Paper and Threads

I just returned from one week in Houston and then San Antonio, Texas.  Yesterday as I walked into my building at work, I was overwhelmed with the changes in the trees that occurred while I was gone.  Several years ago I collected fall leaves to use as inspiration for a quilted, silk wedding chuppah (canopy) that I made for the wedding of my son.  I now find that I just can't pass up a beautifully colored leaf.  So here is my leaf from yesterday.  Nature did a much better job with the brilliant colors than I did!

Even though I very busy during my trip, I did do some visual journaling - and hope to post those pages this weekend.

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Tomorrow I'm leaving for the International Quilt Festival in Houston, followed by a business meeting in San Antonio, so I wanted to complete this week's EDM challenge before I leave.  EDM Challenge #94 was Draw a Spoon.  This week it is Draw a Fork.  I posted the two of them together because they are a wonderful pair of salad utensils - shiny silver that I still can't capture. 

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We didn't have any peanuts in our house - and I couldn't find anything to inspire me to do this challenge when it was posted -  until yesterday.  I then decided to learn more about how peanuts grow and looked at information and images on the web.  This is a painting of a plant with its flowers and peanuts.  I really didn't know that peanuts grow underground from shoots that arise from the above ground plants.  Very cool!

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I continue to practice drawing faces and figures from photos - and did these 4 during October.  I selected this photo because of the foreshortened right arm and was happy with the arm drawing.  Not so much with the eyes.

This drawing was done from a runway photo.  I saw and loved a Klimt-inspired gown in the window of Oscar de la Renta's store on Madison Ave.  This is the image of the dress from the runway - but I didn't even try to reproduce the fabric design.

Two faces drawn from magazine advertisement photos.

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The Virtual Sketch Date photo was just perfect when I was deciding what to draw and paint for my daily journal page.  I usually only do the EDM challenges, but this is the second month that the photo for VSD was irresistable.

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