Hammocks and Upcoming Projects

Since it's been hot and humid these past few days, I've been spending a good bit of my afternoons curled up on my hammock in the shade. The icing on the cake of my relaxing afternoons is my Moleskine, a cold beverage and my puppy curled up beside me. Some days I just doodle random things and others I sketch the things I see. The other day, I gave watercolors their first shot in my sketchbook.

I'm not completely satisfied with the color vibrancy or the way they responded to the paper, but I've got another set I can experiment with. I am happy that I was able to just let go and more paint/sketch how the tree felt rather than trying to capture the detail of every single leaf, fruit and piece of bark. It feels good to let go.

I've been taking a break from my big paintings, having finished two incredibly exhausting ones, The Lady and Deep, in the past few weeks. I'm giving my brain, my guts and my brushes a bit of a break and instead focusing on something fairly new to me; quilting. I made one small picnic quilt a few years back and it was, well, a labor of love (and tedium!). I'm sort of a rule breaker, so there were no exact measurements or fancy tools used, just folding and snipping with my scissors to get squares that were close enough to the same shape. It resulted in just the right amount of wonkiness! This time around, in an effort to bust up my fabric stash (I have tons of fat quarter remnants all over the damn place), I'm making a quilt for my queen sized bed. Same size squares as the picnic quilt, because most of my scraps are on the small side.

Wish me luck. And patience. So much patience!

There are some exciting projects starting up in June, if anyone wants to follow along with me or join in themselves!

Starting June 1st is Daisy Yellow's Index Card a Day project. I've never done this project before, but am looking forward to giving it a shot - going to try not to put too much pressure on myself, but to try to do at least 1 card a day and try out some of the prompts.

And starting June 3rd is Twinkle, Twinkle's Summer of Color 3! I participated in last year's Summer of Color on my main blog and had a great time. I'm looking forward to the start of this one!