Work vs Fun

A year or so ago I think I wrote that I've had a line drawing of the above quilt in my sketch book for years. Ever so often I would look at the sketch and flip the page and go on to another of the many ideas living in more sketch books than I want to count. Several time I have actually started to work on the design. The first try was pieced and the next try was appliqued. Both of these techniques and approaches to taking this idea from paper to fabric was too time consuming, and NO FUN. I suppose I could have fused it easy enough, but since my favorite fabric is PFD Kona which does not fuse well, I thought that would be a lot of work not to have a successful outcome.

I call the act of making quilts my "work" but in all honesty, I REALLY don't want to work HARD. What I want to do is work FUN. An none of the ways I thought of was going to be fun. Then after telling myself that anything one does for the sake of their art vision is permissible I realized that this design could be easily done if it were dye painted. And painting could be FUN. So dye, thickened with rice paste was how "Jester's Garden", the quilt pictured above was accomplished. And yes it was fun/work.

The smaller version below was to be another class sample. I was done using Inktensive Pencils, PanPastels (the larger yellow areas) on soy milk soaked cotton. I am not as happy with the results as I was with the original so I will do this design twice more starting tomorrow with two other mediums, dyes thickened with sodium algenate first and other with dyes thickened with rice paste.
So come back tomorrow or the next day to see what I did.

Not much progress on the condo, just more of the wood flooring was done. The appliances were all in their proper places. I know stainless steel and black are in vogue as far as kitchen appliances are concerned, but I am so glad I decided on white ones. The kitchen looks so much bigger and brighter with yellow walls than it did when it was painted mauve and the appliances were over sized and black.