My Beautiful Park

My Secret Place

Near where I picnic in the summer

Another view behind picnic spot

Bearded Iris Hold Court

Glorious Color

I took these photos the other night between 6 and 7 pm. The light was so amazing and perfect. Carl Shurz Park is this little gem in Manhattan very close to where I live that is so beautiful and magical and I think of it as my park. In the nice weather it can be jam packed with people. I don't like it so much then. On rainy or colder days I may be the only person in the park, except for the people walking their dogs. Since Sasha died last July I don't have that honor anymore. Soon I will get another dog, I'm just not ready yet. So I walk around and visit all our old haunts and look at the dogs in the dog run and dream. I sit near the bridge in the photo above and paint or bring my guitar and play. Anything to connect me to my park again, bittersweet though it is.

Cone flower Quilt & ATC's

Homage to John

My cone flower quilt was designed from a journaling exercise that Julie Balzer did in her Journal Quilt class at City Quilter in Manhattan. Each person was handed a small image and from that had to do a series of quick sketches that the image invoked. From the 8 or 9  sketches done, one image is chosen to blow up and make into an 8 1/2" x 11" quilt. I chose the cone flower because it reminded me of the beautiful house I had in Vermont with my late husband John and the perennial gardens I tended lovingly. It is an homage to my husband.

The quilt is painted with Lumiere fabric paints, machine and hand quilted and in the process of being hand beaded. I spent three glorious hours in the park yesterday sitting at one of the chess tables hand beading.

These are two of 9 ATC's I made for a recent trade I did with a group of women in the Journal Quilt class I just finished taking with Julie Balzer at City Quilter.  The only criteria was that they had to be quilt like in some way. So I took patterned paper I had previously painted with acrylic paints, layered that with cotton batting and backed it all with lightweight canvas. I stitched each ATC with a cross stitch in each corner to hold the layers together then sewed on a found object gleaned from the streets of Manhattan in the week prior to making the ATC's.