Fuchsias

I LOVE fuchsias! When I lived in California in the Bay Area, I always had them. I adore the full, frilly skirts in Easter Egg pastels or wild-girl carmine and royal purple.


Alas, Texas is not fuchsia friendly. I actually saw a few lovely pots at the garden center the other day. I was tempted for about five seconds -- until I thought about having to water those pots twice a day in the 100° heat.

Painting fuchsias will have to do.

From Mistakes to Inspiration

All week I left the two broken fish tiles sitting on the graphite near my torch. Every time I saw them I felt a pang of loss. I kept thinking about how to salvage them. Then two things went together in my head -- inspiration!!


Leaf patterns are pretty ubiquitous in the glass bead world. I've been practicing my stringer work leaves with what I call my kelp pattern. That stems from one of my earliest art quilts, Going with the Flow, which has beautiful silk kelp and jellyfish. The kelp leaves have a float at the base of each one, so that's the way I do the leaves -- a stem with attached dots for floats and then long upward leaves.


Yesterday, I decided to wrap the broken tiles onto the bead anyway, try to attach the second part as best I could, then cover the break with kelp. Along the way I remembered this idea I had about surface sculpting the beads to give more dimension to the fish. See the trail where the kelp winds around? That's where the crack was.


It also masks nicely the back of the bead where the tile comes together, especially in the beads where I use dichro sheet underneath, because it leaves a noticeable line.

I am so in love with these -- so much more enchanting than the plain, flat fish. I'll never go back!!! I guess I should wish for more mistakes.

Which do you like better -- the plain, flat fish or the sculpted fish?

Memories

Supposedly the strongest memories are associated with the sense of smell. I've been painting and have to attest that the smell of acrylic paint definitely brings back that sense of deja vu for me. How long has it been since I pulled out fabric paints?? Months, I guess. It was a real sense of coming home. A big "aaaahhhhhh."

This week in yoga, I finally got fed up with hanging off the end of my mat. The standard mats are 68" long, and I am 71" tall. I should say that three years of regular yoga has gotten me back up to that original height. I was appalled sometime back to get measured in the doctor's office (an indication of my mature years and the expectation that we women start shrinking as we approach menopause), finding that I'd lost 1/2". I'm always repositioning myself in yoga so that I can keep my hands and toes on the mat, or that I hang off in the right direction. Long mats are available, but after months of watching I had never seen a really long one for sale in either of the yoga studios I frequent. Thursday, there it was! 85"!!! Ten pounds??

The upshot is that now it won't fit in my carry bag. And finding a bag big enough is also a challenge. I've been looking at new bags for months as well, and it finally hit me that I should just make my own. So out came the paints.

I had this notion of something simple, and it started that way. I pulled out some Kona cotton and painted five black swallow silhouettes swooping across it. Today I thought to add some flowers, flipped through the reference books, and started sketching fuchsias in one area. That's when I found that a lot of my Setacolor and Jaquard paints are almost empty/nearly dry. No matter, this thing doesn't need a nice hand to the fabric; in fact, I want it to be sturdy and heavy, so Golden Fluid Acrylics filled in for some colors. What I didn't realize was that I would get so carried away with the painting. This was just one area on that big piece of cloth. So now what do I do??? I may decide it's too cool for a yoga mat bag...

Wicked Close Up

I decided I should post a close up of the "teeth" on those tulips.

Wicked Tulips

Aren't these tulips incredible??? Their blossoms appear to be lined with teeth. Perfect for Halloween season.

Vacation Inspiration

For gorgeous flora and fauna, Hawaii is the place to visit! Unfortunately, I don't own an underwater camera, so I can't show all the stunning fish I met while snorkeling. Suffice it to say that I will be giving my goldfish beads some Hawaiian cousins -- butterflyfish, wrasses, tangs and parrotfish to name a few.



I did take a LOT of photos of plants, including my absolute favorite weird, ancient Giant Cycad. The inner crown of this plant has the oddest curls and bumps that just beg to be translated somehow to glass or fabric. The plant colors were incredibly vivid -- even tree bark was amazing.

Cactus

More crossover -- I've been painting fabric to work on another cactus quilt and found myself last night making cactus beads.

Here's the fabric in progress: starting to paint, same area after the salt has been in place for an hour or so, and the entire (almost 2 yd) piece after it dried but before washing out.
What, you've never seen pink, blue and purple cactus? Here you go (yes, they are real!):

New Birds

I was shocked to learn that many people don't recognize the downward facing birds in my bird vessels. So I've been playing with some different, much simpler birds. Yesterday I borrowed the branch idea that Jennifer Geldard has been using in some of her "konstructs" and used it to accent one of these birds. The metallic greens and blues on the bird are hard to photograph. A hole runs horizontally through the branch at the top for a cord. I tried hanging one of my painted birdhouse beads in the middle, but it was just too big. I'm going to try some tiny birds to hang from the birdhouses though.