I’ve spent parts of today playing.  I wanted to experiment with freeform crochet.  My friend CarlaB has made several freeform crochet scarves and now that I’ve got a small stash of red yarns, I decided to play.  Mine was looking nothing like hers, so I asked for advice.  I’m being far too rigid and not nearly free enough, so I’ve started over and will see what happens next week.  I won’t have much time tomorrow, or over the weekend, so I’ll put that on hold.

One thing I did do that is semi-finished and fun was load up some Superior Dissolve on the longarm, lay on a bunch of pieces of my new yarns, pin a second piece of Dissolve on top and then stitch it all together.  I think I need a thicker dissolvable stabilizer, because I had a few issues, but was able to work around it.

It was very cool to stick it in the sink, rinse out the Dissolve and have the following piece appear:

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I have quilted up some blue wool that I’m going to try to attach this to.  I’ve been playing with that this evening.  I’m messing around with adding beads as well. 

On the QuiltArt list last week there was a discussion about "gratuitous bling" and the use of embellishment in art pieces.  I think some people got the idea that some of the comments were suggesting that people who use embellishments are not actually making art, they are just throwing junk on fabric and calling it art.    On the other side, I have gotten the impression that some people think that in order to make an art quilt you MUST embellish.  I was glad to see that the conversation didn’t degenerate into too much of a fight.   I’ve never done much embellishing — not much room for it in the very traditional quilts that I have always made.  Who knows — maybe I’ll play for awhile and find that all of the goodies I bought will just sit in a box and never get used again. 

I think the main point I got out of the discussion is that whatever you choose to do, do it well.  If you are going to embellish — you want to avoid going over the top, but it’s almost worse to underembellish.  My water lilies is a case in point — I considered adding more beads to the background, but I could tell very quickly that it was going to take a LOT in order to do what I thought I wanted to try to do to it.  At that point, I wasn’t willing to make that kind of commitment to a project like that.  I’m very happy with how it turned out, but I can see other ways I could have gone with it.

My piece Alice’s Head went through several stops and starts as I decided how much to commit to the beading and embellishing.  I think the current piece will have to go through the same thoughtfulness.  Trial and error and experimentation.

Oh boy!  Two posts in one day!

Actually, this used to be Sarah’s food dish, but Sarah left us last year.  Katie started with a small plastic bowl, but graduated to a big girl food dish when she was big enough to reach over the top of it.  She was a little bit of nothing when we got her.

Sarah was our first baby — a week after my husband and I got home from our honeymoon, we took a drive to pick her out at a farm in Grundy County Iowa.  She was 9 years old and sick for the better part of a year when we lost her last fall.  I really missed her.  I still do.  We still had Toby, our big lug of an English Springer Spaniel, but he didn’t follow me around and isn’t the same kind of companion that Sarah had been.  I started looking around for puppies, and fell in love with a picture of Katie on the Internet.

It’s been quite an interesting adventure having a puppy in the house again.  She’s a funny girl.  She’s definitely a princess and a mama’s girl (but daddy’s OK, too).  She wrestles with Toby (she’s 19 lbs, he is 50….).  But sometimes she is a scaredy-cat.  For about a month she would refuse to come down our open staircase.  Nobody knows what happened, and eventually she started coming down again. 

Katie, like Sarah, is a stomach with legs.  She knows when it is supper time.  We try to feed her about 6 PM, and she starts heading for the laundry room (where the food is stored) at about 5:45.  If we fed her any earlier, we are afraid she’d just be up that much earlier in the morning looking for breakfast….

I got a new camera last week, and was just playing around with it.  I was really trying to get pictures of her looking at me, but now that I’m on this red kick, I was pretty pleased with this particular photo the way it is.  I love seeing the detail of her whiskers against the red of the food bowl.

I think that red is my favorite color.  I haven’t always said that — it used to be purple.  But as I think about myself and my life, I am finding that there is a whole heck of a lot more red around than there is purple….

In honor of that, I’m going to kick off some color experimentation with red.  My plan is to work my way around the color wheel, experimenting with different techniques and even crafts and starting to explore where my art and quilting is going to go in the future.

To get started, I made a visit to a craft superstore today and found red things.  Yarn, beads, buttons, ribbons, fabric, etc…everything I bought had to be red.  I did cheat a tiny bit — in addition to a red art marker, I bought a black one, but otherwise, everything was red.  I was very excited that most of the yarns I chose were on sale, and the glass beads, too!

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More on red and in it’s place in my life later…..