I used to swatch my paints with the color that came out of the tube, or from the jar, or the "pure" color.  but now, I am trying to satch colors to tone down or lighten the colors to see what other colors I can get that are not"pure" but mixedith something different.  For this series of watercolor swatches, I swatched the pure color, added brown, added Paynes gray and then added white.  It's amazing what you can mix to get new colors from a few tubes of paint!

It's no wonder that some artists spend their entire lives studying color.  You can read tons of books about how to get the perfect color from your paints but actually doing it, makes all the difference.

I love this photo of someone engaged with my Rolodex Artist Book.  

This "book" has 100 "pages" of art.  Each page is unique and is back-to-back so 200 pieces of tiny art all together.  I donated this to ARTMA — a charity devoted to curing childhood cancer.  It sold for $525 and that made me happy.  
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Now that I'm back into hand stitching again, I'm working on some small pieced pieces just using simple stitching.  It reminds me of the Crazy Quilting stitching of years ago.  There is something that attracts me to this process, and the color, and the contrast, and the design.  I don't plan anything, just react to what's I'm looking at as I make decisions on what thread to use, where and if I want to do a running stitch, French knots, or X"s.  I don't know what I'm going to do with this piece (very small measuring 4" x 8") but I never worry about that.  Eventually, an idea will come to me.  Meanwhile, I'm just enjoying the process!

One of the non-profits I like to support is the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum in Golden, CO.  Every year, I donate sewing supplies to their annual "garage sale" and I donate a pice of my art to their annual fund raiser luncheon "Fabric & Friends".  This year they are also asking people to donate a miniature quilt.  

Several years ago, I started watercolor paintings on paper.  I liked the exercise of mixing different hues to create unique colors.  I liked how they came out so I uploaded several to Spoonflower to be printed on fabric.  But I never knew how to use them until several weeks ago.  I thought if I added hand stitching to each square, it might make a beautiful miniature quilt!

Now that the top is finished, I love the texture and the colors.  I also enjoyed the process of stitching on this piece every night.  Tomorrow, I will turn this into a "quilt" by adding batting and a backing and finishing with my rattail binding technique.  Then, I need to add a sleeve and label to the back and deliver it to the museum before the deadline of March 15th!