Full Speed Ahead

Since last we spoke, the holidays came and went, the new year slipped in on little cat's feet (maybe not my cat, cause he usually enters howling), and the whirlwind of my plans and expectations for continuing at the "University of Cheryl and Her Internet" became a new semester.

We're paddling as fast as we can, fueled by enthusiasm and caffeine.

 In December I celebrated the shortest days by frequently photographing the night in it colorful raiment from the perspective of my cozy living room. I especially loved the beautiful sunsets framed by the icicle lights around my living room window. Sometimes I painted with the blur of their movement and I was sad to see them go back to storage so soon.

Dispensed with a tree this year and just added enough
 twinkly lights to warm the night.

White icicle lights are so passe!

Intentional blur is fun to do.

Let's not forget the most meaningful lights of the season.

 The weather has been unnaturally warm and clear to end and start the years, and it seems a sign that winter expects us to just continue with whatever we were doing before the distraction of spending and eating disturbed the creative flow. The last of these wreaked havoc all through 2011, as I quite forgot in the midst of my studies and practice of drawing and stitching that eating was not one of the skills I needed to learn anymore. In fact, moving enough and eating properly became my first refresher course of the New Year. Let's hope I get an "A" in that one.


Most of what drives me from waking to sleeping these days is ongoing from all I started in 2011. Once experienced it is hard to say "no!" to an interesting challenge. I may not be an athlete, but I am a team player in my Internet world of art, and so I've been completing some races, prepping for others, and standing in great expectation of the starting gun of the new challenges.


One of my long time real world commitments is to my local quilt guild. While I haven't been active with the monthly goings on for some time now, every two years I become immersed in the group show. I am working to finish quilts that may have been started last summer or as long ago as 1999!

Last summer I was still completing the embroidered ribbon.

Perseverance payed off. After a mere 12 years, the quilt is finished and hanging, and ready to be my star entry at the quilt show in March.

My association with Australian embroidery teacher extraordinaire, Sharon Boggon, has led me to join many hundreds of other fans worldwide to participate in a weekly lesson/challenge to learn or practice 52 different stitches and their variations this year. Everyone involved comes from a different background of skill and interest, so we are all completing our projects to suit our own needs. I am following the lead of a small group blog where members are doing color themed monthly pages to contain all the stitches from that month. At the end of the year, my pages will be sewn into a (hopefully) beautiful fabric reference book.

Two facing pages ready for the first week's challenge stitch. The completed size of each will be 9x12.

On the Aida cloth side I will be practicing a row of the four or five stitches in basic forms.

On the right side will be a collage of interesting fabrics to encourage stitch variation and exploration.

I am a newbie to any kind of drawn and painted art, but last year I was especially taken by the fun of mixed media explorations. I took a class with Jane LaFazio in mixed media for textile arts, and I also participated in two of the Strathmore Online Workshops. Currently we are in week two of the four free lessons with artist, Traci Bautista. Having spent last year collecting many drawing and painting supplies, I am having a ball learning to actually use them effectively. What I am loving about this workshop is that there is no pressure to do anything but have fun, and that is why I am in this game at all!

The first layer of media set up basic lines and forms to work with by using liquid acrylics sprayed over stencils and other resists.

This is the left side of the page as seen above. I stopped layering the media and designs after the paint layers.

This is the right side. Here I continued with several more layers of markers and inks.

In my ongoing lessons with fiber artist, Jude Hill, I am currently playing catch up with a course she taught in 2010, before I knew how wonderful it was to learn this way. So I am working at my own pace to learn to develop story with characters of my own design in her Patchwork Beasts class.

This photo collage (not to scale) shows the various bases I made in my first two lessons to use for the development of the beasts.

Finally, I am spending some time adding to my "Frankenstitch" class samplers from the fall, so that I will be up to speed when the advanced class begins this weekend. Can't wait to begin, since we will have the opportunity to create textile art for three dimensional formats.

In this photo of the buttonhole sampler you can see I have concentrated on the upper left quadrant, adding padding and woven stitches.

A closeup of the plain weave and raised buttonhole.

Encasing the padded ridges in buttonhole lace and a woven cap.

Have I tired you out yet? Not me. I'm just getting going. Let's see: which pile is calling me with the loudest voice this afternoon? Maybe lesson two of the mixed media (we're doing watercolor backgrounds this week), or my week two stitch for the January page? No, I think it's that hunky Beto Perez and my Zumba DVDs. After all, we have our priorities.

Collecting The Sparkly Bits : Chicago Holiday, Part II

There is something so satisfying about taking bits of color and texture and artfully combining them to make a whole that is so much more interesting than any of the elements involved. As the puzzle comes together, the brain plays lovingly with the new combinations to find meaning and story to amuse and delight itself.

That combination of bits is a great part of all the arts, as in the creation of a piece of jewelry, or a painting, or a woven piece of cloth. It plays into the creation of each new memory of time well spent. It is ultimately the formula of an interesting life.

A finely crafted day is especially wonderful when the bits and pieces include the experience of wonderful art. Those details double the fascination for me, and helps to create memories that enrich with the retelling.  One of my best reasons for wanting a city life in retirement is to be surrounded by the possibility of falling into art.  I like the serendipitous nature of the hunt. Knowing that it is all around me, on the street and hidden behind walls, a day in the city is a scavenger hunt for something I've never seen before, or a deeply loved favorite that I intend to revisit. Some of the findings will come from previous announcement through the media, and some will be by fortuitous accident. Every trip to Chicago has a mixture of these elements, and stumbling upon the unplanned feels like the universe is complicit in my pleasure.

The completed bracelet from last month, a labor of love and about forty hours of work. Don't know that I'll ever wear it, but who would buy it?

Such simple unassuming parts as tiny glass beads or over-sized rhinestones (rivolis). Here you see the beginning stages of adding the fringe. After sewing about seventeen different fringes between each rivoli, others were sewn around each of the beaded bezels and then around the edge of the beaded base to achieve that sumptuous fullness seen in the finished bracelet.

Self portrait of a couple off to have a city adventure
 on a festive Friday evening.

The big city is full of big street art. Tribune plaza has hosted Cows on Parade, "American Gothic" farmers, and now, Marilyn.

A view that we never really saw in the movie or the famous photos. This is the very heart of town, just over the Michigan Avenue bridge north of the Chicago River. She draws much attention, some controversy, and frankly was more beautiful than I thought it would be. She seems to embody the bold energy and excitement that you feel when you stand in this heart of American culture.

Just like last year, one of us took great advantage of the tree-house-like space of the window seat. Looking in from the perch...

...looking out on the night (at Wabash and Wacker, and the Chicago River).

Saturday we went in search of culture at (among other places) The Chicago Cultural Center. Formerly the main branch of the city library, the building was designed in a long gone era of fine craftsmanship and bold investment in public wealth. This was a palace for the people of the city. It is still awe inspiring.

A grand entrance serves as a gallery of amazing tile work.

Newly restored to grandeur, the Tiffany dome.

Beside the beauty of the building, the Cultural Center hosts fascinating free art exhibits, often with a more controversial, modern, or local provenance than the Art Institute. As usual we were not disappointed. The outstanding current exhibit, on view through April of 2012, is "Write Now: Artists and Letterforms".  
The trifecta of enjoyment was completed when we stumbled upon a festival  sponsored by the local public radio station, WBEZ91.5, called "What's Your Art: Celebrating the Art Centers of Chicago." In the huge ballroom-like Yates Gallery, were about twenty booths and activity stations, with enough live art to keep you busy for hours if you cared to immerse yourself in talking to all the artists. In addition to getting a sales pitch to buy hand blown glass from some enthusiastic local students, and a great talk about camera lenses with a local photographer, I had a linoleum block print custom made for me for free, and watched (although I sorely wanted to participate) an "impromptu" communal dance with knitwear.

Getting ready for the reveal...

Just like children's flip books, we each got to choose which head, body and feet went together to create our unique character.

Laid out on the floor covering the center of room was a zigzag of knit tubing (the kind we all made as kids on one of those spools with nails) connecting about 100 knit and crocheted hats of every imaginable style and color.

At the designated time, the dance leader gave a few quick rules of the dance, instructed the volunteer participants to don a hat and the music began.

What good is a giant hat dance without a rousing brass section a la New Orleans and Mardi Gras?

The Man waits patiently. Because I am not dancing
 he knows we will leave sooner than later.

And so it goes, it is time to culminate the weekend's festivities with the original purpose of the trip, a yearly dinner dance sponsored by the Association of Iron and Steel Technology. Never the best of the trip, but the catalyst to prompt us to experience the rest. 

A couple of pink "cosmos" make the table and me more festive.

 Happy Holidays to all my friends and readers. I hope you have enjoyed our adventures together this year and that I will see you again in the New Year. If you aren't already doing so, I hope you will sign up to follow, and feel free to leave comments on this or any post.

Snapshot Interlude: A Chicago Holiday, Part I

Life is good, life is busy and fulfilling, but I am so badly missing the drawing track I was on. It was starting to become such a good habit, but has currently fallen by the wayside. First, however, I have promises to keep. And the promise to myself that as soon as I finish some of my lovely projects that have been patiently waiting for me to love them too, then I can go back to daily journaling of the ink and paint nature.


The first love of my creative life has always been textiles, and I have quite a few fabric-y things piled high in the studio. I am just this week completing (and I mean before the week ends) a quilt that started with an inspiring class in... 1999! Several times I almost called it quits, but I'm so glad I persevered, because I love it now. My guild's next show is in late March, and so I have set a rigid schedule to help me have a good showing there. I'm sure I will be glad I did.


So instead, this week I am sharing the first installment of visual candy of my recent trip into town to gather and participate in that good holiday vibe of early December. I always take the sketchbook and journals with me, but when there is a short time and much to capture, there is nothing like a camera. I love to see how much energy I can pack into my shots, and so share a bit of the excitement with you.

The Hotel Monaco, just south of the Chicago River is our favorite place to stay in town. They have just redecorated and the room was quite elegant.

The view from our third floor window took in the Trump Tower
 across the river. The crystalline blue makes it look
 like a computer-generated image to me.

In Daley Plaza, we drank hot spiced wine and ate gooey chocolate soft pretzels. Two "porcelain figurines" posed in front of the giant Christmas tree.

Hanging out at the Christkindelmart is a nice time to stop and look around at the dramatic beauty of the city buildings.

I love all the overlapping reflections and intersecting lines. Just a pop of red.

Always on guard and always on duty.

"Flaming Pigeons"
It was hilarious to watch them warming their "heinies" in front of the memorial flame in the plaza (especially since it wasn't a terribly cold day.)

An elegant Macy's Window foretold the exciting decor to be found inside. (Although it's still Marshall Fields in the heart of many locals, I am a Philadelphian, and the fabulous building reminds me of the Wanamaker's of my youth.)

Trumpets on State Street

The amazing tree in the Walnut Room restaurant

Real tree "skirts" along the sidewalks are always holiday festive.

Sometimes "The Bean" makes you catch your breath with how it appears as delicate as a bubble.

It is mandatory for tourists and locals to visit and take
 photos of their reflections.

When you walk under Cloud Gate (the real name of the artwork,) the reflections multiply and produce dizzying effects. If you aren't careful you can walk into the surface.

The girl behind the camera

The sun was beginning to set and we headed off to the Art Institute for our afternoon coffee at the Modern Wing.

Lines, textures, colors (and this was just a hallway out side the lavatories!) I think it would be a good start for an interesting painting or quilt.

Crown Fountain "spews" water from the ever changing faces
 on the two 50 foot glass block towers. (Well, not in winter; but in summer kids of all ages frolic in the water.)
Note the moon directly overhead.

Heading back to the hotel, the magic glow of the city at sunset.
The building on the far right is the Aon Center,
 previously the second tallest building in the city
(before Trump was completed.)

Hope you enjoyed!

Next time: a bit of the night, plus an arty stop at the Chicago Cultural Center.