Year of the spark: online class

I'm taking an online class (Year of the Spark by Carla Sonheim and Lynn Whipple) - I signed up a little late - and I've started on one of the lessons. It's kind of funny. I never would have made funny collages with old photos before but it does make me chuckle. Here are some cut out pieces I made to use for collage - aren't they so colorful!:

And some doodle pages, one with markers/pencil, and one with paint (I really like the colors on the paint one):

And here are some audition pieces with old photos from the internet, and some collage pieces added (the first three are using an image of Annie Oakley:

This image was a cut out from some miners (but now I can't find the reference to link to):

It's just super silly and good to get the hands moving making creative stuff!

WIP: Hummingbird paintings

Here are some works in progress: hummingbird paintings (mostly acrylic, some gouache). I used some of the layering/stenciling ideas I learned in the last online class I took, but now I have  get to add all the little details of the birds...ie feathers, eyeballs, shadowing, etc...

Baby Quilt in Progress

I finished the top and added borders, now I just need to quilt and bind it. This is 34" x 40".

Next quilt: auditions in EQ6 - Process post

I have a baby quilt to make, and will use black/white, blue/green colors. I've been thinking about what to make, wanting to keep it simple. I saw this quilt on Pinterest, then did a mock-up in EQ6 using my colors:

Then I reversed the direction of half the blocks:

Then I changed the direction of the middle line compared to the outer lines (of the block unit):

Then flipped the direction of the blocks again. This one is my favorite (ignoring the limited color palette, of course). And when you look closely at the square unit (in this case, 6x6 of them) you see that it's just two sets of 2 strips that have been cut at a 45 degree angle and sewn back to back, or else you could piece the blocks together from triangles and strips... I'm calling this "Diamond in the Rough", and definitely plan to make it someday:

Then I rotated a small selection of the above so the blocks weren't on point and it makes this super simple quilt (but I don't like it much compared to the visually interesting one above):

I also saw this image of Half-square triangles by Susie Z on Flickr, and you can see all the possibilities of ways to arrange HSTs, so I made a quick mock-up in - you can see all the lights are placed in one direction and the darks in another, which creates the visual effect of squares on point:

This is the selection of fabrics from my stash that I've picked out to work on this quilt:

I narrowed it down to 30 of the above fabrics and cut 7" squares from each for making HSTs to position randomly for a very simple version of the last mock-up in this post - I'll have to make 'Diamond in the Rough' another time, when I have more time to execute it properly.

Here are several arrangements of the HST-squares on the design wall:

1

2

3

4

On the design wall, I finally ended up with #4, but looking at them as thumbnails here, I actually really like #1! We'll see what happens...