if all the world's a stage, I want better lighting!

On Saturday I took a day off from working in the house and the studio and made a trip to the Rocky Mountain Quilt Festival to see the only exhibit there will be of every piece in the 2015 Hoffman Challenge

First let me say that it has been my privilege to have pieces hang in this exhibit for five of the past six years

and second, that this will probably be my last year to participate

it is a story of diverging paths -- they are going in a more traditional direction while I am headed toward something much more out of the box!

I had already made that decision pretty much, but when I saw how these pieces were treated this year, it sealed the deal

Here is where I get on my soap box:

the lighting on this show is terrible -- but it always has been, and that's part of the down side of holding a show in a Fair Grounds building

but the real annoyance was how badly creased many of the pieces were -- including the award winners!  the quilts had obviously been FOLDED into a box as tightly as they would fit for the shipping because they had deep creases in them

when I ship my pieces I try to make sure there will not be any creases -- it detracts from the work

I was very disappointed by that, and frankly I don't care to share my work with an organization that treats it with so little respect

Ok, stepping off my soap box now!

but while I'm talking about quilts -- this piece is coming right along now -- I've been adding shadows at the bases of the trees -- hand stitching on pieces of tulle that have been cut in reverse of the trees they are meant to shadow

I have a couple more days of that work to do then it will be time to work on the next step of this piece

bead work continues too

this pumpkin pin is all finished and ready for the show I'll be doing in September

I started this piece for an on line challenge this week -- also moving right along

and this is part of another piece designed for that September show

one of the most important things that got installed in the studio this past week was the stereo system

I know there are a lot of MP3 player approaches to this including radio type stations, but like with things in my art, I want to control what it is I listen too -- and I have a lot of CDs, cassette tapes and even record albums

there was a minor crisis earlier in the week when I could not locate the cables to hook it up, but by the end of yesterday I was in business -- back to putting other things away to the sounds of Andrew Lloyd Webber tunes (the 5 CD selection that I found first in the one box of CDs that has been unpacked

this week I hope to get a lot more done down there!