New Year's Eve

Although I resisted, I am going to have to review my creative year before committing myself to some goals for 2009.

This time last year I had finished the Self Expressions class, which had been pretty successful in developing confidence and 'listening to' the piece. Some of the class members went on to found a yahoo group, which has had intermittent forays, and a couple of challenges. The number of participants is not great enough for continued momentum, unfortunately. They plan to work through AQWorkbook this year, but I have already done that. However, a lasting legacy of the SE class is that I am much happier just seeing where a piece might go, and adding and subtracting threads, effects, etc. until it tells me it is finished, or I decide I am done with it. Not everything has to be a masterpiece. Randomly about half of what I made this year are things I would be happy to display publicly.

In March I went to a weekend workshop here in Christchurch with Gloria Loughman, to make a forest landscape. We started with a pale wash of sky colours and then sponged on various greens and browns. The technique was not to mix green, but to pick up a blotch of yellow and black or yellow and violet and get a mix on the fabric with the sponge. There were about 14 people on the course, and everyone made completely different landscapes. Some got as far as stitching, but I was not one of them. I did a few hours more when I got home, and the project is still languishing in the halfway land between design board and 'consigned to UFO' box. It was great to work with Gloria and see a lot of her works up close. She was very happy for students to maul her quilts. She also encouraged us to practise with her machine and threads, some of her threadwork ideas. She had some small quilts that feature in her book, which show the same scene using different colour options, which was a great lesson in colour effects.

In April I left for my long overseas trip. This was broken down into: 10 days with Mum to see her and get over the flight, followed by a week in the Alicante mountains with my Somerset friend Barbara to get fit. We had a great week of weather, only 2 of us on that grade of walking, so our own guide, and shared the hotel with a group of birders, so got to see nightingales, rollers, vultures, and a huge tawny owl which sat on a dead tree outside the hotel. From there I went to Barcelona for a couple of nights before heading to Rome to pick up the NZ walking group. That was almost a month of walking, sightseeing and eating our way round Tuscany, Umbria, Amalfi and Rome. Semi-work, but also enjoyable.

I spent another month in the UK, mainly with Mum, but I also did a trip to the Midlands, and met up with Angela and Joanna from our yahoo group. We spent the day in Liverpool at the Klimt exhibition (Tate Liverpool). It was really good fun to meet them in person, and we also took lots of photos of the lambananas exhibit all over town, and went to the impressionists at the normal museum as well.

Then off to Canada and the States, to stay with people I had hosted here through Home Exchange, or other ladies from the quilt group.

More on that next post.