists are free to go wherever their muse takes them. I decided to write a Tall Tale in the form of an abcdery. Like this:

At this point my book was barely half full. So, I composed another abcdery.

I just realized I left out Q! That was meant to be 'Quality.' Phooey.

There you have it. 😁Now to get it in the mail. (Deadlines are wonderful things.)