Notan, Gallery Exhibits, & Scrap Starters

Last weekend at CQFA, we did a mini workshop on considering the Japanese concept of Notan in our designs. Here are my workshop results completed with free hand cut paper and glue.

I gallery sat at the Cinema Place Gallery in Hayward for their Abstract Exhibit. It is a nice selection of both two and three-dimensional work. There are three other quilters plus painters and sculptors in the exhibit. Chabot College also has an exhibit there this month. The work in the Chabot exhibit is mostly representational, and is an impressive display of drawings, paintings, and sculpture.

Wanting a small project I could do in between my current watercolors, I thought I would try completing a small quilt started with small scraps. I saw this idea on Franki Kohler’s blog. Franki was inspired by an article by Jenny Bowker in Machine Quilting Unlimited (May 2011.) Here is my start. The idea is to use the small scrap as in inspiration for the quilting design, and then to expand the design into the plain areas of the quilt with free-motion quilting. I am already thinking about how I might add paint to parts of the quilt.