noelle o designs

creativity + sewing + upcycling inspiration

books, collage art, design, fabric, family, journaling, quilts, sewing

skate or die, dude

I started this skateboarder quilt square/entire quilt idea years ago. This if the only square I have gotten finished, but I did just find the super-secret master plan sketches I’d drawn up. I’ve been distractedly pondering the whereabouts of my drawings in this mess of a workshop/sewing room I’ve got, so now it’s game on.

It’s been so long, and my style so changed, who knows if the other squares I make will remotely resemble the style of this one. I might have to start all the way over.

The good news is- I really do love making paper pieced applique.

Here’s my inspiration and a fun-filled trip down memory lane, (for all of you old enough to remember the late 70’s)- photos from my lovely spouse, Steve Olpin’s skate journals…

His Skate Park ID cards, he’s so stinkin’ cute, I can hardly stand it. We’ve got two little fellas of our own with a very strong resemblance to their Dad.

Wary of messing up the pages, I just scanned the entire thing-

On his ramp in the backyard in Pacific Palisades California house.

Tony Alva even stopped by to skate a few times.

These pictures leave me wondering how it will all work? Twenty five years from now… certainly there will be some adults with wobbling stacks of ultra-cheesy overdone baby scrapbooks highlighting a minute number of real pictures and piles of pretty paper, stickers, buttons and other unnecessary nonsense carefully, archivally stuffed inside. And on the flip side, others armed only with a stack of CD’s or hard drives and tens of thousands of pictures to sort through and possess on their own, if the files still exist in their digital cubbies and they have hundreds of hours of free time to search.
It’s so complicated these days, too much data…I aspire to be somewhere in the middle, a no-nonsense capturing of the best (who know how many, really) pictures on some kind of real paper (fancily archival, of course) and storing them in real places, like the bookshelf.  I’m seeing a new years resolution coming on… I’d better start whittling away the hours now, if I want a hard copies of the reminiscent joy of being a kid, (with serious skills) for my offspring like their dad has… on a book shelf and not just the screen.

For more rad So Cal images from back in the day-look here.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.