February

The sun came out today. So maybe it is time to take the blog (and myself) out of hibernation.
I spent most of my free time this winter sketching, still having fun with the selfies and other exercises.
I'm also studying  Japanese again.

Last week, I finished another little quilt in the "Incertitude" series.
And this is how my design wall looks today...

The plan is to make a fifth quilt using the printed face on the right.

I had the next mosaic ready some time ago, but apparently, I forgot to post it...

... and the next picture too...

December

Here's a quick summary of this month in the studio...

It looks like there was a little bit of everything... drawing, painting, printing, weaving, sewing, studying Japanese, ...
Actually, it was mainly drawing and painting. And also thinking a lot about the work I want to do next year.

Day 3

Day 3 of the 31 Day Blog Writing Challenge...

This week, I started working with Japanese for Busy People III.
I had finished the volume II before going to Japan last spring. After this, I felt a little tired of studying and decided to take a break. Of course, I tried to maintain my Japanese as much as possible by watching movies, reading easy books and magazines, listening to podcasts and CDs and so on.
But now, I think it's time to start working seriously again!

On the quilting front, I did the machine stitching part of the binding this afternoon. Tonight, I'll do the hand-sewing.

November

Silent but not idle...
Here's a mosaic showing what I've been busy with...

I finished this small chartreuse quilt...

It's probably the last of my Colorplay scrap quilts.
Today I picked out these fabrics for another quilt, but except for the small chartreuse piece, they are not leftovers from the Colorplay series.

In other news, I started knitting a sweater with a beautiful new Katia yarn (it's the "Merino Effect" yarn).
I've put a new warp on my Louet loom, and I'm experimenting with point twill, and also using floating selvedges (and loving it!).
Last week, I did some book binding with a new great little tool, I spent as much time as possible outside, I played a lot with my GD, and of course I studied Japanese.

I've also been working on this quilt with the Japanese fabrics. I pieced a lot of blocks, but it suddenly got very boring, so I started adding smaller pieces. This is where I am now...

Do you see the two small textile pieces on the right side of the photo? These are Tambani embroideries that I bought at the Carrefour Européen du Patchwork in September. I want to use them for making two little bags.
You can read here about the Tambani Textiles project in South Africa.

Expo Veldhoven

Yesterday, I visited Expo Veldhoven 2014. I arrived there so early that I was the second visitor to enter the hall! I had a very good time at the show, but I didn't take many photos as I was too busy chatting with old friends and also making new ones.
Anyway, here are a few pictures among my favorites.
The first one is "Dutch Colors" by Willy Doreleijers.

Next is "Skateboarders", a collaborative work by Susan Chapman, Christine Restall, Janet McCallum and Beverley Wood, from the group By Design.

Please read about their working process on their website.

The next quilt is "Insieme" by Elisabeth Nacenta de la Croix.

And then "Treasure Box" by Reiko Kato. (Sorry, the website is in Japanese. ;-)  )

I think it was the first time I had the opportunity to speak four different languages in such a short time span, and I must say I had some trouble falling asleep after this!

A small quilt and more prints

Here's the small quilt that I made using four of my tree prints.

Last week, I did a demo about gelli printing at my guild meeting. I really enjoyed it and made of course lots of new prints while demonstrating. When I came back home, I had to put all the prints on my studio floor to let them dry. Here are some of them, waiting to be ironed.

I've been thinking a lot about Kyoto and its beautiful cherry blossoms these days.

I spent some time practicing my hiragana,

trying to write さくらのき (sakura no ki), which means cherry tree, as nicely as possible.

I burnt a few thermal screens from the best ones and started printing on fabric.

I'm working on a larger quilt using more gelli prints as the starting point. I'm almost finished with the top. I'm thinking of entering it in a show, so I'm not sure I can show it here yet.
It looks like the weather will be gorgeous this weekend. It's good news because the garden is in great need of attention after this very wet winter.

Pink

I've been obsessed with the colour pink, more precisely the colour of sakura. One of the ways to say pink in Japanese is to use "sakura colour" 桜色 (sakura iro).
I can see a sakura quilt in my near future. I still have lots of pink fabric, but I needed to dye some blue for the sky. I did a few small pieces, and two larger ones. That should be sufficient for the quilt I have in mind.

The colours are brighter in reality, but today is a pretty dull day and I can't get the colours right.

I also did a few monotypes, on paper. Pictures will be for another post.

December...

Already? Really?... Am I losing the blogging habit?
I'm afraid I am...
I still take pictures of my work though. I even had this little mosaic ready at the end of October, showing a little peek at my sketchbooks and some beautiful paintings of my GD...

I don't know where November went... I didn't get much studio time, but I managed to do two small quilt tops, one mixed media painting, and lots of sketching.
I also finished my colourful piece of weaving and started another one, although I try to be careful with this as my back pain might  be coming from there.

On the Japanese studies front, I finished the first unit of "Japanese for Busy People II", I know about 140 kanji (still a long way to go!), and I discovered the NHK News Web Easy, which is wonderful. :-)

And now, let's see if December can be a blogging month... Once a week maybe? What do you think?

Stitching

I did a lot of stitching lately. I wanted to overdye a few fabric pieces.

I chose another blue, cobalt blue, for the second bath. I believe the first one was cerulean blue. (I did the first layer a long time ago.) I'm using cold reactive dyes.

I am still trying to use the green/blue fabric in a quilt. But really, it isn't working! Here's a little peek at my design wall.

Maybe it needs to be overdyed too. I think I'm going to try a very dark blue.

My blog post in Japanese last week was just a little test. I intended to explain it earlier, but in the meantime, I got an awful back pain and didn't feel like sitting at the computer... Anyway, the idea was to see how Japanese script looked on my blog. No, I don't intend to blog in Japanese. Not yet ;-)
I simply wanted to add a page to my blog with some kanji I'm trying to memorize in order to be able to "read" my Japanese magazines more quickly. I call it my "Japanese glossary". Of course it is a work in progress and it is still very short at the moment.
And just in case you wonder, the title of the post means "kanji", and the phrase means "it's raining today" as you might have guessed from the picture.
Today, it is sunny. Here's a little pic I took this afternoon in my garden...

漢字

今日は雨です。

This is just a little test!

Transition

My mom passed away peacefully. She had been sick for several years and we knew this was coming, but it feels strange and sad to think she's really gone now.

The whole family had a beautiful celebration a few days after her passing.

Life has to go on now. I am slowly going back to the studio. I finished my super-secret quilt that I can't talk about until next year. I think I'm going to take a break from art quilting for a couple of months. I want to concentrate on painting, weaving and reading this summer.
I also need to go back to my Japanese studies. Did I tell you that I did really well at my end-of-year exam?

This is a mixed-media painting, using acrylics, collage and my own calligraphies.

February

February is almost over, already!
This month, I spent more time studying Japanese than sewing, quilting or weaving.
I know about 100 kanji. It means that I know their meaning, but I'm not able yet to write them all correctly. But with this, I can sometimes understand simple sentences here and there on some Japanese websites and blogs.

I took care of my little granddaughter during Carnival week. This is her last painting...

Isn't it funny how her colour palette matches mine?

February was very cold and grey. I am totally ready for this...

Wagashi

As you know, the theme for this new Twelve by Twelve challenge was "Sweet".
Wagashi are Japanese sweets and I just love them. They are sweet, of course, and so beautiful. If you've never seen any, you have to do an image search in google, and you will see how pretty they are, almost too pretty to eat!
Actually "wa" means "Japanese-style" and "kashi" means "confectionery". Together they become "wagashi".
One of the big challenges in learning Japanese is to master the writing system. I now know my hiragana and katakana pretty well. But of course I am only starting to study kanji.
Anyway, for this quilt, I decided to print some fabric with the word wagashi written in hiragana:
わがし
I tried lots of things, made many test prints, and finally settled on using only the hiragana わ (wa). By the way, "wa" means "Japanese-style", but it also means "peace" and "harmony".

The flavours and shapes of wagashi are often inspired by seasons and flowers. This is why I added this sakura on my quilt.

Here's another close-up.

And now I'm off to the Twelve by Twelve blog to see what my sweet friends have done for this last challenge of the series.

First snow

We had our first snow yesterday night. Not much, but enough to make the roads a bit slippery, especially this morning.
I did some more calligraphy exercises the other day. I'm using Japanese brushes and sumi (ink).

The idea was to use these as designs for screenprinting. First I made a very small screen. I wanted to see how well this ink is burning the plastic coating of the mesh.

Then I prepared some larger screens. This is some test printing using fabric paint.

Now, I need to print more fabric.