Recharge Zone

Happy Veteran's Day with much gratitude to all those who have served and are serving our country!

I’m back from Houston, feeling recharged and ready to create amazing things.

Unfortunately, being out of town for a week put me WAY behind in all other life endeavors, so I haven’t had much chance to work on fun things.

In brief bits of time I have been frantically cleaning my sewing studio, though, in preparation for my new purchase . . . a HandiQuilter Sweet 16! WOO HOO! I’m only mildly excited: can you tell???

I’m also trying to finish up a couple of quilt-tops so that I can FM quilt them with the Sweet 16 when it comes in next week. Here’s one that’s ready:



While in Houston, I took two wonderful classes. The first was a 1-day painting-with-dyes class with Hollis Chatelain. I had seen Hollis in the documentary film Stitched, and she seemed to be such a calm, laid-back person. HA. She’s a firecracker! I enjoyed her and the class tremendously and learned a lot about painting fabric with dyes, and especially about blending colors; I still need practice in that department, but now I know where I’m headed. Here’s my dye-painted fabric class project (Hollis’s design):



The other class I took was Powerful Portraits with Esterita Austin. Esterita was wonderful; she’s funny and a great artist. This was a 2-day workshop, so we had a little more time to work on our portraits. Here’s my class project, a fabric portrait of Esterita’s son’s girlfriend, Layla:




I still have quite a bit of work to do on her, and I’m trying to figure out how to use paint for highlights and shadows to 1) make her look a little less sad, and 2) make her lower lip less prominent. I love this technique and can’t wait to finish this portrait and start on others.

As always, there was an abundance of amazing quilts in Houston. I’ll try to post some pics of my favorites in the next couple of days.