Take a look at the gorgeous work done by beaders participating in the 2008 Bead Journal Project.
Bead Journal Project - Home Page
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Archive for August, 2008
Can anybody read Chinese?
The Olympics aren’t the only exciting thing occurring in China. This package arrived on my doorstep from Hong Kong: the bluelines for Color Mastery. I sure wish I knew what this said. I’m sure it’s something quite boring, like “folio 1 of 7,” but the writing looks so elegant.
Color Mastery color proofs
I’ve been poring over (thanks Marla!) these proofs to make sure the colors are dead-on accurate. I drove Gregory Case, my photographer, crazy with my questions and his constant assurances that, yes, the colors would be accurate even though they didn’t look that way on my monitor. Gregory was a therapist before being a photographer, and he told me I needed to take the leap and experience the result, even if I made a mistake. Wow, therapy and photography all from one guy!
I took these proofs with me everywhere this week: home, carpooling, even pee-wee football practice. Quite the contrary to Alicia’s experience when she and her husband Andy secluded themselves in a quiet diner to look over hers for her book. I remember those days, bc (before children).
My pee-wee football player
Here’s son #2 in his pads and uniform, ready to hit somebody! This is a new experience for me, and not an easy one. Watching my son get knocked to the ground repeatedly during practice is tough. And for 7-year-olds, there’s no such thing as a clean hit: they grab onto anything they can to bring you down: shirt, mask, hit from the back. My husband tells me the goal for son #2 is to get through practice without quitting or crying. He will, but I might not.
1996 Olympic Quilt with pins from Atlanta games
We’re Olympics junkies here. We’re glued to Olympic coverage and letting the boys stay up late to watch even though school has started. I love everything about the Olympics: the collective enthusiasm of the world watching a single event all at once and cheering on the athletes, the spectacle of the ceremonies, the stories of persistence and courage. I’m a sucker for all of it.
When the Olympics were in Atlanta, quilters from Georgia en masse turned out and made quilts in droves, and each country received two quilts: one went to the flagbearer, the other to the head Olympic official for that country. I worked on two quilts, one going to El Salvador and the other to Belarus. They are documented in this book: 
The Olympic Games Quilts: America’s Welcome to the World (Olympic Games Quilt).
A group photo of all the quiltmakers is on the back of the book, taken in the rotunda of the Georgia capitol building in Atlanta. It was so hot that day some of the older ladies were passing out, and I was five months pregnant with my first child.
My guild at the time, East Cobb Quilt Guild, had a meeting where we all made an Olympic wall hanging with one star for each of the Olympic rings. I attached all the pins to the quilt and it’s hanging in my powder room, along with lots of other Americana-themed decorating. One pin is special, and wasn’t available to the general public:
Pin given to quilters who made quilts for the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games
This pin you couldn’t buy and it was special to me for being a part of the games. I’ll never be an Olympic athlete, but in my own small way I was a part of the games in Atlanta.
It has on it the quilt of leaves that became the symbol for the 1996 Atlanta games, saving us from that horrible initial mascot, Whatizzit.
Today I wrote a letter to my local newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, about the cuts management is making to its newsroom and how disappointed I am in the results. Ya’ll know I’m a reader, and I’m saddened at the changes I’m seeing in the newspaper that is so much a part of my daily life. I thought I’d share the letter with you:
Dear Ms. Wallace,
I am a long-time AJC subscriber and am devastated at the cuts and changes I’m seeing in my daily newspaper. If bad news comes in threes, the AJC certainly had its share in a second large round of newsroom job losses, the decision to cut the Sunday @issue section, and the news that Cox is putting up all but three of its newspaper holdings. I am saddened, indeed.
My perspective is unique, and quite relevant to the forces you are experiencing. May I explain? I graduated from UGA with a Journalism major (News-Editorial) with a minor in Computer Science. I am an eight-time published author who developed my own website and two blogs, and I do most of my work and reading online. I depend on the AJC for something entirely separate from what I get online, and your management is slowly chipping away at the very properties and personalities that make your newspaper unique.
I grew up reading Celestine Sibley and Lewis Grizzard. I depended on the movie reviews of Eleanor Ringel Gillespie and Steve Murray (I couldn’t care less what Roger Ebert thinks, and I can get his movie reviews anywhere, so why turn to the AJC for them?). As a former Director of Courseware Development for ExecuTrain, I depended upon Maria Saporta for news of the local business community. The only real columnists left are on your Sports page (which as a woman I don’t crack) and John Kessler in the Food section. Get rid of him, the last bastion of enjoyable Southern charm in the paper, and I relinquish my subscription! (I realize you have political columnists, but I live in the north Georgia mountains, so local Atlanta politics have little relevancy for me.)
Section A of your paper is now filled with more AP stories than stories from local reporters. I can get that from Yahoo! news. Movie reviews are from nationally syndicated columnists, also available in multiple places. The local perspective is slowly disappearing from your pages, leaving readers with their own version of the USA Today, printed in Atlanta. I want local perspective on everything in my newspaper, from the war in Iraq, to politics, to movies, art, books (as an author I sorely miss the column from a real book editor), community . . . .EVERYTHING! And you are slowly, painfully, taking every bit of local perspective out of your metro newspaper.
I read local blogs, such as Fitzlew’s Georgia Daily Digest and Georgia on My Mind for local stories, but I rarely know the people writing them. Readers come to know the reporters and columnists they depend on in their local newspaper, and they are slowly disappearing from your pages. I can always depend on Mike Luckovich for a hilarious poke at politics and recent events . . . and that’s exactly the point: I depend on the AJC staff. I know them, I email them (even Elizabeth Landt (?) on her beautiful art), and I allow them to come into my home everyday. But lately, I don’t know the names on your pages. The ones I cared about are gone, and I’m seeing them replaced with “downsized” versions coming from syndicates and news wires.
I have two sons who are being taught by their teachers to use the internet as their main source for their reports. They turn to the AJC only for the comics, sudoku, and News for Kids. As they grow older, I’m hoping the AJC retains enough local news, columnists, and flavor for them to deem it relevant.
The recent essay written by Mike King on the passing of his wife was touching and so much a part of what I miss reading in my daily newspaper’s pages. I enjoy reading the editorials (all three pages!) and especially so now that the editors assign their names to them, and I learned a little more about Mike and his life. Give me a reason to turn to my newspaper everyday for news and perspective I can’t get online or syndicated anywhere else.
I realize how difficult it is for newspapers to remain relevant, but I believe the AJC is moving in the wrong direction. Don’t take away the very elements that set you apart from homogenized versions of national and local news.
Sincerely,
Maria Peagler (29 years of reading the AJC)
(You’re gonna want to scroll down for this one.) So what does all this stuff about sketching have to do with quilting? It prepares you for the single moment that inspiration strikes. I want to make a quilt of a house, a bird, a cup of coffee. I want to make a bow-tie quilt, log cabin. I can’t wait to use that new fabric. Now you have a rich repository from which to draw images from. You’ve “filled the well” as Julia Cameron would say in her seminal work, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity [10th Anniversary Edition] 
.
Here’s one path from sketch to original art quilt. I started with several thumbnail sketches, not really sure how I wanted to capture this gorgeous valley.
First Thumbnail
Second Thumbnail
Third Thumbnail
Fourth Thumbnail
I went with thumbnail #3, as I loved the vertical composition and the feeling I was at the top of the peak looking down. I captured the image on muslin using watercolor crayons, and here it is being auditioned for a border to serve as a frame:
Final Piece: Which Border?
And here it is on my design wall ready to be quilted:
Art Quilt on Design Wall
All the preparation in my sketchbooks readied me for this quilt. Funny, it didn’t feel like preparation. It felt more like time was flying by, being the in flow, capturing the images and moments that held meaning for me. Truly, the best part of being an artist. Dreaming, sketching, and quilting.
I love my job, don’t you?
Note of interest: The tiny building in the background (best seen in Thumbnail #1) burned to the ground months after I did this sketch. It was a local restaurant that held many memories for me and neighbors in my community. Now it has been immortalized in a work of art. See what I mean by capturing meaning? I had no idea of the unfortunate event that would come, nor do you ever know all the layers a work of art potentially holds. Until you actually create it.
Thumbnail Sketch by Maria Peagler
If I’ve peaked your interest in sketching, check out Katherine Tyrrell’s blog Making a Mark. Katherine is a pastel and colored pencil artist who has developed a wealth of lessons on sketching and keeping a sketchbook. She doesn’t include quilters or fiber artists in her blog, only drawings and paintings, but don’t let that stop you. Her lessons apply well to our medium, and I know I could happily get lost in everything her site offers.
Pastels and Pencils - How to Sketch - advice and information by Katherine Tyrrell ASGFA
A family day at a Braves game
At some point in my sketchbooks, I stopped using them as a place for only my ideas and inspiration, but also as a place to capture the daily moments of my life by drawing them. My husband had given me the book How to Make a Journal of Your Life 
, and it really enhanced my journaling style. Dan Price has been detailing the minutiae of his life for decades, drawing things as simple as the interior of the car as he rides with friends. His drawing style is simplistic and far from perfect, but that’s what makes it beautiful. He’s not attempting to create a masterpiece; rather, he’s making art of his everyday life in his own hand, his own style.
I still drew only sporadically until last year, when again my sweet husband gave me another book for Christmas: Danny Gregory’s Creative License, The: Giving Yourself Permission to Be The Artist You Truly Are
. Danny begins drawing his days after his wife is hit by a subway train and becomes a paraplegic. Like Dan, he draws the little details that make up our lives: what he has for dinner, his dog, the interior of his medicine cabinet. And he is insistent that you make drawing a daily habit: do bad drawings, sketch things wrongly, but just do it and learn as you go.
I don’t sketch daily, but weekly, yes. Sometimes more than once a week. I draw more often when I’m on vacation, as I have more time and I want to remember the places I’ve been and what we were doing.
Eating out in St. Simon's Island
This journal I made by hand, after reading on WhipUp about a great book called How to Make Books (see the link in my sidebar). I made this little journal from old blue jeans, drawing paper and watercolor papers. It is always with me in my purse, and holds my sketches, summaries of books I’ve read, and even my grocery list. It’s a little journal of my life.
And now I draw things I would never have imagined as important or even beautiful.
Items on a side table next to a plan for a medallion quilt
But they are beautiful, because they are my life.
My baby bro's home
My younger brother, Michael, had his home profiled in Sunday’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution. His wife is pregnant with their second, and she looks so calm and relaxed in the photos accompanying the story. We get to see them on Sunday at their son’s second-year birthday party. We live a good distance north in the mountains, and it’s always a treat to venture into Hotlanta . . . and even better when we return to the lush, green, cool mountain air.
Here’s the full story:
Mind mapping my future
I’ve always thought Disney had it right in calling their employees Imagineers. What a cool job title - getting paid to bring imagination to life. I do my own imagineering in my journals, using two techniques I talked about in my podcast: mind-mapping and 100 Questions.
Mindmeister is a great online resource for mind-mapping, but I must confess I enjoy the old colored pencil and paper method best. A wonderful book on both techniques is How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day 
.
This book really transformed how I approached ideas, and I must say I now delightfully imagineer far more ideas than I’ll ever be able to do. But a girl can dream, can’t she?
As I continued to keep journals, I started adding my own ideas, designs, and dreams to them. I would still sometimes cut and paste from magazines and newspapers, referring to color schemes or styles of art I liked.
Here I liked the African women repeated across the page. Simple design, yet effective.
Images as inspiration
I also like to cut swatches and selvedges from fabrics I buy when I travel:
Who needs travel photos?
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