This is a really fun thread. I like to see what everyone has in their garden and how thoughtful about art and creative you all are. I often think I'm going to "make" some garden art but then never get around to it. I don't decorate the garden with a whole lot of art. I have a few decorative stakes and then a few glazed birdbaths and some copper sprinklers that I use more for decoration than watering. My mom has a very cute piece of garden art. The story behind it is that we were at Hever Castle in England and they were selling all kinds of cement statues. We fell in love with so many of them. My mom couldn't part with this guy. Hever Castle was down a hill so we had to hike back up the hill, carry him on the rest of our tour and then carry him home on the plane. He weighed between 30-35 pounds so it was like carrying a little person around. He was well worth it though!

"The Statler Stitcher® is a computer software program combined with hardware which will operate a longarm quilting machine and can stitch almost any design. A Gammill® machine equipped with Statler Stitcher® can handle an intricately patterned king-size quilt in a matter of hours instead of days, and is guided by the computer instead of by hand. The system can determine the pattern size, block size, stitches per inch, repetitions of the pattern and the offset of the pattern." If you have $30,000 to spare and room in your basement, you can have your very own quilt factory, and the glory will be a production run of one single factory quilt at a time. It will be perfectly easy to save your program and throw on quilt after whole cloth quilt--they will all turn out perfectly, and perfectly the same, at the great rate of two per day. It's an amazing machine--the "quilter" doesn't even have to stay in the room. Most factories call this person an operator. You may say you'd never churn out copies--but you COULD. Back to my painting analogy--is it original hand work, or is it limited edition print signed by the artist, or is it a paint by numbers kit? Folk art follows a tradition in a craft. Generally, folk art can be done by...folks. Whatever is happening by professional long arm quilters with these expensive machines is VERY far from the heart and soul of a quilting tradition. My grandmother and great aunt were skilled factory workers at the Derby--now known as Fruit of the Loom. You can take the machine out of the factory but you can't take the factory out of the machine. They'd no more be proud of a machine quilt than of a pair underwear they bought at Wal-Mart. My mom sends out machine pieced quilts to be long armed--it's expedient, but she'd never call it the best. The fact is, by law of supply and demand, with automatic machines churning out two quilts a day, those quilts will be less valued over the course of the years. People are smart, and all the art talk in the world doesn't change the value of reproducible work done in a few hours by automatic machine. The human element becomes entirely secondary to the machine. Some of these shows function mostly as a marketing tool for the industry, and indeed the whole shift to machine quilting was pushed along by big prizes awarded by businesses. It's very much in the interest of business to elevate the easiest. The easiest sells. BTW, lets all make a million pillowcases!!! Excuse me? This, I think, is what kills machine quilting for me, and makes me reject it as art (not high art, not fine art, but folk art.) The end product of Gammill Statler Stitcher will be indistinguishable from any other machine quilt--except it will look very, very skilled and be entirely reproducible. I feel like my values have been slowly pushed too far, my standards slowly pulled aside and I feel myself backlashing. Suddenly, I look up and say "That's ridiculous." I certainly don't mean to attack machine quilters, especially you, Annie. What you do is practically unique--find me another professional treadle quilter (yeah, I know there might be a few, but still, it's rare isn't it?) It's not black and white by any means, machine quilting has it's place, albeit with all these different categories and qualifiers. Hand quilted will always be a class alone for me, no explanations required because everybody understands a hand, a needle, and a thread.

yillimuh and probookie, I'm running late but I just have to post: I think we need to schedule mutual house tours! I'm so with you, yillimuh -- most of what I've collected I've 'acquired' from thrifts, and that includes serigraphs and oils worth thousands as well as really well done, unusual paint-by-numbers. The three of us have similar tastes, and probookie, the Lady Godiva is delicious -- who did it? I have many three-dimensional pieces as well, including midcentury textiles and studio pottery/ceramic by PNW artists that was made for hanging and midcentury brass by some of the usual suspects. Even an African wood inlay piece of women going down to a waterfront with big baskets on their heads -- on the laundry room door, palimpsest : ) My taste runs from the most abstract to the PNW Mt. Hood landscape -- I like different things for different reasons. We also have a vintage aerial photo of Grand Army Plaza/Prospect Park and a map from when Prospect Park was being proposed (that we found out here, of all places--no one else wanted it at an estate sale so we got it for a great price!) because that's where DH and I got married. Not too many other sentimental pieces up, other than one piece by DD of the Nutcracker Suite when she was very young that I put in a huge rococo frame : ) I grew up in a world of reproductions -- those mdf-mounted things from the Met -- and posters. As an immigrant from the middle east educated in Europe, my father completely worshipped European high culture. Reproductions were the closest he could get. My American, Bryn-Mawr-educated mother had a few nicer pieces she got during her 'world tour' in the late 40s, but otherwise, that was it. The reproductions actually worked the way my parents intended, which was to have me growing up looking at excellent art, even though they couldn't afford it. Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction" was not only significant in a theoretical way to my professional work later on, but *so* personally resonant for me. I'm still amazed by his insight. I wish he hadn't died when he did.

Linelle - I don't eat fish (I have, but I prefer not to). I don't like to even wade in waters where they swim for fear of touching them. I have, at times, been so startled by an unexpected photo of a fish when turning the page in a magazine that I have actually thrown the magazine across the room - just an automatic response. I can't pinpoint the exact moment when this fear came on, but I was pretty small. I do remember being in a pet store when I was maybe four or five years old, and running my hand along a table full of sale items. My hand stopped on something that felt odd, and when I looked to see what it was, it was a dried-out, dead fish. Horrifying! I believe I started having fish dreams not too long after that. I'd wake up screaming in the night, certain that a fish was in the bed with me. My poor mom, being awakened at dark-thirty and having to quell the unreasonable fears of a very insistent little girl! When I was a tween, I used to like to go fishing with my grandfather when I visited my grandparents' lake house in the summer. He would bait the hook for me and take any fish I caught off the hook, and I thought it was great fun. I guess I wasn't horribly phobic at that time. One day he and I went fishing out in his boat. I caught 17 fish, and we took them home with us. My grandmother deemed them too small to fix for our dinner, so she decided to make a sort of stew out of them for the dog. She put them in a pressure cooker (I have no idea why), thinking they were all dead. Something happened and once the thing heated up, we heard hideous thrashing inside the pot. After awhile it stopped, but when she lifted the lid, there was a nasty film on top and a few eyeballs floating around. Again - horrifying stuff. The dog ate it up though. Once I told a boy in high school about my phobia, and shortly thereafter I opened my locker to find a huge dead fish inside. The boy thought that was just the funniest practical joke ever, and chased me up and down the halls holding it by the tail. I remember trying desperately to keep my cool and not show how agitated I was, but I fought not to burst into tears - or pass out. (I know this is getting to be way too long ...) A few years ago I decided that I wanted to overcome my phobia once and for all and actually sought counseling for it. I also tried to do a bit of immersion work on my own, and DH and I went to a local aquarium one afternoon. It's long been difficult for me to even get close to a fish, in any manner - even those behind glass. The salt water aquariums didn't bother me terribly; after all, those fish are often beautifully colored or comical looking. The freshwater tanks, however, caused me to panic. I forced myself to remain seated next to one that was built low to the ground with glass walls, with the various lake-living fish swimming right up to me on all sides and behind me. I couldn't do it. I sat there and just bawled and hyperventilated, and DH got me the hell out of there. Around that time we were traveling regularly to Mexico, and scuba diving was very popular where we stayed. In spite of my fish phobia, it sounded like a lot of fun, and I went so far as to take a few scuba lessons here, but did not go on to be certified. I didn't like the feeling of breathing underwater and couldn't get past a feeling of simmering panic. I know I wouldn't have made certification anyway - at least not with the instructor I had - as his group went to a local man-made lake to receive their certification, and the waters were often murky and always filled with curious fish. Pretty sure that seeing something like this would have induced dangerous panic in me! Gosh, I am sorry to have told you more than you ever wanted to know. I've not been asked about this in a long time, and I guess my memories just came flooding back!