Roan Mountain

Last Friday we took a trip to Roan Mountain which sits along the North Carolina - Tennessee border a bit north east of Asheville. Roan Mountain isn't really a mountain peak, but rather a ridge that spans about 5 miles and sits over a mile above sea level. Because of the elevation they have what is referred to as a Canada-like climate that creates an interesting ecosystem. This is the time of year when the native rhododendrons are in full blossom. It's a spectacular display of thousands of magenta blossoms.

Here we are among the rhodies on a beautiful June day!

A brief hike from Carver's Gap along the Appalachian Trail brings you to Round Bald where you get spectacular 360 degree views like this.

Here is a photo of a native flame azalea. They are also naturally occurring on Roan Mountain, but not as plentiful. They do have a beautiful color though and are a treat to find.

A Quilt for Shindig

One of the things I really like to do in the summer is attend the weekly Saturday evening outdoor event called "Shindig on the Green." It's a mountain music and dance program that features a "house" bluegrass band, a couple of scheduled traditional dance/clogging groups, and the rest of the program is "open mike" and made up of entertainers who just show up and sign up to do a couple of songs each. The music is a mix of bluegrass and traditional ballads that stem from the Scots-Irish heritage of the Appalachian region. It's a wonderful community event in a beautiful setting, last year returning to the refurbished Pack Square Park in downtown Asheville. Shindig happens in July and August and starts each Saturday evening "right around sundown."

This spring my friend Alice and I decided to make a quilt and donate it to the Folk Heritage Committee. The FHC organizes "Shindig" and our quilt will be raffled off to raise funds to support their work.

It was a fun collaboration! We chose to make a traditional pattern, a log cabin quilt, and set it in the "field and furrows" design, because we felt that was in keeping with the agrarian roots of mountain music. Log cabin blocks traditionally have a red center, to signify the hearth, so we chose contemporary batiks in golds and blue-greens to surround our fire. The quilt measures 60 x 84 inches and consists of 35 blocks. None of the blocks are identical!

Spring Cleaning

I have some photos cluttering my desk top, so time to do some spring cleaning! After all, next week it is summer. So here are just a few pictures from our February trip to Arizona for the golf Road Scholar program.

It was chilly for our day in Albuquerque,

but we did take the tram up the

mountain there and from the top of the ski area

you could almost see forever!

And here's Russ with some petroglyphs at the National Park in Albuquerque.

At the Road Scholar program in Phoenix, we had an excellent talk by a naturalist who brought in all sorts of desert creatures for us to meet. Here I am with a tarantula I befriended! I don't look scared, do I?

And here I am, posing like a cactus at the Saguaro National Park in Tucson.

Wholecloth Painting... done!

In May I took a workshop called "Wholecloth Painting" with Susan Brubaker Knapp, who presented a wonderful program of her work at our quilt guild meeting. http://www.bluemoonriver.com/ I'm not exactly sure why I signed up for this class... I really think I was just looking for something that would take me a little out of my comfort level... and the big benefit was that I didn't need to lug my sewing machine, since we'd be painting and not sewing.

I also didn't need to gather a big materials list. In fact, I could have just shown up and for a very reasonable fee used all of Susan's materials!

My friend Alice offered the use of her fabric paints. She had both PROfab textile paints and some Lumiere (Jacquard)... I ended up using and liking the PROfab paints very much.

I had purchased some prepared for dyeing (PFD) fabric when some of my bee mates and I took a field trip to MaryJo's Fabric shop in Gastonia earlier this spring. And I had an assortment of paint brushes from past projects that I thought would suffice.

The process was fairly straight-forward. Susan had three photos that we could choose from. I picked the sunflower because it's cheerful and Alice seemed to have a couple of nice yellows in her paint set. Susan had traced the major lines of the photo and enlarged it to about an 8 x 10 size. Each of us took a copy of that line drawing and put it under our PFD cloth and drew the lines onto our fabric with a pencil. Once the image was transferred, then it was basically paint by number without the numbers... and of course, we had to look at the photo and try to replicate as best we could the colors and then get them on the proper part of the fabric. It was the usual frustration of getting used to unfamiliar materials and wanting our efforts to actually resemble the artist's sample. I can't say that I was thrilled with the experience, but I did finish the workshop with my painting pretty much completed and resembling, somewhat, the photo image.

Like most of these things, my painting stayed taped to the board for weeks. Finally this week, I did a little touch up painting, removed the piece from the board and began doing the quilting/thread painting to finish the project. I was surprised that I enjoyed this part of the process very much and I am pleased with the end result. Here are a few more photos:

This shows my project with the photo that I painted from.

Here is a closeup of the thread painting that "saved" the center of my flower.

And just to give you an idea... this is Susan Brubaker Knapp's original sample. She created a lot more realism and depth, but I think I did fine for a first (and likely last) attempt!