Geyser Colors

There were so many colors in and around the geysers. One of the blues looked like it was the color of a glacier but was in hot water instead. Some of the colors in the pools are created by microscopic organisms that can survive in the hot waters. These are just a few of the many pictures we took of the interesting colors.

Geysers

Last weekend was our first time at Yellowstone National Park. Originally, we had planned to stay in the north area of the park. But due to two road closures within the park that would had have us doing a 250 mile detour, we changed our reservations to stay in the west area of the park. This is the geyser area and there were lots to see.

Our first afternoon there was cloudy and cold, maybe in the 40's. But the wind made it seem colder. The next day was very cold, but sunny. It was maybe around 20 degrees in the morning. Every time I took my hand out of my glove to take a picture it seemed like it froze instantly. It warmed up a little and the sun was nice.

The third day as we were heading out of the park, it was very cold and foggy. There was frost everywhere.

Our funny geyser story is this. We hiked up to a geyser that was off the beaten path, called Solitary geyser. Anna and I were standing quite close to it (although not beyond where it was indicated to stay back) looking at the colors and trying to see the formations inside the pool (which was hard to do as there was lots of steam). As we were standing there, I commented to Anna that you could hear the geyser and, very shortly after that, the geyser sent a spurt of water about 10 feet in the air. Anna and I both screamed as it had startled us and also because I was thinking we might get hit with scalding water. We didn't.

Frank had wandered off somewhere else and came running. He said he heard this "roar" and then us screaming and thought there was some kind of wildlife attacking. We all had a good chuckle afterward. Then we read the sign that said it erupts about every five minutes. We waited another 15 minutes or so to see it erupt again, but all it did was a burble.

This first set of pictures are some of the geysers we caught erupting. Sometimes it was a matter of timing and how long you wanted to wait. I bet you can all guess which geyser is the last one.

Tomorrow's pictures will be geyser colors.

Quilt Craftsmanship

I have no pictures to show you today. I returned home from Illinois on Sept. 29th and we were suppose to drive to Yellowstone the next day on the 30th. Due to a road closure in the park, due to fire, we postponed our trip until Thursday. We spent two nights in the park and one night outside. I have lots of pictures to share with you. But today I would like to talk about something else on my mind.

Yesterday I returned to the museum to work. The Gee's Bend quilts had arrived (or at least most of them) and I got to look at them for the first time. It is very interesting to see them in person. There are a few that I'm not that impressed with, but most of them are wonderful. And when I say that, I mean with the color/fabric combination and the compositions.

What surprised me was the lack of good craftsmanship in the quilts. If you look closely, you could see knots and thread ends. The quilting was uneven and often far apart. Edges were wobbly. Corners not squared. The fabric puckered and wrinkled in places. As most quilters that try to enter shows know, this would never be acceptable.

Of course these ladies come from a small community and originally were just making quilts for warmth and didn't have any "rules". Do these flaws make up some of their appeal, conveying a folk-art feel? Does it really matter because these pieces are being shown in museums as artwork? Can you even compare them to art quilts that are being shown in the major quilt shows? Are they like the outsider art of the quilt world?

But I think if they were really being made for use (in the beginning), then they certainly would not hold up very long. Maybe that didn't matter to them either. Maybe they would just make another when the first fell apart. And you really can see the wear and tear of some of them with holes and seams coming apart. But when you step back and not look at those things, they are very appealing. I also like the fact that they are using found fabrics from old clothes and such.

There are also some prints (etchings?) that are being shown with the quilts and were inspired by the quilts. I really like those a lot because they have similar composition and color but they are flat and the craftsmanship of the prints are very good because they were done by a print publisher.

Just some interesting thoughts to think about.

Prowling

When I was a child and we went to visit my grandparents, often times there wasn't much to do as they lived in a small town. One thing I liked to do to amuse myself was to go prowling in their attic storage place. Maybe it was my childish way of exploring the unknown. Maybe you would just call it snooping. Either way it kept me busy for awhile.

What treasure was waiting there for me? Mostly old, forgotten everyday items. But for a child, sometimes that was interesting. Sometimes I would discover something; a jar of marbles, old school supplies, once I found my grandmother's college scrapbook.

While I was visiting my parents house, I reverted to my prowling in their basement storage area. First, it was to just see if I had any remaining stuff from my childhood there. (There was a small amount and I cleaned it out to donate what I didn't want to keep.) Also, to just see what was there. What treasure or memory was hiding in those boxes? After a while, I decided to just start organizing some of the stuff, as well, by putting like things together, consolidating and getting rid of empty boxes, etc.

I did find some "treasure" there. I found some eighties jewelry of mine, which included some bangles that looked just like the ones I had purchased for Anna to wear to the Junior High "Eighties" dance (apparently the eighties are back in style now). I happened to find them on the night she needed them, but she was in Idaho and I was in Illinois.

Below are some more treasures I found: old buttons from my grandmother (who at one time worked in a button factory), lots of thread, old table linens and aprons I can use for fabric.

I also found these old Pyrex dishes I thought I could use at home (I carried them in my airplane carry-on luggage.)

I didn't get very far in the organization of the storage area, but it did make some difference. Below is the "after" picture. There is no "before" picture because I didn't know I was going to organize anything, I was just prowling!

St. Louis Art Institute, Part 2

The museum did not have a special exhibit up when we were there as they were getting ready for the next one. But they have a very large permanent collection and that is always free admission. There was still plenty to see even though a few of the galleries were empty in preparation for the start of their expansion.

Below, my dad stands next to a piece that is by Jeff Koons. It is silkscreen on stainless steel and looks so much like a real balloon, but it is flat. I had my dad stand next to it so you could get a sense of the scale. If I had just taken a picture of the piece, you would have wondered why I was taking a picture of a balloon bunny.


Also while we were there, they had a conservator working on repairing some antiquity paintings. He was stanchioned off in one of the galleries. You were not allowed to talk to him or ask him questions except for during certain Q&A times they had scheduled. I wondered if he felt like he was in the zoo, with people coming by to watch him. The painting was quite big as it goes down below the platform he is standing on. There were three paintings all together that were to be repaired.

I liked the stare of this guy in the Oceanic section.


This was a very interesting piece near the back entrance in which we came. The artist is African and it is made with metal caps from bottles and liquor. The label explained some things that he included these because slaves were traded for liquor and other items. It is wavy and reminds me of a quilt. It is also very big.

St. Louis Art Institute

On the second day of my trip to Illinois, we went to the St. Louis Art Museum. It is a very nice, somewhat big museum. It is in a nice setting and has some nice architectural details.

A rose window on the ceiling.

Inside they have a restaurant called Puck's (as in Wolfgang Puck). I guess you can figure out who did the glass piece - Chihuly, of course.

My mom and dad from inside the atrium of the museum.

This last photo is a picture of the back of the museum where they are planning to connect a big modern expansion. So maybe the next time I visit, this view will no longer be.

River Ride

Since we had gone to the quilt show in the morning, we had some time in the afternoon. It was a beautiful day so my dad and I decided to go for a bike ride along the river path. It was not the most scenic ride as the Mississippi river is a working river and there are industrial buildings along the way. But it was nice. We didn't have to worry about cars and the path was right along the river.

In this first photo, if you look very closely on the horizon, you can see the skyline of St. Louis and the arch.

This next photo is the view of the path looking back to the bridge that crosses over into Alton on the Illinois side.
We went over a wooden bridge and saw this interesting pattern of dried mud below.

Below is a picture of my dad on one of their bikes which has a chair-like seat and smaller wheels.


Check out my ancient ride. I have no idea how old this bike is. It was a little rusty, the seat swiveled, even after being tightened, there was a clankety-clank as you rode along, no gears and the old fashioned pedal backwards to brake. However, it did it's job and got me there and back.

Trip to Illinois

I have been out of town for several days visiting my parents in Illinois. I left last Thursday and came back yesterday. I had found out online that the Quilt National 2009 show was going to be in St. Charles, MO. and that was part of the reason I wanted to visit (My parents live across the border from St. Louis.) We decided to go to the show on Friday because we thought it would be less crowded.

When we arrived at the Foundry Art Center in which the show was being held, the parking lot was very empty. When we went in, we discovered why. The lady at the front desk said the show wasn't suppose to open until the preview that night at 7 p.m. But she said we could go talk to the quilt lady that was in charge. The lady in charge was kind enough to let us see the show even though they were still putting the finishing touches on it and getting ready for the preview opening that night. She also said if we wanted to buy the book (which I had planned on buying anyway), then she would just include the admission price in that. So basically, we got in free.

All three parts of the traveling exhibit of the show were there. After this venue, the show would split up and travel separately. I have several books from the past Quilt National shows (it's a biennial event). But now having actually seen it in person, you miss some things in the book. There was wonderful artwork there. I loved being able to look up close and see the stitching and figure out the different techniques the artists used and how they were put together. We were not allowed to take any pictures.

But I did take some pictures of the Foundry Art Center. It is a big building with gallery spaces on the bottom floor and artist studios upstairs. You can go into the studios if anyone is working or just look in the windows. It also looks like a nice space to hold events.





After viewing the show, we had lunch in the quaint town of St. Charles. Outside the restaurant were these beautiful flowers that the butterflies loved. I love the polka dotted body of this butterfly. When finished with our lunch we enjoyed going into some of the small shops nearby.

Gee's Bend

Right now at the Boise Art Museum, we have been taking down an exhibition and getting ready to put up an exhibit of quilts from Gee's Bend. If you haven't heard of these, it is a great story. A group of ladies in the small, poor, town of Alabama make these quilts. A guy "discovered" them and started promoting them as art. The ladies use whatever fabrics they can find and do most of the stitching by hand, I think. They don't seem to consider them art, just something they do. I am very excited to have this exhibit here and to be able to see the quilts up close. It won't be open for another week or two as the quilts have not yet arrived in Boise.

Seraphine

Last Friday night, I had the rare occasion of finding myself alone. Frank was in Nevada shooting off big rockets. Anna was invited to spend the night at a friend's house (also somewhat rare). I decided to go see a movie at our local, indie flicks movie theater. It was called Seraphine. It is a French movie based on the true story of a french artist living in the early twentieth century.

It was a very good movie. I recommend it if you are interested in art or independent films. It had English subtitles.

Color Forms #3

I did manage to finish most of the quilting and binding on this piece yesterday. There is a little more space at the top and bottom that didn't show up because I just put it on my scanner.

This piece marks the beginning of the change from non-objective in the previous pieces to more objective. This one reminded me of an outdoor theater at night, after having put it together. After about halfway through stitching the french knots in the "sky", I thought to myself that night stars would not be in an orange sky. That lasted half a second when the next thought was, "Well, they are now." That's the great thing about art! It can be whatever you want it to be.

Color Forms #2

I managed to do the quilting and binding on the second Color Forms piece today. I'm not sure I will be able to keep up the one-a-day finishing process. The next few are not quite as abstract as these first two.

Color Forms #1

First I want to thank you for all the comments on Indian Summer. After finishing that piece, I was ready for something smaller that I could finish quickly. I enjoy reading Melody Johnson's blog and really like her work (I own one piece.) I thought I would try her fusing technique.

I began buy fusing some strips together then cut it lengthwise. That strip was my starting point and I started adding other shapes until I came up with the piece below called Color Forms #1. Fortunately (since I don't want to copy), it doesn't look like Melody's pieces. I did it a bit differently by using one piece of fabric for the background and working on that.



For the hand stitching, I used some thread that I had dyed when I did my first batch of fabrics. It is a matte finish, so not as smooth as DMC perle cotton. But it was nice to have the matching color.

The piece looks a bit Calder-esque to me. It also reminds me of the Colorform sets that children play with (original seen below). I don't think we had the Colorform set when I was little, but we did have a magnetic set with colored shapes which was basically the same thing.


I had such fun playing with the fused pieces of fabric, I ended up making five pieces. I managed to do the quilting, hand stitching and binding on this first one today.

Indian Summer Revisited (process)

I wanted to talk a little bit about the process of this piece. I only had a vague idea in my head and no sketches when I started it. Below is what I started with. After moving the blue pieces around many times, something was bothering me. My husband, Frank, came in and I asked his opinion. I'm not sure exactly what he said, but he didn't like the blue.

Getting feedback from people, even if they don't know much about art, is still helpful. I left it alone and thought about what he said. I thought maybe since I was using complimentary colors that they were fighting with each other too much. So I decided to work with the more neutral color, brown, and some muted green and went in a different direction.


I ended up with what you see in the first picture. When I finally finished the dense quilting and stepped back to look at it, I thought it was better. However, it really didn't do much for me. It was just o.k.

I brought Frank back in and he immediately said he liked it. What I interpreted that to mean was that it was better than with the blue. He also said, "trees." That was my intent, but didn't want it to be too literal.

As I looked at it more, I wanted to cut a section out and turn it sideways. I didn't want to do it physically, and I didn't want to spend several hours with it on the computer in Photoshop. So I printed out several pictures of the piece and got out my old fashioned scissors and glue. Much quicker for me and more fun to handle physical pieces of paper.

I tried several different arrangements and glued them in my sketchbook. Below are some of them.



You can see which one I decided to do. I cut it apart and sewed it back together again. Personally, I like it much better now. It has some more movement in it which makes it a little more exciting. What do you think?

Circle Stamps

Here is an idea I think I read somewhere on the internet and decided to give it a try. You can make easy circle stamps with craft foam that looks like marshmallows. I bought a package thinking Anna would like to do it, too.

Here are some of the stamps below. Some things you can do are carve them (image will be positive), draw on them with a pencil (image will be negative), glue stuff on top (I used a craft foam sticker for the flower or try to impress something in it (I used a spiral paper clip that worked pretty well.) You can also do both ends of the marshmallow to have two designs.



Anna couldn't figure out what to do on the circle format and abandoned the project, but I had lots of fun playing with designs and used up my 12 marshmallows very quickly. They work fine with regular ink, but the design lines are so fine when using the pencil that I'm not sure they would work with paint on fabric. I'll have to try sometime. I guess if you had a bunch of real marshmallows that were stale you could try using those.

Labor Day

I hope everyone is enjoying their weekend. So far our weekend has been a bit laborious with doing some overdue tasks around the house and necessary shopping. I have not had any time to work on art, but I did finish the quilting on this piece last week.


It's called Indian Summer and is fairly large (for me). The quilting is very dense as you can see from the detail photo. I would appreciate any comments you might have, as I am still mulling it over before I finish the edges.