Eagles photo

Isn't he cute!!!

OOPs downloaded two eagle photos.

I have used the Eagles photo I created in photoshop, to make a quilt top. It is a collage of my hand dyed fabrics, with the photo in the center. I added some silloettes of larger eagles cut outs on either side, with branches reaching into the picture. It is all in bright colors of magenta, purple, teal, and lime green. The quilting will help define the branches, so they don't melt into the upper background. I haven't decided about adding a few pink flowers on the lime green leaves, it might be too distracting from the eagles in the center. I have finally found a great artist quilts photo book, it has the style of quilting I really admire, to use my own landscape photographs and colors, and altering them in an artistic way. I can do most of the manipulations on my Microsoft photo editor, and MS Paint programs, but I will have to get Adobe Photoshop Elements to do alot of it. The book is Artistic Photo Quilts by Charlotte Ziebarth. The previous books I have gotten show, scrap book kind of things, cut and paste, cutesy, or too complicated So you can't even recognize your photos. Last weekend we went to the local animal park and I took alot of photos, just playing with my new camera. The flamingo and alligator pics turned out real good. Also they had a baby camel, so cute!!! He came right up to the fence so we could pet him, he has huge blue eyes, and long lashes, so soft to pet, but you still wanted to be careful he didn't spit, ha ha ha.

Fabric book, continued

I have worked on the pages of the book, two at a time, in facing pairs, and tried to develope a theme in each set of pages. Sometimes it was just a color theme, supported by vintage buttons and flower and fabric choices. Other times it was an element of the decor, birds and birdhouses, rabbits and violets, copper bells, the Tonka trucks were fun to work with, I added wheels and construction elements, pink flamingos was fun too, I added vintage pink rhinestone buttons, palm trees, and other flamingos. On several of the garden scenes I carried the picket fencing up to the page design. I added lots of tree branches with various leaves and silk flowers. All the silk flowers are beaded, as well as all the fabric butterflies and dragonflies. Beads and embroidery accents help blend the buttons to the page, so they don't stick out so much, a cluster of beads helped the buttons, so they didn't look so out of place, just stuck there for no reason. I used a little bit of paint , gold around the edge of the sun, some stamped leaves, and I made a wire rug beater to sew onto a page and used it to stamp the design onto the page also. I notice there is a lack of ribbon and lace, it just didn't come into usefullness with the garden scenes. I did embroider a few words onto the pages. I also used some metal tags with words on them. I was limited to useful words that I could find in the collection at the store, if I could have printed my own, it would have been unlimited. But it was a challenge to make a cohearent phrase out of the choices I had. Although going through the tags was lots of fun! I also found some metal letter beads that I had gotten at a garage sale, I spelled out Joey's dog "Summer" on the back page above her photo. Of coarse I didn't have enough letters to do Aurora too, so I went and got some plastic letter beads. You always run out of the useful letters, the vowels and s, t & r. And then you have to go buy another pack of beads. So you end up with a whole bag of q, z, x and j. I finally finished all of the embellishments, what fun it was palying with all the "STUFF" My table was piled high with fabric, bead trays, button boxes, embroidery thread, boxes of silk flowers, and tons of other stuff. It was great to use some of the stuff I had been hoarding. Now onto assembling the project into an acordian style book.

Fabric Book Photos

Here are a few photos of the fabric book pages, the edge trim has not been finished on some of them.

Playing with Photoshop

I have been playing with my photo editing software, I created a picture of two eagles in a tree with flower foliage in the foreground, with an intense sky background. I started with an old photo my Dad took of a bald eagle on the telephone pole at my sister Vicky's. I took out the phone lines and cut it out and put it onto a color enhanced background of a rusty truck. Then I added a second eagle, reversed. Then I added some flowery foreground and sharpened the contrast and adjusted the color a little bit more to blend it all together. I think it turned out pretty good for my first try at creating a unique picture. There was a little more manipulating than that brief discription, but that is the simple version of what I did. I am also posting the original photos and the end result.

Sepia Garden Book, part II

I have been embellishing my photo pages, with everything from beads and buttons to charms, feathers, metal washers and a penny, paint, silk flowers, cardboard cutouts, embroidery, even a rubber pig!! It has been an adventure just collecting things, Joann's fabric was having and end of season button clearence, 80% off, Michaels Crafts was having a sale too, I went to a local auction and a lady bought a box of junk jewelery and we shared it, I got all sorts of weird stuff, chains and charms, a kitten button and I gave her $1 When I have been stumped on what to add, I have gone to my vintage button collection from my mom. A friend Suzie from quilt guild came over and we went through Mom's button jar, Suzie is a serious button collector, she just went to a West coast button convention, she found a small stash of interesting buttons from Mom, and I got all the fun ones she didn't want, but she lectured me on all the different types and what era they are from. I came home with a big zip lock bag of them. Mom's jar is not just any quart jar of buttons, it is a five gallon glass pig jar, full of buttons, that she picked up at fleamarkets and such in the 70's. we had lots of fun going through them, we poured them out onto cookie sheets and picked through them for hours. Suzie didn't believe me when I said five gallons!! I'll get some photos of the pages next time I am online.

Sepia Photos

Sepia Garden Book, part I

I started on a new project with photographs I took at my sister Vicky's, up in the Seattle area. She has a beautiful garden with lots of funky stuff, it was stuck here and there in her flowers. I started taking pictures on the "Sepia" setting on my new Canon digital camera. I loved the results and took alot more. With a digital camera, the view finder shows you a sepia view, not color, so I was able to really see how much contrast there was, how much shadow and light. I had never been interested in taking Black & White photographs before, because I couldn't see what the outcome would be. But with the digital cameras, it gives you the actual picture in the view finder. I had always admired the B & W pics my sister had taken of her kids and my friend Sue L. in California had taken alot of B&W too. Taking B&W pics of your partially finished quilts, will give you an idea of wether or not you have enough contrast in your fabric choices, and your quilt pattern. I think it will be a usefull tool, instead of looking at "watercolor style" quilts with a ruby red viewfinder, you can use a digital camera. I took almost 50 pics when I was there, all sorts of stuff, pink flamingos, wicker chairs, old granite ware pots with succulents, wrought iron garden art, sculptures, birdhouses, lots of nic-nacks, no flowers though, all just "Stuff". I did take flower pictures in color though, mostly lilies and dahlias and marigolds at this time of year. We did pick lots of blueberries, tho I missed out on the blueberry pancakes. ;-( When I got home I wanted to make a quilt with some of the pictures, so I started printing some of them out on my fabric, that was treated with "bubble Jet set,' and backed with freezer paper. I put it through my computer printer and printed two to a page. After removing the freezer paper I heat set the fabric/ink with an iron, if making a quilt or pic on a T-shirt you want to rinse out the excess ink first, then iron. As I was working on them I decided to make a fabric book instead. So I started sewing the individual pictures onto a cotton backing with strips of fabric around them "log Cabin" style. These individual pictures will then be embellished and put together as an acordian style book.