Travel Photos

We made our almost-annual trek to Phoenix for the holidays. Some pictures I took on the way.....


Anyone interested in a 1946 fire truck?




Overpass art in Albuquerque, New Mexico


San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff, Arizona

Sketchbook for 2007

I love blank books! Lined & unlined, mostly the covers attract me to buy them. Many don't get used, some get used once or twice, others are filled up. I found a WONDERFUL blank book in a bookstore in December and decided to use it as a sketchbook. I don't pretend to be an artist when it comes to paper and pencil, but I do sketch a lot of things I see. The sketches are done on a scrap of paper, a napkin, or the back of a receipt. The sketches often end up trashed just because I'm tired of dealing with the small piece of paper. I'm hoping that keeping all these tidbits in one place will allow them to inspire me down the road.

I carried the book to Sedona, Arizona on Dec 28, my official Sketchbook Start Date. Another page was done at the Heard Museum. I find I am writing notes as well as drawing. Words come easy & often! The page I've chosen to share here was done as we traveled on I-40 east of Albuquerque. We made 150 miles in 7 hours. Not bad roads, just heavy traffic due to road closures the day before.

There isn't anything particular inspiring in these images, but they recall the day for me in vivid detail. Other pages are similar. I'm not sure that "Sketchbook" is the correct name for my book. Maybe I'm more of an Illustrated Journal person. So be it!

Prairie Windflowers

Bragging time! My quilt, Prairie Windflowers won a blue ribbon at the Nebraska State Fair and received the Pride of Nebraska award. The quilt is 33" X 41".

About my quilt:
I do a lot of long-distance driving across Nebraska and the other Plains states. Along with the hawks that sit on both natural and man-made hunting perches, I see windmills. The non-working windmills are harder to spot, with their missing blades and the overgrowth of vines. The working windmills make me think of a single flower, growing high above the other plants, blades turning or not, dependent on the wind “sweeping down the plain”. These are my “windflowers”.

While windmills are typically solitary figures on the landscape I’m passing at 60 MPH, there are also windmills near my house in Omaha. I am intrigued by this juxtaposition of urban and rural within the largest city in Nebraska.

One windmill is alongside the trail I walk almost every day. The trail winds along the outer edge of an urban neighborhood less than ten years old. I photograph another windmill in a park while my kids play just a few feet away on bright plastic modern playground equipment. These and other urban windmills remind us “city slickers” that Nebraska is more a land of wide-open space than suburbia.

This quilt combines a solitary rural Nebraska windmill with a splash of urban Omaha flowerbed. The background fabric was created using a can of rusty nails taken from an old barn on a farm handed down through at least three generations of Nebraskans. (A farm with a non-working windmill.) The windmill is some distance from the viewer, as are most that we see. The flowers, on the other hand, are seen at close range, perfect for viewing the subtle variations in color and shape.

Look for both windmills and flowers on your next drive!

Artist Walk

I set out yesterday with Casey and camera, having decided to play with the macro feature on the camera. It was surprising how many things I noticed when I quit looking at The Big Picture and began to study the details. After detouring around the sidewalks splattered with mulberries, I stopped to take a picture of berries still on the tree. (I also ate a couple, but they don't taste as yummy as they did when I was a carefree child in Ohio.) The black walnut trees have a bumper crop. I believe my first dyeing experience was accidently-on-purpose coloring my hands with the hulls!

My next photography attempt was of a new (to me) flower that was in the landscaped areas where trail meets neighborhood. After a dozen attempts, this was the best shot. I was trying for a clear shot of the stamens, thinking ahead to a combination of applique and beading. The stem is a stylized pineapple, flat & symmetrical. If anyone knows what this flower is, please leave a comment!


Wild grapevines caught my attention and I was very pleased with this shot of a bunch in various stages of ripening.


I batted about .500 with good/not-good macro shots. Raindrops on pine needles, tiny yellow balls of petals, and a carpet of black walnut hulls under the tree where we took shelter from a light rain were all not good enough to make the cut. Casey's whiskers and interesting leaf shapes were were better.

And saving my favorite for last, I loved the way the light came through the leaves when I ducked under this tree. I used a flash for the first shot and it looks VERY flat. The 2nd show, sans flash, is what I saw. Wonderful shades of color interplaying with light! In addition, these leaves look like the star leaves that the dinosaurs were hunting in one of The Land Before Time movies.





On the way home, I found a tiny bird egg (bluebird, I think) beside the trail. I picked up a small piece of blue glass with writing (names of cities, which will go into my collection of found objects for a quilt about places. I picked up and discarded a piece of plastic with a Nissan logo. My favorite tree on the trail, which has HUGE leaves, also has seed pods - 2 feet long & skinny & round. Such a wonderful contrast to the leaves in shape, while maintaining scale. My right knee hurt, so I was walking slowly. Rain was threatening, so I didn't stop to take any pictures.