Stitching with a Shimmy

Shimmying through life with needles and thread…
April 13th, 2009

Late, late Indigo

Note: Getting Things Done is taking longer than I expected it to, due to some bad planning on my part, taxes, and family emergencies.  I AM still making progress, though, albeit slowly. I’m going to try to come back to one post a week because I don’t want to completely disappear from all your radars!

Indigo:

I’ll admit it. I failed horribly. And I’ve had more than a week to find it.

Indigo is a color I love – a deep blue with a hint of purple in it. It is also not a color you see often, at least in the form I expect it. My midnight blue hipscarf comes close — in fact, it’s the color the International Order of the Rainbow for Girls (IORG) used when I was a member – it annoyed me then, too – there’s no purple in it. Hence, to me, it’s blue.

My irises have indigo in them as I remember — they haven’t bloomed yet. I did not think I would fail to find a color I love so much. I was wrong.

Has anyone else found anything they’d call indigo? If so, I’d love to see it! Post a link in the comments and I’ll find time to come look. I promise on that one. I LOVE indigo!

Next, Purple, violet, whatever you want to call it! And I’m still on the lookout for indigo.

March 15th, 2009

Blue…

Blue is one of those strange colors… Where does it end and indigo begin? In Rainbow, blue was always light, and indigo dark, but it’s more than that. Indigo should have a more violet hue. But we’ll get to indigo.

This week, it’s blue. Which is almost unfair, since so much in my world is blue. When the EO and I got together, we both a bit surprised to find that we also shared a love of blue and silver.

So anyway. Blue things. I wanted to include a photo of the Carolina sky, but the day I went to take the photo the clouds rolled in, and it looked like Seattle!!!

Next week… Indigo… blue or not?

March 11th, 2009

Depth of Field

In photography, depth of field refers to the distance between the camera lens and the object to be photographed so that the subject remains in focus. When you change the depth of field you can decide whether the subject or the background has more clarity. It’s an advantage in SLR cameras that you can play with this.

Block one with many (not all) seams stitched!

Block one with many (not all) seams stitched!

Recently I have been focusing my depth of field on backgrounds in my art. Simple is beautiful. but as I discover some of the more detailed and deep layering in mixed media art I want to figure out how to apply that to my tixtile work. A while back I took Sharon Boggin’s Sumptuous Surfaces class — which set me on this path. This year I am taking her Encrusted Crazy Quilting to continue this line of thinking. What better format for adding this kind of depth than crazy quilting? I stitch slowly, so I can’t promise you quick results on my original blocks (though I seem to be moving faster than I originally expected!)

In addition to the quilting class, I took Kelly Kilmer’s Prompt a Day mixed media journaling class last month. Can’t justify the time this month since I havent’  done all the prompts from LAST month yet! But what I’m finding is that the more layered the background, the sharper, and more prominent the focal image appears — a way of adjusting the depth of field in hand-made art as well as photography. This should be an interesting experiment.

I highly recommend sidestepping out of your normal media choice and play for a while. The results to your focus may surprise you.

February 21st, 2009

Orange

I was right. Orange is difficult to find in spring in a way that *I* consider pretty.

There are a lot of construction flags. I was trying to avoid actually taking pictures of oranges or carrots. I didn’t manage it.  But here we go:

The orange sweatshirt on the construction guy with all the orange traffic cones in his truck:

First I felt the need to cheat and use the doodle I did on an orange scratch pad at work:

I resorted to photographing the ads:

I found the orange lid of the glue at the office:

Then I noticed that the book I’m knitting from has a great deal of orange in it:

And I finally resorted to food: oranges, and then noticed the baker’s chocolate in the baking cupboard of things I can no longer eat:

And I took a close up of the bag for the oranges because as well as being a beautiful deep orange, the texture was just so cool!

So. Did YOU find anything neat and orange this week? Trackback or post a comment so I can see, too!

Edited to add: Next week… Yellow!

February 14th, 2009

Red

Happy Valentine’s Day!!!

And it is, still Valentine’s day, if not for much longer where I am. I meant to get this out earlier, but the day kind of got out of hand…

Anyway. Here are some of my red images. I actually found more than I expected to, and none of them are roses or valentines! I think Orange may be harder next week…

This is the apple I had for a snack last Wednesday, my red editing pen at work, and the “blood” all over the technical document I’m editing. I wrote it, so the author won’t feel TOO bad that the editor is making all those corrections, LOL!

The berries outside of the drive-thru where I bought my salad…

The dressing had a red packet, too! But I’ll leave them to your imagination.

We had Valentine’s Day dinner at a red restaurant. This is the Evil Overlord… at least as much as anyone will ever see of him… he prefers to live in the shadows. (REAL dinner was sushi last night. My husband really is a romantic at heart.)

Even the cups are red:

So that’s my red week. Leave a comment or a trackback to show me yours!

Next week… Orange!