Rhonda Bracey: At Random

Last day at Quilting adventures (QA today). We did a bit more stuff on marking fabrics, this time with oil- and water-based crayons. And then it was time to say goodbye for another year to old friends and new.

I stayed overnight in New Braunfels (Gruene, actually [pronounced ‘Green’]) with Kim and her Mom–the QA organisers. Kim showed me some of the Hill Country around New Braunfels, which I had never seen before despite this being my third trip to the town. What a pretty place! I can see why tourists keep coming back. We also walked some of the old area of Gruene, including the Gruene Hall, where many a famous act has played. Check out the line-up for April:

We’ve spent the past two days learning to use Tsukineko All-purpose Inks, Fantastix applicators, and Fabrico markers (also Tsukineko), as  well as artists’ coloured pencils and oil crayons to enhance fabric. Lura Schwarz Smith taught this part of the class. So much of the past two days was learning the techniques via demonstration and some hands-on practice; however, there’s not a lot of ‘product’ to show for how much we’ve learned, so there aren’t many pictures. I finally did some stitching late this afternoon prior to the walkthrough of everyone’s classes, doing some thread painting of the hair and shirt of the boy’s face I had traced and coloured with inks, markers, and pencils yesterday and last night after ‘show and tell’.

After a rocky start with drawing a face yesterday (guided by Lura), I felt much more comfortable working from a line drawing, tracing it onto fabric, and then shading it with the various media. It was quite amazing (and scary!) how some horrible emotions bubbled to the surface during the freehand drawing phase — faces were one of things I was awful at when I did Art at school (I was fine with still life, pattern and design, and poster work, but could never get faces right… all those yucky feelings came back…).

I also had two more photos printed onto fabric, taking advantage of the printer that Kerby and Lura had bought with them.

I won’t have a chance to start stitching work on any of the photos I’ve had printed until I get home — we’ve had so much learning of techniques in this workshop that there hasn’t been much time to ‘do’ and work on our own pieces. But that’s OK. Learning new stuff is why I chose this workshop. That said, I guess I’m a bit disappointed that I haven’t made any progress on the photos I had printed. However, that was MY expectation based on previous experience at other workshops; Lura and Kerby have definitely fulfilled all the expectations listed for the workshop.

Here are the photos from the end of today for each of the students in my class (all five of us!).

This was my design wall late Wednesday afternoon. The boy in the lower right has been partly shaded with inks. The boy on the top left was my freehand drawing of a face — the one that gave me such angst.

My design wall late Thursday afternoon. Two more photos printed on to fabric (corn from Santa Fe and a frosted leaf from Michigan), and a fabric chosen to perhaps border the fox. More ink and coloured pencil work etc. on the boy in the lower right, including thread painting of his hair and shirt.

We spent much of today on ‘walkabout’, taking photos around the resort, and then processing them in Photoshop Elements, and getting some printed on fabric. We learnt lots, but so far we haven’t got much ‘product’ to show for it, though that may change tomorrow when we start to work with our printed photos.

The photos below are of the design walls of those whose photos have been printed so far. Next step is enhancing the photos with paints, markers, and/or thread — the really fun part for me!

I spent last night working on homework!

Day 1 of Quilting Adventures (in New Braunfels, Texas) with Kerby and Lura Schwarz Smith was in the classroom at our laptops learning photo manipulation techniques in Adobe Photoshop Elements. Why? Because it rained and rained and rained almost the entire day here in Texas Hill Country. We might get out and about today to take photos if the rain abates. But yesterday and last night was all about prepping our existing photos ready for printing on fabric.

The printer Kerby is using is fantastic — he printed our binder cover pages yesterday after we’d manipulated our photos, and, with the combination of the inks, the paper, and the printer, they turned out brilliantly — see below for mine. (For the techies, the printer he used was an Epson R3000, with Ultra Premium ??? Matte paper. Out of my price range at nearly $1400 for the printer in Australia and inkjet cartridges at $50 each [NINE cartridges].) The results were great, but you’d have to be doing a lot of photographic printing on paper or fabric to justify that sort of cost. US price is about $700 for the printer… yes, Australians get price gouged, again…)

As so much work was done on the computer, the only photo I have to share is the cover page I created from a photo I took of a protea in my garden. It’s significantly reduced in size — the original is 31 MB TIFF; this one is reduced to 25% size, saved as a PNG, and is just under 1 MB (click it to view it larger).

Only in Texas…

Needed to share this quirky ‘only in Texas’ moment. When I arrived at the venue and checked into my room, I found this ‘Texas star’ in the bathroom 😉 The rooms here are all decorated in a rustic Texas theme and the Texas star is everywhere. But in the years I’ve been coming here, I’ve never before seen a gold star on the loo paper 😉