KVIE and something new to work on

The KVIE art auction GALA night this past Monday was totally a great evening...took my daughter Jennifer and we had a ball....smoozed with all the artists and art collectors all evening long.....and it was great to see my work with a jurors award ribbon in it...and by the end of the evening I had earned a first place in Contemporary Classics, total surprise to me...$100 award check also.
The Art Auction begins tonight and I have my eye on a few items for me to purchase and my piece will sell along with the others in the gallery on Sunday, 3-3:30...can't wait to see what my piece brings into for the KVIE donations.

I have always loved things in a circle and seems to drift towards this shape in a lot of things I do...I saw a Craft in America series this past Saturday where they talked about Circles of Healing and that struck a cord for me as I feel I'm in a healing stage over my estrangement with my husband since this summer.  So I pulled out all my reference books on shapes and ideas and came up with working up three different circle designs. 

 The first step was creating the design in 1/8 of the circle, then creating a mirror image or 1/4.
Then I went to my trusty scanner and PC..increased the scanned size to fit 11x17 paper, printed four of each section. 

 Taped the sections into halves and then  into whole circles, cutting them all out and taping them
all together.

The end results was three wonderful 32" circles with the total design over the entire piece so I could see what it would look like once pieced together.  Now that I see the total design, I'm probably going to NOT make each 1/8 section and piece it together as I don't like the look of the seam work.  So I'm going to cut the total circle as one piece and then cut the images and shapes as whole as possible and fuse them onto the circle, stitch, then surface design stitch the completed circle.  Along the way I have to figure out how to display the round finished piece, but that will happen along the way.  I can always create a hard surface circle shape and fit it into the back of the piece or half of the shape or something....my head will figure that part out as I work on creating the full circle. 

A new idea, new challenge along with all the other ideas floating around in my head. 
I'm still weaving every day on my new loom and really enjoying it...once warped the weaving goes fast and the play with the yarns is wonderful.
I'm also experimenting with using gourds as a base along with fiber...friend Cindy Lee gave me about five gourds, I'm going to cut them in half and work with the base to see what happens. 

And this morning, I got notice that one of my newest pieces, Walking for Water was accepted into the Art League of Lincoln's exhibit happening in October....fantastic news.