Art Quilters Dinner 2019

It's hard to believe that another year is coming to an end. I've already had two break up parties. We had the Waverley Patchworkers Christmas meeting on Monday night with a really good turnout. At the Christmas meeting we bring a plate of food to share at our tables and have a sit and sew night. Instead of paying our entrance fee we all bring food for Christmas hampers for the Waverley Benevolent Society. They make up hampers for the people in the area that are going through tough times. I wish that I had taken a photo of all the donations, there were bags and bags of yummy treats.

The Waverley Art Quilters also have their break up in November because December gets too busy. We went to our favourite local Chinese restaurant as usual. Here we are looking gorgeous!

The Waverley Art Quilters

Because I run the group, they gave me a lovely glass candle holder called Klimt's Flowers. I absolutely love it!

Klimt's Flowers Candle holder

One of our members, Marion, makes beautiful cards and she made me one this year and everyone in the group signed it. Definitely a treasure to keep.

Every year we are given a challenge to complete over the holidays. The challenge was supplied by Norma this year, we are calling it the circle challenge.

The Circle Challenge

The instructions say that we can paint, dye, add other fabrics, weave, applique, piece, use hand or machine embroidery or anything we can think of!

We all got a different DMC thread to use and mine is a sage green. We can use it as colour inspiration for our challenge.
I have no idea what I am going to make with this challenge. It would be sensible to get on with it and do it now and not a couple of days before it is due next year.

Mmm, I have a long list of work to do over the holidays for the various challenges, quilt shows and competitions in 2020. I suppose I just have to add it to the list.

Bye for now,
Linda

Metamorphosis Exhibition

On Tuesday, I went to the Art Quilt Exhibition with the theme of Metamorphosis. It is put on by the AQIPP group, which stands for Australian Quilts in Public Places. It is run every two years and I have been exhibiting in the last 3 exhibitions.

Here I am in front of my quilt yesterday.

My quilt is called Sunken Treasure and is about a shipwreck that becomes an artificial coral reef.

Sunken Treasure ©2019 Linda Steele

I didn't win a prize this year but I was still happy to be included in the exhibition.

The winner was Linden Lancaster with her quilt Run the Fire and it is certainly a worthy winner.

Run the Fire by Linden Lancaster

I have seen photos of this on Facebook and some people asked if it was a photo. I was surprised to see it up close because it is actually made on very small snippets of fabric.

Run the Fire detail

If you click on the photo you should be able to see the small snippets.

Next to my quilt was Sue de Vanny's gorgeous quilt, I think we were put together because of the underwater theme.

Danseurs de Meduses by Sue de Vanny

What a beautiful quilt! Here is a detail photo. The top is quite heavily thread painted and the jelly fish frill underneath is 3D.

Danseurs de Meduses detail

The winner of the Best use of Colour Award went to Michelle Mischkulnig for Change Born on the Breeze. Her quilt was about the changing seasons.

Change Born on the Breeze by Michelle Mischkulnig

Karen McGregor from the Waverley Art Quilters entered a quilt about a little rock wallaby, he was done in wool and looked so soft.

Rock to Rock-Wallaby by Karen McGregor

Here is a closer picture of the dear little wallaby

A small quilt caught my eye, it had lots of detail.

Moths Flight by Bree Thomas.

There were so many different interpretations of the theme Metamorphosis and the gallery had hung everything so well, in colour themes so there was nothing jarring, the exhibition really flowed.

The exhibition is on at the Box Hill Town Hall on Whitehorse Road, Box Hill. Victoria, Australia.

Free admission and open until the 21st December, so there's still plenty of time to get there.

Tuesday-Friday 10-4
Saturday 12-4

Bye for now,
Linda

Pixeladies Photoshop Class

For the last two months I have been busy working on Photoshop Elements Essentials 1 and 2 with Deb Cashart and Kris Sazaki, who are also know as the Pixeladies. They run these fantastic on-line courses for Photoshop Elements that are suited to Textile artists.

Now I have done these classes before, quite a few years ago but I decided to upgrade to the new 2019 Photoshop Elements. Pixeladies also offered a discount to those who had done the classes previously. I loved the classes, they explain everything so well, with videos showing you the way, step by step. They also answer questions and you can see what the others are doing by logging in every day.

There are some great new features in the latest Photoshop Elements that make things so much easier. I found it much easier doing the classes again because I already knew all about layers and resizing photos etc. Saying that, there was still lots to learn!

Here is a recent photo I had taken of friends at our recent Waverley Patchworkers Retreat.

See that annoying sign behind them, ruining the photo?

Now the sign is gone! So much better.

One of the lessons was about playing with filters. Now that is a rabbit hole where you could play for hours and hours.

I used my latest little art quilt called Windows.

Windows by Linda Steele

Here's what it looked like after I had added some filters. For those who may be interested, the filters I used were Twirl, Mosaic Tiles, Polar Coordinates and Hue/Saturation.

Windows with filters applied

We learnt how to take a section of a photo and add it to another background. I had a photo of my granddaughter Savannah who had recently been to the snow. So, I cut her out using one of the Selection Tools and made a snowy background for her with the brush tools.

Savannah in the snow

We also had to make a postcard using all different photos. I had lots of photos of my granddaughter Anna's recent 1st birthday and so I used them to make a fun postcard. I also used the text tool to write Happy 1st Birthday

Anna's Postcard

Another lesson was adding photos to text, so I used photos that I had of my grandson, Jack. I couldn't leave Jack out after using photos of the two girls!

Jack's Postcard

Well, that was fun and I am so glad that I did the classes. Although the lessons are over and I have the printed lessons to look up instructions if I forget how to do something, the classroom and all the videos are open for another 6 months. So I plan to go over all the lessons again and make sure I remember how to do everything.

I use Photoshop mainly to resize and crop photos but I realise that I could use it so much more than I do for planning quits etc.

I highly recommend the Pixeladies classes, sign up to their newsletter and you can find out when their next classes are.

Bye for now,
Linda