Celebrating Zoey's Gotcha Day

 

Zoey joined my family on September 15 last year, and on October 3, I added a post here on this blog about her as a way to document her growth and progress.

Interestingly, not much has changed with her. Most of the changes are mine. When I first got her, I kept wondering if her energy and her past traumas were too much for me to handle. She doesn't jump on me or put my hands in her mouth as often as she used to, mostly because she is more comfortable with me and doesn't get as frightened or nervous as she used to. She has separation anxiety so she will jump on me or pull at my clothes when I come back from taking the trash out for pickup.

 Mostly though, I am no longer afraid that she is going to bite me or hurt me when she jumps on me.

 

She finds the ripe passion-fruit and plays ball with it until it breaks and then she eats it. She is much better than I am at determining which passion-fruit is ripe enough to eat so she gets more than I do. In the picture above, you can see a yellowish green walnut and beside that is the darker green passion-fruit. 

I tried to put a daisy on her head like I had put the dandelion in a previous post, but she decided she would rather know whether I still love her. 

Yes I definitely do. I am so happy she is here. She still loves her squeaky ball and carries it around with her, even to bed. The one that fits her mouth is small enough to roll under the couch and furniture, so I have to keep getting them for her. 

Now that firework season is gone, I have reduced her anxiety medicine. She no longer chews on furniture or baseboards when I am gone, but I still try to stay home as much as possible or get a sitter for her when I have to go anywhere for more than an hour. She walks around the house crying and looking for me.

I haven't added any more talking buttons to the board, but she loves to use them to tell me she loves me, to ask for food, and to ask to go outside. When I tell her to wait, she will wait a few minutes and will remind me when the few minutes are over. I am glad she does that.

15 Minutes to Stitch Week 41

 

I spent these weeks quilting and binding African Garden quilt. That's it in the picture at the top of the post. I am really happy with how it turned out. One of my determining factors about whether  quilt is successful is how it looks when it is all rumpled up, and this one definitely makes me happy. Even when you can't see the pattern, the colors make it so pretty.

15 minute days these weeks --14 out of 14

15 minute days this year -- 213 out of 288 days

Success rate  = 74%

 

 

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 15 Minutes to Stitch follow this link to see all the other people who participate in this challenge

Progress on Tuxedo Vest

 

I bought a bunch of African fabrics. I know them as Kitenge, which is what they are called in East Africa. They are known as Ankara in West Africa. I showed them all in a Youtube video.

I fussy cut some of them and am appliquéing them to the Tuxedo Vest quilt. It looks very different now from where it started. It will be finished shortly.

Looking at it now, I am reminded of a Jane Sassaman quilt that was a garden. I had put it on my mental list of quilts to make a long time ago. I can't find the picture now, but it makes me happy that I am retroactively able to cross that quilt off my to-do list.

Yesterday, I found an art quilter who uses Ankara fabrics to make art quilts, Marcellina Oseghale Akpojotor. She was featured on the Colossal, which features different artists every day. They remind me of the dimensional pinecone quilts that were in a book I recently saw, even though these quilts aren't made with triangles.

I also want to bring your attention to American Quilt Society Worldwide Quilt Parade that is going on right now. I submitted three quilts to that parade. I am from Ohio, if you want to find them faster. You can vote for quilts you like there if you want.

15 Minutes to Stitch Week 39 and 40

 

I spent these weeks admiring the African fabrics and cutting and appliquing them to the Tuxedo Vest quilt. Eventually I will rename this quilt. Right now I am thinking of Kintenge Garden or Ankara Garden.

15 minute days these weeks --14 out of 14

15 minute days this year -- 199 out of 274 days

Success rate  = 73%

 

 

Tuxedo Vest Progress

 When I entered the finish of my portraits quilt on my spreadsheet, I noticed how far behind I am in my very easy goal of finishing more quilts than I start this year. As the weather is turning cooler, I know that I need to make some fast progress towards my goal.

I have pulled out my Tuxedo Vest quilt since it looked like it would be a quick finish. It took me a while to search out what I had named this quilt.  The name will change, but I haven't come up with a new name. 

It turns out that this quilt is about two years old and when I left it, I was planning on adding another column to make it a little bigger. It is a simple and easy quilt that I should have been able to finish in a day or a weekend, and here it is, still unfinished two years later.

I had hung up this top on a hanger, but I didn't put the leftover fabric with the quilt.

I put the quilt top with the African fabric I recently purchased in my bedroom because I want to keep my studio clean for Youtube videos when I decided that some of the African fabrics would really enhance this quilt top.

15 Minutes to Stitch Week 37 and 38

 

I am showing this chart again to show that I need to have two finishes to meet my goal. I spent most of my time thinking about what to do with the Tuxedo Vest quilt, so there isn't really anything to show for it. Until this morning, I wasn't really thrilled with any of the ideas, but I could see that I was making forward progress. It finally clicked this morning, and now I am ready to take more action on this quilt.

15 minute days these weeks --9 out of 14

15 minute days this year -- 192 out of 267 days

Success rate  = 72%

 

 

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Quilt Reveal: Making Friends

 

 I finished the portraits quilt I showed you in the last post.

I used the index card portraits as my inspiration, so I used background fabric that would result in the same size as the index cards.

I used fusible applique to add the body and the body parts: hair, whites of eyes, eyeballs, nose (optional), mouth, and clothing.

 

I decided to use the binding fabric as a border instead, and since it looked like a frame, I decided to birth the quilt instead of bind it.

I used embroidery stitches to stabilize the quilt instead of stitching in the ditch.

I added straight stitches in the border to mirror the look of the frame.

Finally, I used free motion quilting to secure all the fused pieces.

Although I had a bit of a panic when I thought the portraits would look like aliens instead of people, I settled on the idea and am really happy with how it turned out.

It took me 24 working hours to edit the video, since there were so many clips as it took me a little less than two weeks to make the quilt, and the software added extra, duplicate, and unnecessary clips.

 

15 Minutes to Stitch Week 34, 35, 36

 I have been awful about reporting my 15 minutes to stitch progress this year.  The good news is that I did stitch every day these three weeks and even finished a quilt - the Making Friends quilt I have been showing you on this post.

15 minute days these weeks --21 out of 21

15 minute days this year -- 183 out of 253 days

Success rate  = 72%

 

 

Linked with:

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My Weekly Painting and Quilting Progress

 

I had a fabulous arty week. I have finished five 8" x10"paintings so far, all based on quilt blocks. I have five more blank canvases to make for this series. I will use bigger canvases for the next series. 

I found out that my video problems with Youtube had to do with system upgrades, internet speed, and low battery and not really a bug in any software. I am getting better with the software although the things I want to do is much harder to do than talking head videos.

15 Minutes to Stitch Week 33

I did start quilting though. I am making a quilt based on the index card portraits I have been making. The blocks will finish at 3x5 to match the size of the index cards. I am having fun with these, with fusible applique, but the pieces for the facial features are so fiddly.

It is taking time to make this since I am also recording my process so I can make a Youtube video out of it.

15 minute days these weeks --7 out of 7

15 minute days this year -- 162 out of 232 days

Success rate  = 70%

 

 

Linked with:

 15 Minutes to Stitch

 

My "Vacation" So Far

 

 

Zoey and I have been enjoying our summer vacation so far staying inside the air conditioned house. The squirrels outside are enjoying eating and gathering the walnuts from my neighbor's trees and since it is raining walnuts outside and the bees are a-buzzing, Zoey does not want to go outside by herself.

It is nice to be outside enjoying nature and watching Zoey's antics for these "outings" but they aggravate my allergies so it is good and bad at the same time. 

Quilt and Color

 

Starting a YouTube channel has been much more difficult than I thought. You can skip this part and go on to the next section if it gets boring, but I wanted to record it so someday (hopefully soon), I can look back on it and say "Poor me, the things I didn't know. They had such simple fixes too."

My original thought was that it would take me about an hour to record a ten to twenty minute video, and then an hour or two to edit and publish it. I could publish one a day. I had five "practice" videos where I could just show things I have already made and then I could move on to making things and showing tutorials. It is taking me so much longer than that to publish the videos that I haven't been able to get to the quilting content yet.

I had to record the first video, the scrapbook, three times. I didn't have a tripod and getting the journal in the screen and at a good pace took quite a bit of doing. I linked that video in my last post.

I gave myself a budget and bought an overhead tripod, which is somewhat defective in its other features, but the tripod part works and I was able to get that one published. I couldn't get my voice to be loud enough so I bought a microphone as well, but decided to let the first one be music only. I know I sometimes prefer that.

The second video, the index cards, was therefore easier to film and I was able to record my voice, but I wanted to be able to edit out the blunders, the long pauses and the coughing and sniffing. I used the same free software that I used for the scrapbook, Lightworks, and it was working fine with all the edits, but then all of a sudden it kept saying "offline". I didn't know why it said that because I was able to use the internet fine for other things. I had to start over again two additional times before I could get a video that was good enough to publish. The cards are not in chronological order, but they weren't in perfect order anyway so I am not going to worry about it.

The goal is more to learn about how to do things and improving with each video, so although I don't like publishing things that aren't perfect, I think they are good enough to do the job they are supposed to do.

For the third video, Review of Arteza Paints, I decided to  so I switch to a different software, Davinci Resolve, which was similar to Lightworks but I had to learn it as well. It worked fine for a while but then it also eventually said "offline". It turns out that the software is cloud-based, and the problem was at my internet provider's end. I wound up taking what I had created in Davinci Resolve, moving it to Lightworks, finishing it off and publishing it. 

For my fourth and future videos, I increased my budget yet again and buy Adobe Premiere Elements which will be able to handle the basic functions I need and not be cloud-based. It is causing me problems where my voice is not syncing properly to the video so when I edit, I can hear my voice in stereo, with one voice being a second or two off the second voice. Very annoying. At this point, I do think Lightworks is a better software than Premiere Elements, but I think I need to give myself more time to learn both.

There is a backlog of the list of videos I want to post. I hope the list doesn't get as long as the list of quilts I want to make!

15 Minutes to Stitch Weeks 29, 30, 31 and 32

 

My last 15 minutes to stitch post was July 16. I didn't realize that it had been that long. Sorry. You can probably guess that this means that I haven't been able to get to any quilting content. I haven't come up with a good schedule of working and playing.  I did take time off from recording and editing videos to paint three canvases, which felt like cheating, so I have been creative, but haven't gotten to the fabric yet. Did you notice the rail fence in the background?

I don't know what this person is doing, but doesn't look as confident as the inspiration. Whoever looks at it can decide, but I am calling it Throw Caution to the Wind.

 

It will come soon though, I promise. I do have plans to make portraits on fabric. The success rate looks so sad since I was expecting it to increase now that the work project is over.

15 minute days these weeks --0 out of 28

15 minute days this year -- 155 out of 225 days

Success rate  = 69%

 

 

Linked with:

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Starting a YouTube Channel

 

The work on the project for my day job is basically complete, so I will probably not be working for the next two months.This year, I decided to use my time off more productively by launching my career as an artist. I don't know what that means yet. It will probably have something to do with making and selling quilts. 

I have been thinking about starting a YouTube channel anyway, as a way to show a video of the quote quilt, and the index cards and art journal that I made. These types of things aren't as easy to show with photos on the blog.

I created the channel called Quilt and Color and posted my first completed art journal. I wanted to get practice on making videos before I start showing the quilts.

I decided that if I was going to take the time to learn to record and edit videos, I might as well go in and try to create a channel that will be monetized. To make sure viewers have a reason for coming back, I will offer tutorials and product reviews. I know that you are supposed to stay in your niche, so I am using a broad niche to begin with - just a creativity channel so I can paint and color and quilt and anything to do with art. The people who don't recommend staying with a niche said to just throw spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks. That way you can focus on what your viewers want.

I won't spam this blog with all of my videos, but I will let you know about what I publish from time to time. If you are interested, I would love it if you subscribe and watch my videos. I need at least 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of viewing just to become monetized. I appreciate your help.and support you have given me on my blog and would love it if you would do the same for the YouTube channel.