Canadian Designer

This has been an exciting week for me in design. I have been featured as a Canadian designer in the Canadian Quilting Association's magazine "The Canadian Quilter". It is a five-page feature, which is wonderful! One page is about me and the other four pages feature my pattern "Counting Sheep".

This pattern is also availble on my website http://www.sunflowerdesign.ca/.


Thanks to CQA for this opportunity!

Fibre Art Network

Do I have anything to show for my creativity this weekend? I don't, but I did spend a lot of time being creative! This weekend was spent catching up on graphic design work, both paid and volunteer. One of my latest volunteer ventures, started in the winter, was to become Assistant Website Coordinator for the Fibre Art Network, also known as FAN.

There are a variety of things that I do... post recent newsletters, help people with setting up Artist Galleries and trouble-shooting various problems. I had some success solving problems this weekend, but I still have work ahead of me. I volunteered for this position because I wanted to continue to learn about web development... and I am.

FAN is a group of women (so far, but men are always welcome!) fibre artists in Western Canada. We have over ninety members! Many are professional fibre artists who exhibit regularly, and many are part-time fibre artists who want to belong to a group like this to network and learn together. It is a fabulous group. Please explore our web site if you have time. I always have a link to the Fibre Art Network on my blog in the right-hand bar, so come back later and explore if you don't have time today.

So... even though I don't always have work to show at the end of a period of creative activity... I am still busy being creative behind the scenes :-)

Creative November 2009

I have enjoyed AEDM so much and I want to visually share all that I accomplished this month. I know I will sign up for Creative Every Day so I can keep the momentum going. Thanks to all my fellow artists participating in Art Every Day Month and other friends and family who have stopped by with a kind word of support. Special thanks to Sam for joining in on the fun :-) Enjoy the pictures... and I'll post again soon.

Blogger's Quilt Festival... Welcome!

Today is the beginning of the virtual quilt show. It runs from October 9th to 16th and there are already many, many participants. If you want to see the other quilts participating, please click on this link Blogger's Quilt Festival. Below is my quilt for the show...

This quilt is titled "Self Portrait". When I was attending university doing my Bachelor's Degree in Design, I studied colour in many of my courses. I took a year long course on painting, which really ended up as a year of mixing paint colours from scratch... not like Da Vinci, who made his paint pigment from minerals and other goodies... I had a limited palette consisting of about six tubes of paint. From these six, I had to learn to make any colour in the colour wheel spectrum and all colours in between... hundreds of them. It was fascinating and taught me to look at the colours of our every day environment in an entirely new way.

Right after the course was finished, I made this quilt. I wanted to show how my colour sense had changed and how using bold, bright colours was not intimidating like it used to be. I started with light colours in the center of the spiral and worked through various gradients until I got to the bold colours at the end. It was a fun project and took a lot of different colour combinations before I got to the end product. There were little squares of fabric everywhere!

The quilt is machine-quilted in variegated rainbow thread. In each corner of the border I quilted a silhouette of my hand in black thread to highlight that working with my hands is how I get the most out of my life.

Enjoy the quilt... and if you have time, please visit my other sites Etsy, Time for Quilting!, and Sunflower Design. Thanks for dropping by!

A Great Weekend Tour

Thanks to everyone who stopped by my blog and had a look at my studio. I had such a fun weekend visting other creative people's studios (and I am still touring with a second look at some!).
The event inspired me to spend all day Sunday and Monday in my studio just enjoying the space... and, of course, creating.

This weekend, October 9th to 13th, there is a virtual quilt show. You can look at all the quilts... and/or if you are a quilter, you can participate as well. Click on the Blogger's Quilt Festival button to the right. This button will take you to the link that explains how everything works. Last spring's quilt show had almost 500 participants! This promises to be another fun and inspiring event.

A blog for Sam

This post is for Sam.

I have been away on a wonderful visit to family and friends in the Kootenays. We began with a lovely family memorial for my Grandma who passed away in April. We went on to Nelson and stayed with my husband's brother and his wife... had a good visit with parents and nieces and nephews, aunts and uncles. We then spent three fun days with our good friends in Salmo. It was nice to get back to the mountains, but I did miss the big sky.

Now I am home again. Working on patterns, sewing, doing a little graphic design and planning for the next holiday to Vancouver Island.

Today I spent more time on Trevor's quilt top. I am pausing while I think of what to do with it next. So many possibilities, so hard to choose just one.

Fibre Art Network

In April I re-joined the Fibre Art Network. This is a group of Western Canadian art quilters/fibre artists that have joined their efforts to promote quilting as art. They have had many successful exhibitions in the last few years.
This week I decided to become part of this group on their web site and today my profile is up on their gallery pages. It is exciting to see my work alongside this prestigious group of artists.
Have a look!