Myrtle Beach Quilt Week, spring

While this photo has nothing to do with either quilting or the beach, it makes me happy to post it.  When I returned from the annual trip with my Quilting Peeps, of course I took a tour through the gardens.  Things visually change so quickly this time of year! I watched a juvenile hummer working the blooms on an azalea.  Time to hang the feeder!  Our terrific power-wash dude, Reuben, was scheduled to clean the winter mildew this week, so I waited until yesterday to hang the feeder.  The first thing I saw through the kitchen window this morning was a hummer at the feeder!

We arrived at our perfect condo on the beach last Saturday in time to unload and go to lunch.  The previous tenants, in a moment of drunken silliness, switched the keys for the multiple units they rented, and returned the keys to the office.  Of course, the keys we were issued didn't work!  The women at the office implied that we didn't know how to operate a key...until the housekeeper came by with her key and discovered what happened.  We spent a quality hour, sitting on the porch, waiting for keys that worked.  Afterwards, we went to a outdoor restaurant Karen and Bev visited last spring during the week.  Well, on pretty spring weekends, it becomes a biker bar!  Five middle-aged women  had them laughing.  At least I was wearing black leggins and a "tuttu".  Just for fun.

Time to get to work!  I partially quilted a top Gini made.  Kari will complete the quilting, and it will go to one of Julie's daughters.  It was fun to quilt!

 Bev brought out her Hawaii fabrics, and completed this top.  With a little diversion due to some math difficulties, it finally came together beautifully!

 Karen finished the fusing of this intricate piece...lots of little bits of fabric to trace the pattern, cut and fuse.  It is beautiful!

 Joanne worked on this quilt, which will be a gift for her SIL...golf fabrics, for a golf pro.

For some reason, I have NO pics of Kathy, hard at work quilting.  She quilted at least FOUR quilts last week.  All gifts.  GO, Kath!

 I was exploring colors for the hydrangea quilt that has been hanging around, waiting for attention for the past 3 years.  All those little blossoms have been cut and pressed, now it's time to sew them on the background.  I'm really pleased with the beginning, and am eager to work on this quilt.  I love hydrangeas.

We all worked on several projects during the week, and the weather allowed me to walk everyday on the beach.  It was a productive week!

 Back at home, the gardens have made a giant spring leap.  The few azaleas the deer managed to miss are blooming; the dogwoods are blooming; the species loropetalum are blooming.  And, the hummers are back.  The day after our return, I also put the tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and okra in the ground.  Basil, parsley, dill and fresh oregano,too.  The horseradish is springing up, and the perennial onions are happy. 

It's going to be a great garden year!  Stuart replaced the faucets in the garden, with two heads:  one for the irrigation system and one for the hose.  I'm a happy girl, now that the plumbing is finally in good working order.  Thank you, Stuart!

An out-of-focus tiger swallowtail butterfly.  They are out in full force, the tulip poplars having hosted them.  The milkweed is beginning to bloom, so soon we'll see Monarchs. What a great week!

Quilt Challenge: Oaxaca

Joan and I met through a matchmaker.  The matchmaker, Joann, is a retired HR woman, with the skills to efficiently get things done.  Joann knew I'd bought my sewing machine at a pawn shop last spring, and in an email introduction asked me to tell Joan about the purchase.  In just a couple of email sentences, I told Joan about the pawn shops in the Centro Historico.  She responded, and I responded, and soon we figured out we are both quilters.  It was Joan who suggested that we should meet.  As soon as she walked into Brujula Cafe, on Macedonia Alcala, we felt like Very Old Friends! 

Joan, from San Francisco, has taken up quilting in the past few years, and we giggled like girls can do when we discovered we both were completely awed with the Gee's Bend quilt exhibit.  Pretty soon, we talked about a Challenge.  In the quilting community, a Challenge is a pretty common tool for a kick in pants of the creative process.  Maybe other arts have something similar, with a different name.  Choosing Daily Life in Oaxaca as the theme was the obvious decision.  We went a step further:  using only fabrics we can find in Oaxaca.  oh dear.  The Telas Parisina, and Modatelas, are the two fabric stores in Oaxaca, and have a pretty awful selection.  Mostly synthetics, and this time of year, lots of polar fleece.  Quilters want lovely, clean, soft COTTON.  And, we had to at least get it started before the end of January, when I was leaving Oaxaca.  So, we gave ourselves a challenge on many levels!

Joan had a pretty quick idea of her piece, and of course I had a thousand ideas shouting for the top slot.  Just when I thought I had made a firm decision of how I'd begin (I never know what the finished piece will look like), I'd see something that made me change my mind.  I have always had commitment issues. Throw in the week away from the city in early January, and I was already behind schedule!

A trip to two fabric shops, and I bought a collection of yucky-feeling solid colors, and a few pieces of yucky-feeling prints, all synthetic.  Both, very typical of the modern city.  My inspiration came from a spanish lesson.  I was filling-in-the-blank with correct verb and tense for a story of Rufino Tamayo, the late accomplished painter from Oaxaca.  One sentence included "sensuous" and "watermelons" together, and I knew I had my theme!  Food! 

Joan and I met, with friends, for lunch the last week I was in the city, and I showed her the very beginnings of my first piece in the series, Sandias (watermelons). 

In the beginning of January, there was an group of exhibits at the Oaxacan Painters Museum, that included an exhibit of hand-embroidered handkerchiefs with comments about domestic violence.   Here is what Joan created:

Joan wrote, "I finished my piece and it certainly was a "challenge!"   As I mentioned, my theme was violence against women and I tried to make it look as Mexicano as possible.  I was inspired by the embroidered pieces at the city museum to embroider sayings that I saw on the walls around Oaxaca relating to the violence; and, as I never embroidered before, the letters look just as simple and crude as some on the the handkerchiefs.:-).   It's all very "oaxaquena."  Anyway, it's nothing like anything I've ever done before and the material was certainly a challenge, but it was a fun process,  So I'm happy that we decided to do this regardless of the crudeness of the outcome."

Here are the two unfinished pieces I created.  I have actually finished them both, but haven't taken photos yet.  Both are direct copies of Tamayo's Sandias, but created with cloth rather than paint.  I had a good challenge choosing how to make that thin, white bit between the red part and the rind of the melon, and chose to create the illusion of that inedible part with  thread and stitching.  As elementary-level as it appears, these two small quilts were both good lessons for me.  And, as always, I cut without a pattern or straight edge, using my cutter like a pencil on paper. There will be more Sandias, but this week I'm working on other things.  That's for another post!