How I Spent my Summer

In the summer of 2016, the morning glories grew around the window

 the cabbages unfurled silver and purple.

and the garden continued to soothe

 

 In July, I  made a couple of quilts for young women who graduated from high school this spring:  my niece Megan, in California, and my neighbor, Grace.

In midsummer, I took a two-day class in dimensional felting at New England Felting Supply https://www.feltingsupply.com/ with Andrea Graham. 

 She's great at dimensional tree trunks and rocks

But she wasn't able to help me bring any dimensionality to these images of canoes at Boat Meadow Beach in Eastham, Massachusetts.  Unfortunately, that had been my motivation for taking her class.

Nevertheless I persisted in working on them and continue to this day.

Also this summer I decided to donate the felted image below to Auer Farm, a 4-H facility in nearby Bloomfield, CT.  This is an image of a mushroom barn on the Auer Farm property, which the 4-H would like to rehabilitate.  It's an iconic reminder of Connecticut's agrarian past, and worthy of preservation.  I've offered it to the farm to auction or raffle off this fall as part of a fall fundraiser.

This felted landscape was created using the technique I'll be teaching at the West Hartford Art League in a one-day workshop on Sunday, October 16, from 10 am to 4 pm.  http://westhartfordart.org/workshops/. 

Working from a photo, I traced its outlines onto a piece of raw silk, then filled in the outlines with a soft form of wool called wool roving, using a special barbed needle.  There's still time to sign up!

Also this summer I got to go to three art openings:  opening receptions for juried art exhibits for which my fiber art was chosen.  One was a reception for Water, Water Everywhere, a juried show at the Spectrum Gallery in Centerbrook,Connecticut. Here I am with Low Tide First Encounter Beach II on the left and Eastham Low Tide II on the right.

Another was a reception for the national show at the Cape Cod Art Association, http://capecodartassoc.org/the-national-2016/  which I understand is a very competitive one.  The piece chosen for this show, Coastal Heath, earlier this year took first place in the 72nd Annual Art Exhibit at the Slater Museum in Norwich, Connecticut.

Another was a reception for the annual show of an organization called Connecticut Women Artists.  That show accepted my painted and quilted whole-cloth quilt, Great Head Trail, which shows an image from Acadia National Park.
http://www.ctwomenartists.org/

 This image is next going to go off to the Phipps Center for the Arts in Hudson, Wisconsin, to a juried show called National Parks, Personal Narratives, honoring the 100th anniversary of the National Park System.

http://thephipps.org/event/national-parks-personal-narratives/

Also this summer, some teaching was on the schedule, in two venues. One was Hartford's Chrysalis Center, and you can read about that in a soon-to-be-created blog posting, now with NEW HIPAA compliance.

The other teaching venue was the Windsor Art Center, where I taught the art of felted beads:

Which reminds me, I'll be adding to my own supply of felted beads because those are one of the items I'll be vending at Open Studio Hartford.  http://openstudiohartford.com/artists

Come see me on Saturday or Sunday, November 12 or 13, at the Connecticut Historical Society, one of Open Studio's many venues, at One Elizabeth St. in Hartford's West End.

 http://openstudiohartford.com/connecticut-historical-society

In other news this summer, I created a major 40 x 40 piece, called "Layers, Literally," which embodies a series of visual puns.  More about that in a soon-to-be-written blog posting. 

What else?  Two sojourns on Cape Cod, a week in June and two weeks in September, yielding these inspirations:

These images are going to sustain me when the cold weather hits.  Meanwhile, I'm enjoying the last of the departing summer's balminess.