Getting a Little Bit Greener

This is what our yard looked like at the beginning of June before we had the lawn removed.

Today was spent laying out edger board along the right side of the driveway for a walkway next to the car. It was perfect weather for working. It stayed overcast most of the day. We got about ten minutes of sunshine and about two minutes of very light rain. We have lucked out this summer, and haven’t had any very hot days.

Yesterday we planted some low growing Manzanita plants. This “Emerald Carpet” variety only stays less than a foot tall, but will spread up to six feet. Camilla spread bark around the plants today.

We have just a small edge of the garden planted. We will be very busy the rest of the summer, and maybe fall too.

Working a Little Larger

The current project is a little larger than the quilts I’ve been making. We had the front lawn removed a month and a half ago, and it’s finally starting to look like more than a dirt pile. All three of us have been busy working on it.

I claimed laying the landscape fabric as my job. The fabric we got is very similar to a stiff Pellon non-woven interfacing. I spent most of yesterday interfacing the entire area while Doug hauled wheelbarrows about and Camilla started arranging rocks to separate the gravel areas from the planting areas. We both played with rocks some after all of the cloth was laid.

The pile of sand will get spread as a base for a stepping stone walkway.

Several yards of gravel and redwood bark is getting delivered later today. We may take the day off from working, and go shopping for plants.

Whisper Challenge

Have I really not posted since December? I was busy in Spring teaching an Excel class which I hadn't taught before. Went on a week and a half trip to Orlando and Disney World right after school let out. This summer I've been busy with a major garden project in the front yard. I did manage to get a quilt done last month, although I can't show more than a preview since it's a challenge project which can't be revealed yet.

It’s Whisper Challenge time again. Here is a small detail of how I began. The top is pieced together with overlapping edges held together with zigzag stitching. I drew the main design lines directly on the top with a permanent fabric marker. They are hardly visible now after I have added all of the layers of paint and quilting. The completed quilt won’t be revealed until after the challenge is complete in February 2013.

The 2011Whisper Challenge can now be viewed on the SAQA regional blog. My quilt “Figs for a Crow” is the seventh quilt in Group 5.

I never showed the finished quilt from the 2010 Whisper Challenge, although I showed a preview a couple years ago. I don’t think there is a slide show available of the whole challenge, but I do have a few photos from the beginning.

Here is the photo, which I started from. A small crab on a rocky beach.

Here it is my finished quilt. I zoomed in on the little crab, brightened the color scheme up, and added a few barnacles.

I love what Deb Cashatt came up with next. She manipulated the photo of my quilt in Photoshop, and came up with something totally unique.

Eddie's Rooster

“Luck blossomed from the first. A dusty Rhode Island red rooster who had wandered too far from his own farmyard crossed the road and Eddie hit him without running too far off the road.”

(John Steinbeck, Cannery Row, chapter 13)

In Steinbeck’s book, the chicken ended up in a pot of soup with “a sack of carrots which had fallen from a vegetable truck, half a dozen onions which had not.” I have put the truck far enough down the road to give him a second chance to leap out of the way.

Merry Christmas!

Working on Perspective

The perspective rules I had known about weren’t allowing the car to look like it was driving downhill. I learned yesterday to raise one of the vanishing points for slanting objects. The proportions seem off a little, but I think I won’t let it bother me in the interest of getting the painting done on time.

I will scale my drawing on the computer to fit the composition, and then trace it onto the watercolor paper to save the step of redrawing it again.

“And then Eddie driving, they backed up over the rise, over the top and turned and headed forward and down past Hatton Fields.”

(John Steinbeck, Cannery Row,chapter 13)

Lee Chong’s Model T

Our final project for watercolor class is supposed to be based on something we’ve read. I’ve chosen a passage from “Cannery Row.” This is a value study for part of the painting. I have been working on redrawing this truck so it has the correct perspective to fit in the final composition.

“The body of the car was so battered that its next owner cut it in two and added a little truck bed.”

(John Steinbeck, Cannery Row, chapter 11)

Completed Again

There were a couple things in this painting that were bothering me too much, so I made a couple of fixes. The middle line on large pot is now following the curve of the pot better. And I’ve darkened the shadow near the bottom behind the lavender vase.