Paint It Bright

The Picture Doesn't Do Him Justice

One of my favorite residents of the Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco is a gorgeous white alligator. He's got beautiful ivory skin, and a pink freckled nose. He fascinated me.

A Page a Day, That's All We Ask

I received two lovely new journals for Christmas. My very good friend Leanne gave me one made of banana fiber, I think. And my daughter gave me one she'd handmade, composed of various scrap papers of all kinds. In fact I've at least one other blank journal here in my studio, made from a cast aside book. I seem unable to resist the things, and the potential that they represent.

So I've decided to begin keeping an art journal. Nothing serious, just for fun.  Sometimes its a joy just to do something for fun. Sometimes the things done for the joy of it are the ones that spark something bigger.

 
Maybe my silly goosey is there only because I started to sketch one of the wild ones I'd seen today, and then remembered that they had black bills and feet, which wouldn't have shown up well on a black page!

Or maybe she represents the inner longing of a mere decorative artist to fly more freely. Maybe...

Happy luck!

pamela

The Turquoise Quilt is "Finally Finished"

Two posts in one day! How do you like them apples?

Remember my turquoise quilt project? It's quilted, and on my bed. Has been for quite sometime, actually. Here it is in our newly remodeled bedroom, with the painting daughter-darling and I did.

I designed the quilting in Photoshop, after this gorgeous 1947 Stig Lindberg fabric, which I have long admired

My friend, Jenny Michaels of Finally Finished in Saratoga, CA machine quilted it for me.

Sounds so simple. It wasn't. First we had to convert the .psd file extension to type which Jenny's Statler long arm machine would recognize. Me, knowing about "this much" about machine quilting design had made two long quilting paths that extended the entire width of the quilt. Oops! Jenny mounted my quilt top on her machine, and did the first pass; so far so good. But on the return trip - big problem! The the long first pass of quilting had caused the quilt to draw up, and Jenny ran out of quilt before she ran out of "path"! Jenny had to dismantle my long quilting paths and convert them to shorter chunks of quilting to be repeated over the width of the quilt.

Here's a close up of the quilting.

Jenny did a gorgeous job, didn't she? 

Until next time, heureux chance! (Happy luck!)

pamela

I'm Back...Again

It's a rainy late fall day here in California. I just wanted to prove that we do have "fall color" here. This golden tree is gorgeous. I don't know what kind it is.  We have flame colored trees too, mostly liquid ambers.

A la prochaine. (I'm trying to learn french.)