Cheryl at Violet Patch

Look what Cheryl is did with clay and pellon!!!!!!!! 

Night and Day, You Are the One

On Target

Halycon II

Peeps

General Stuff

FiberArts Network Forum  This is a community board for, well, FiberArtists.  Its new, so there is not much activity yet. I recognized the name of one other AQ member.  I've participated on boards of specific interests forever and usually enjoy them.  There is a section for beginning...(or should that read emerging/re-emerging ;) thanks Sonji for that) art quilters.  Also there is a sub category for mixed media artists.  Check it out it you want just one more internet thing to do :)

This weekend is Easter.  I never go to church on Easter due to the crowd that only attends on this day of which I would be one because I rarely attend church myself.  I actually prefer classes and study sessions over a church service...theres always much more opportunity for dialogue. But it doesn't matter for me this weekend anyways because my work place is moving into their creme' de la creme of shelters this weekend and I will be floating in and out...hopefully more out than in and some fellowship with my family and quiet time will be in order.

Next weekend is the Vagina Monologues and I've yet to commit to memory my six lines...I think I got it though...heck, I'm just sitting around with a group of other women talking about when we first got our periods. The hardest part is not the lines but remembering who I come after and the timing.  I'm looking foward to getting it over with. I'm not an actress nor have I desired to be.  Doing my own original work in performance is different from doing a script written by someone else.  Think of the qualitative difference between making a quilt from your own design and that of a purchased pattern.  Your original design you are more emotionally invested in.

I've recently been diagnosed with severe pulmonary hypertension and I need some time and space to think and handle what needs to happen for treatment.  I've always joked about my spirit age being 84...I've been 84 since I was 27...but I'm becoming comfortable with the idea that I don't have to kill myself being all things to all people and "phuckem" if they can't take a joke. (thats a phrase from a good friend meaning to dismiss folks who really do not have your best interest at heart).  My kids are running late for school...I gotta go "shake a stick" in their direction...hangeth in.

American Quilter-tv show

American Quilter tv show on Lifetime Real Women...has anyone seen this show?  I don't have this channel available on my dish network...but I haven't seen the show mentioned in any of my online q-circles. Does anyone get this show?

here is the link: tv show about quilting that possibly no one sees

In comments, Debra mentioned the 24/7 quilting channel...this channel will be "a tv channel broadcasted through the internet"!!!!!!  Here is the press release about it: QNN info

Yea! another interview

I was sitting here having a rather ho-hum morning...and came looking for some inspiration and Diane's interview has given me some jazz!  Check it out!

Cheryl's interview

Check out Cheryl's interview!

Elle's Interview

Elle's Interview can be read here. Her answer to number 2 brought tears to my eyes as I could have answered almost identically.  I hope you enjoy her answers as much as I did!

Thanks Elle. 

The fabric, brushed cotton, was described as hand-dyed cotton I picked up at Hancock's.  The fence is from the same cloth and the sky is from another.  The fence is woven strips.  I plan on making at least 9 more of these.

(c) City Fence 2005, PostmarkdArt 

Postcard Exchange

                                                       

                                                                               

The above are recent additions of fabric postcards I've received this month from members of www.postmarkdart.com

Below are 3 I've made, 2 of which will be mailed to other members and 1 going in my 4-sale batch. 

                                                            

I've emailed Cheryl at Violet Patch 5 quilt-related interview questions for the "interview" chain.  I'll post a link to her answers when she posts them!  Thanks Cheryl!

Cyber Roving Interviews

Michele started this interview thread...of course she picked it up from another blogger and its one of these things that roves around blogs and cyber communities.  Generally, these things have medium to low appeal for me but this one I like because the interviewer, (in my case it is Michele who I think is pretty cool) personalizes the questions to the person being asked.

Here are the questions she gave me along with my answers:

1. If you weren't living during this period, what other era would you have lived in and why?  I've been asked this before and stated that my era hasn't come yet but this time after thinking about it...I'm gonna say around the mid-1400s and I'm a citizen of Songhai.  My father is a salt merchant and my mother is a seller of cloth...they have worked hard and prospered to send me to the urban and very cosmopolitan and international University of Timbuktu. I'm studying Arabic, Poetry, and Astronomy and am one of a few hundred women among a student body of 30,000. I head the Young Non-conformists Women's Student Association of Songhai...my parents are very supportive but don't understand my radical views.  I will go on to become the first female (but not the last) Official Bard of Songhai.

2. What do you want most to be remembered for when you are gone? That a poem I wrote really meant something to 1 person AND that I always encouraged and helped support the dreams of others.

3. What makes a woman beautiful? CONFIDENCE W/ KINDNESS!

4. What do you love most about your cultural heritage?  It is so rich and still yet to be understood and discovered so it is hard to narrow it down...but in a nutshell...the endurance, perseverance in the face of destruction. I was not meant to survive or be born and yet, here I be :)  I try to think upon this deeply when I'm at my lowest rungs of depression. 

5. How have relationships with those closest to you shaped your view of life and the world?  I give my great grandmother the honor due in shaping my sensibilities and intuitiveness.  My mother gave me my work ethic and sense of deserving to work hard for anything I want and she taught me how to stand and look people in the eye and SEE and not be afraid.  I don't know that I've always lived up to it, sometimes attributes and burdens are one in the same depending on the circumstances...my father gave me a sense of fun coupled with rebelliousness.  But ya know, Michele, I think my sense of the world came from the caste of characters that frequented my great-grandmother's house and neighborhood...I learned the people are different and diverse, people came in different sizes, heights, smells, dialects,...some thumped bibles, others thumped J&B Scotch bottles and some you embrace and respect even when they seem strange and some you steer clear of and keep one eye open on even when they seem comfortable and close.  My great grandmother knew what was going on in her block and who needed what.  So my need to connect with people and have a sense of a community of spirits comes from those days.

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For anyone reading this, if you would like for ME to interview you, leave a comment saying "interview me".  I will respond by sending you five questions.  You will update your blog/site with the answers to the questions I create just for you.  You will include an explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.

So out of the 50 something links in the AQ ring...surely I can get 2, 3, 5 (cough cough Cheryl cough cough) of you to play...and if you are not in the ring but do blog and have read this, that makes you eligible too...so I'll be waiting.

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On the quilting front...I've been working on a bed quilt in batiks that I'm determined to finish. Its the Attic Window that I posted a while back.  Other than this, nothing has been happening...I come home and collapse right here in front of the computer or in bed and sit here and chat with my teens.  Hopefully, I can get busy soon...the spirit is willing but the body is weak. hangeth in beautiful people!

International Women's Day II

3 quilters who are blogging about their international tenures have come to my attention over the last several weeks.  First is a member of the Postmarkd Art Group who has recently been transferred to Taipei...Bella Quilts. Second, I found on another blogger's site in the AQ ring, (but I don't remember which) the link to this blog, Postcards from Cairo. The third one I came across a while back and it was recently mentioned on the QA list...Karen Musgrave teaching in the Eastern Bloc countries.  And of course the AQ ring has international flava which is appealing. 

Now, I'm running really behind and have to scoot! peace.

Happy International Womens' Day!

Last night I attended a celebration at UofL. My workplace was one of the sponsors so it was an extension of my work day and a major perk. I read my poem One Mother's Blood and Karina interpreted it in Spainish for the audience that was largely Spainish speaking.  I met Tanya from Russia who shared that March 8 is a huge national holiday in Russia celebrating women...now that would be awesome to experience as a widely celebrated national holiday! 

An Iranian sistah majoring in Music Theory sung a melodic love song in Persian, another Hawaiian sistah danced a traditional dance, and several groups of Latino children did dance routines.  The evening really lifted my spirits.  The only bummer was that I forgot my camera at work. :(  When I got home I felt compelled to sketch and kinda liked what I did.  Looking at work in the last week by Abstract and Expressionists artists made me feel unhindered by my lack of drawing skills...or no-skill drawing skills (heehehehe) is more descriptive.  But I'm going to look at the sketches and see how I can turn them into quilts.

But I hope everyone had an affirming day yesterday...now lets extend that affirmation to the other 364 days of the year...hangeth in.

I woke up at 1am to pee and couldn't go back to sleep. This happens when I go to bed before 11pm.  I did manage to edit a letter that should have gone out Sunday night so at least that was one productive thing as a result of insominia.

I dissed the blasted button since I couldn't figure out how to link it to Diane's page and I finally was able to locate the html code for the AQ ring thanks to Teri's suggestion.   Anyways, I'm going back to sleep...peace

HTML, Birthdays, Movies

For 2 hours I've been fiddling trying to get this button posted in my side bar...well, as you can see it is there, BUT instead of opening up the membership list, it opens as an image in another window.

I also deleted the code for the"join/list/random/etc" button. I've emailed Diane for help. But I've taxed my itty bitty brain reserves trying to figure this out...when I have moments like this, I repeat the line from the movie Philadelphia when Denzel's character says "Explain it to me like I'm in the 4th grade"

We went to see Hotel Rwanda for my beloved's birthday on Friday.  If you love really intense movies like we do, really intense as if you are inside the movie, then go!  Don Cheadle's character was very compact and well developed.  By compact I mean at the moments of indecisiveness and moral challenge he found fly by the seat resourcefulness within himself to just get to the next moment by moment by moment.  He demonstrated throughout the movie that "make a way out of no way" intuitiveness.  My 13 yo son sat on the edge of his seat with a furrowed brow and it sparked great conversation on the drive home helping him to understand genocide.  The stunning part for me was how such an arbitrary and mythological definition that distinguished the 2 ethnic groups became such defining and fixed meanings in the political, social, cultural fabric of a nation.  Now I don't have enough space or time to go into where this takes me in examining the current trends and waves for us who live in the U.S. I'll just ask for your own personal ponderings, "What assumptions are you operating on as fixed universal truths?"  Or maybe the question is "What fixed universal truths do you operate on but have never examined?"  Don't answer me as I'm no one to answer to, but I simply posed the questions to share where the movie led me.

Peace.

Did my great grandfather know Romare Bearden???? Inquiring minds want to know!

hey, i'm feeling pretty daggone good---going on day 2...i even applied a full face of makeup today after about 2 years of going nekkid...this is pretty significant because for 7 solid years i was a very very happy consultant with mary kay cosmetics and my face was my canvas and i simply did not feel dressed until i at least applied foundation... hehehehe i was really all about the skin care...i can come close to not bathing at all  if my only option was a deoderant bar of soap...nope,not on this skin... i'm all about a good quality shower gel with matching lotion and body spray.  right now my favorite is something called bella ecco that i ran across at the natural foods store...when i had a hospital procedure done a month ago the rn who prepped me kept remarking on how soft my skin was (i kept thinking she really wanted to add the words "for someone your age")...she made 2 other nurses touch my feet and arms (with my permission of course as i sat demurely  and gloated)

at lunch time today, i stopped in at the library and picked up some quilt related books and also checked out The Art of Romare Bearden...my interest sparked by the discussion at some of the blogs about collage work.  Reading about his back ground took me some place...his grandparents owned a boarding house in Pittsburg that primarily housed 'coloured folk' who left the south to work in the mills of which my great grandfather was one of those 'folk'...now my imagination (this is the poet in me) lead me to ponder the what if of my great-grandfather staying in the boarding house ran by Romare Bearden's grand parents and where Mr Bearden worked for a short spell while in high school and what if the young Romare had an occassion or two or many to help my great-grandfather up the stairs to his room after a weekend of drinking and partying after payday and a week long's work of toiling in the mills...it was the Bethlehem Mill to be exact...I have his worker's id badge.  What if my great grand entertained the young Romare with stories on the front porch of 'life for folk down south' which I read was a favorite past time for the young and older Bearden.  There are days I just love the way my mind works :)  Relating totally unrelated news stories and bizarre events is a little gift that the muse gives me from time to time.