Creativity Challenge Completed! (Episode 14 "In Which We Were Creative")

What a hoot this was! I loved getting the responses to the creativity challenge I issued. Thanks so much to Lynn, Frances, and Virginia for playing!

Here's the original photo again, just to jog your memories:

Here is the response I was sent by Lynn. For more information about her entry (and just to read some fun blogging!) check out Lynn's blog.

I really like the way Lynn used her quilting to represent the water marks on the side of the barge, and the emphasis on the shadow as a vertical line amidst all the horizontal/diagonal going on. The saturated colors really bring almost a mysterious mood to the piece for me as well--reminiscent of the mysteriousness of the man's shadow on the side of the barge. Love it!

And here's the response from Frances:

I like the gravel background!
But seriously, I love how Frances interpreted the colors of the piece into fabric, and the "wateriness" of the shadow itself, being interrupted by other fabric. She also played with contrast of value in hers by using a pretty wide range of fabrics. Really cool stuff.

And now for something completely different. Virginia's inspiration from the photo played out in a traditional pieced block and I love it.

Virginia played off the yellow/orange in the photo and used that to pull coordinating colors from her stash. Many of the fabrics are batiks, which also are a bit reminiscent of the watery feel to me as well, plus the borders relate for me to the steel/metal of the barge in the original photo. I also like that Virginia was able to pull out the diagonals from the original photo into a block that's diagonal.

Really, really cool stuff. Love all of them! It's just so much fun to see how different people get inspiration from the same photo.

Now, here's mine (also very different). I continued my experiments with Lutradur and photo printing on fabric in this piece. I won't say much more about it--to hear about my process and why I did what I did, listen to the episode!

(By the way, the bottom border looks like it's pulling up but it's not. I had to fold it to get it in my totebag to take to my guild meeting this week for show n' tell. Lesson learned. Lutradur and canvas don't fold. They bend. There's now seemingly a permanent crease in there!)

I'll post again later today or tomorrow with the responses to the "debriefing" questions that I sent to the three responders. I asked them about their process and so forth. I've also got a new creativity challenge I'm issuing--stay posted!

It sounds like a horror movie but...

...I now have red creeping thyme in my garden. (Cue horrific scream.)

Gotta love anything named "creeping." But it should be pretty. Not that mine looks like this yet. Rather, I now have five little tiny patches of green bitty leaves interspersed along a boulder wall in my front yard. I had to leave the plant markers in so my husband wouldn't accidentally yank them as weeds. I doubt they'll even look like this by the end of the summer, but at least they should look like something by then.

We've been in this house for 4 years now and I've yet to find anything that will actually grow over the top of that wall and flow attractively down the front of it like I've dreamed. It gets a kazillion degrees out there and is subject to pretty high winds, so we can only plant the most hardy of stuff. Daylillies--check. Ornamental grasses--check. Sedum--check. A few other wildflower-esque things that now I can't remember what they're named--check. But pretty flowy things? Not yet. The alyssum lasted all of about 5 minutes, the creeping sedum is growing about a quarter inch a year, and I've had a few tragic ends to other hopeful plants. I think I'm starting to hear them scream when I come towards their little table in the garden shop.

So, since I've had a lot of luck with herbs over the years and it's amazingly hard to kill them (they are, after all, edible weeds), I decided to give the creeping thyme a shot. I'll just try not to have nightmares of it eventually "creeping" it's way into my bedroom in the dead of night and wrapping itself around my neck.

It feels good to have finally gotten my hands in some dirt this weekend. I got my tomatoes planted, as well as some mint, basil, and rosemary to supplement the other herbs that did come back from last year (anyone need oregano, sage, or tarragon? Bumper crop already). I'm a little late--usually Memorial Day weekend is the big planting season around here. Any earlier, and they freeze their little roots off. Later and you can't get the produce off before it freezes at the other end. I think we'll be good. Round about mid-August I should start being able to make pasta sauce almost completely from my garden. I still have a few other random empty spots I need to find something to plant in but hopefully by the end of next weekend I'll be done and we can just wait and see what survives our strange little mini-ecosystem.

OK, so this isn't a quilty blog entry. Sorry. I have been sewing but I'm finishing up the creativity challenge project so I can't really say much about it nor can I post pictures yet. Later this week--promise! I can't wait to post pictures of other folks' responses to the creativity challenge that I've been sent--this is so freaking cool! I love seeing how different people interpret the photo. Nifty keen.