Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Fiber Art for a Cause

I've blogged before about being invited to be one of the 100 artists to raise funds for the American Cancer Society.  You can read all about it here.  I thought and thought about what my contribution would be and started looking through my small pieces to see if one of them would be appropriate and I came across this piece that I had made and framed.  I thought it was a good representation of my work.  It uses only my hand dyed fabrics and has a lot of free motion quilting.  I thought it would be perfect.



It is 9 1/2 inch square mounted to an ecru 12"square mat.



Detail
It looked just fine up close but when I put it up on my design wall and looked at it from a distance I thought that the circles blended in with the background and needed some definition.







So I went around each circle with a running stitch using a darker shade of the the circle's color. I enjoyed doing the hand work, something I haven't done in a while.





Much better, I think.  You can see some of the other art on Pinterest here: http://www.pinterest.com/d_boschert/the-100-fundraiser-to-fight-cancer/


I'm linking up with Off the Wall Friday.  Co check it out.

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Christmas at the Botanical Gardens

Today I shared a magical day with my son, home for the holidays from Portland OR.  We went to the New York Botanical Gardens in the Bronx to see their Holiday Train Show. It is the masterpiece of Paul Busse who created this wonderland over the past 20 years, constructing miniature replicas of famous NY landmarks out of plant material, such as twigs, cones, seed pods, etc.  Running throughout the display are miniature train sets.

The exhibit is set in the Edith A Haupt conservatory, so though it was a dreary drizzly day we were cozy and warm inside amongst all the plants.

I took a lot of pictures of the buildings but neglected to take any of the bridges overhead, the Brooklyn Bridge replica being 14 feet tall. If you've ever been to NYC you will recognize a lot of these buildings.



JFK Airport with the TWA terminal, made from giant fungi.

This is hard to read, but if you go the the link I gave you in the first paragraph, you can read all about him.

The angels at Rockefeller Plaza.

Famous skyscrapers, including the Chrysler Building.

Yankee Stadium with spotlights.

Edith A. Haupt Conservatory.

Check out the detail in the figures.

Grand Central Terminal.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

There were many, many children there today enjoying the scenes and trains.




St. Patrick's Cathedral

There were over 150 buildings and three huge bridges overhead.  Go to their website to read more about it and see more pictures and click on any of my pictures to see a bigger view of all.

After the exhibit we drove about a mile to Arthur Avenue for their famous Little Italy, full of restaurants, markets, pastry shops, bakeries, fish stores, butchers, and more.  We had a scrumptious lunch at Roberto's and did a little shopping.  We would have walked around a lot more, but the weather was miserable. The area was so busy and crowded, we had a hard time finding a parking place.  Everyone was shopping for their Christmas feasts.  It is an Italian tradition to have fish on Christmas Eve, so the stores were bustling.  It was a great day and fun to spend time with my son.

I hope that you have a wonderful Christmas with family and friends and a happy, healthy New Year!



Thursday, December 18, 2014

Gifted Ornaments

I hosted a Christmas luncheon yesterday for 12 of my non-quilting friends. (More about my quilting friends later). I did all the cooking and following my niece's form, I served Pumpkin Pie Martinis to start, so delicious and everyone wanted the recipe. I was delighted to receive some lovely gifts including these five new additions to my trees.



This sparkly high heeled slipper fit right into my living room tree with all silver, white and gold ornaments.




As did this one made out of ribbon and fashioned to look like a rose, so pretty.





Everyone knows that I love Santas and this one was so unusual.  He's made of a small gourd and comes from Peru.





How about this handsome Parisian Santa with his easel, painting by the Eiffel Tower?  A real charmer!



And last but certainly not least, this winning Scottish Santa playing the bagpipe.


Now for my quilting friends.  I am hosting another luncheon tomorrow, but that will be much easier than yesterday's.  It's a much smaller group since so many will be out of town and its a potluck, so all I have to make is the meat course, a spiral baked ham, doesn't get much easier than that.  I love entertaining over the holidays and getting to share my festive home.

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

New Santas

If you follow my blog you know how much I love to decorate for Christmas.  Among other things, I put up two big trees.  The one in the living room has all silver, gold and white ornaments and the one in my family room has all Santa and red ornaments.  It's a big tree and there's always room for one or two new ones each year.


When I'm traveling I try to find a Santa from that country.  I looked and looked on my Canadian Rockies trip and the best I could find was this ice fishing Polar Bear with a Santa hat.  If you look very carefully you will see the fish he caught at the end of the line.




I am especially find of glass Santa ornaments and this little guy with a bottle-brush tree wanted to come home with me, so he did.



.
I could not resist this New York City Santa with the Empire State Building all decorated in red and green and the Big Apple with the I Love NY logo.



Thursday, December 11, 2014

Recycling

I enjoy sending Christmas cards and am vey fussy about what I buy.  I especially like three dimensional ones, though they often require extra postage, so I don't do that as often.  I also love to get cards and it seems like such a shame to throw them away, so I have bundles of cards from previous years.

This year when I was getting out my supplies of new cards and a few left from last year, I came across a card that I had sent to a friend and that had been returned to me.  She was in a nursing home and sadly had been moved to the dementia wing so I never did resend it.  I thought it was such a cute card and tried to come up with a way that I could use it again.

I also like to wrap my gifts in attractive ways and thought that if I cut this card down, it would make a great package tag, something of which I always seem to run short. So I cut off the inside part of the card with the sentiment and writing, folded the front in half, using a boner for the crease, trimmed it way down, and voila, a nice little tag.


It was originally a horizontal card with a very long scarf to the left and more snow to the right.  Now the scarf wraps around to the back,  Those are real little buttons.  Isn't he cute?

So that got me to thinking about what I could do with some other cards and I went through all of my cards from last year.  They don't all adapt to this technique. Some are folded vertically as above where they open like a book or horizontally making a tag that opens from the bottom. If it has been written on on the inside of the front, you can't use it.  Some were small cards that could not be folded  but they could be used as a tag that you write on the front.


I will go through all those cards I have stored in the basement at a later date, but now I have to go and address this year's cards.

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Quilt Tree

Last Friday my FiberWorks group took a road trip to The New Britain Museum of American Art to see the exhibit, Let Me Quilt for One More Day, an exhibit of quilts from the 1700's to present day.  I was thrilled to be one of the invited contemporary artists.  I showed you my quilt a while back when we had a SAQA meeting at the museum.  No photography was allowed, so no pictures of the other quilts.  Suffice it to say that it was a wonderful show, beautifully displayed.

In the lobby there was this huge 16 foot tree covered with small quilts, all for sale.  I have three small (postcard size) hanging there.






There were seven other trees at the museum, each one coordinating with the gallery in which they were installed.  For example there was a Victorian tree in the Moser Library and a very modern white tree in the Contemporary Gallery.



As I've said before, this is a great museum with a fabulous permanent collection and photography was allowed in the rest of the museum. This very large piece by Nobu Fokui caught our eye from a distance and we all thought it looked like a quilt.  As you got closer you could see the amazing detail.






The current exhibit is on until Jan. 5, but the museum always has something interesting to see.  

I'm linking up with Off The Wall Friday.  Go see what everyone is up to this week.

Friday, December 5, 2014

It's a Good Thing




You've often heard me talk about things that I've done with the Woman's Club, of which I am a member.  I've been on numerous trips to various museums, New York City, points of interest, and many other things and many lunches.  What you may not realize is that our club, the Woman's Club of Danbury/New Fairfield, is part of the General Federation of Woman's Clubs of Connecticut. We are basically a service organization dedicated to uniting women in the community by promoting educational, philanthropic and fellowship activities. We also have a lot of fun in the various fellowship groups such as hiking, bridge, canasta, Lunch Bunch, golf, bowling, Flick Chicks, book club and many more.

Our club's biggest fundraiser is our poinsettia sale, where we presell plants in November and then deliver the plants in early December.  It is a huge undertaking and this year we sold over 3,000 plants or $50,000 worth.  All of the profits are donated to local charities and given to five local high schools for scholarships.  Every year we get better and better.  More that $460,000 had been raised for the organizations in the Danbury area since the club was founded in 1982.


This past Tuesday was our distribution day.  The plants are delivered at 6AM in two huge delivery trucks.  We always hope for decent weather and this year was pretty good, cold, with no snow, ice or rain.  We have a cadre of husbands who unload the trucks and then the members empty the boxes and set them in rows according to size and color.  There are five different sizes and three colors and prices range from $10 to $30 apiece.  The empty boxes are filled with orders to be delivered.  It is a masterpiece of organization.  All the orders are usually filled and delivered by 1PM.  It's hard to tell in this picture, but there are many, many volunteers, each with a specific job.

Then there is the food.  I like to help out in the kitchen.  We start with breakfast food and coffee, lots of coffee, to feed the hungry workers.  About 10:30 lunch is set out in the form of sandwiches, pizza and desserts.  All the food is donated by members, too.

It's a busy day, but very rewarding.  In April we have our Celebration of Giving, where we invite representatives of the various charities to our luncheon meeting and hand out the checks.  It's a good thing!

Monday, December 1, 2014

Fiber Art For a Cause



I am delighted to announce that I am an invited artist for “The 100” to be held on Wed., Feb. 4, 2015. The goal for this fiber fundraiser for the American Cancer Society is to raise $10,000 in one day. And February 4 is my birthday, what a nice way for me to celebrate.

This is Virginia Spiegel's baby.  Fiberart For A Cause has already raised $240,000 through the generosity of fiber artists and patrons. In 2015, her goal is to bump that amount up to a nice, round quarter of a million dollars. 

I’m sure you will want to be one of the very exclusive 100 patrons who will be randomly assigned artwork from an extraordinary line-up of international fiber artists.