Serenity

I am delighted to report that my newest art quilt, "Serenity," was accepted into the exhibition "An Exquisite Moment" by the Dinner at Eight Artists.  Here is how they described the exhibit theme: 

"Consider the following:  The unfurling of a flower. A hummingbird in flight.  A magical moment shared with a lover or friend.  The birth of a child.  A personal milestone.  The realization of a dream.  A treasured memory.  The sacred moments of the ordinary.  These are the Exquisite Moments that make us who we are."  

Jamie Fingal and Leslie Tucker Jenison curate these exhibits and I'm very honored to have my quilt included. 

The exhibit will be shown at the International Quilt Festivals in Long Beach, California this August and in Houston, Texas in November.

South African Drumbeat

When I was at Festival of Quilts in Birmingham, England this past summer, I met Magie Relph, the delightful owner of the African Fabric shop.  I bought a basket and a bit of fabric from her, and Magie admired the 12x12 quilts, and before I left I'd agreed to participate in a mini challenge with some of the other Twelves using some South African fabric called "Shweshwe."

The fabric is not what I'd have recognized as African, and when I did a bit of research, I learned why:  although it is now made in South Africa, it originated as discharged indigo fabric which was imported from England.  A South African textile company eventually started manufacturing the fabric with help from a UK investor.  And while it started as primarily indigo and brown fabrics, it's now also made in vibrant oranges, pinks, purples, and reds. 

At any rate, that quilt up top is what I did.  My inspiration was the patterns from other South African textiles, sort of like this:

 

I started by cutting a variety of shweshwe prints into strips and piecing them together.  They're so pretty, aren't they?  I tried organizing them them randomly...

and then I tried doing a light-to-dark arrangement...

and that's what I ended up using, so sewn they looked like this:

Look, even the scraps look pretty in these bright colors:

Then I layered the strip pieced under a layer of black fabric, and onto batting and a backing.  I'd drawn my design onto tracing paper, aiming for a loose and primitive use of patterns.  I arranged the patterns to create (in my own mind anyway) hills at the bottom, then grass, then flowers, then huts -- a symbolic landscape of sorts.  I layered the tissue paper on top of all of the fabric, then sewed through all of those layers with small stitches. (It made a great crinkly sound when wrestling it all under the sewing machine!)

Then, I started peeling the paper away, and cutting away parts of the black fabric to reveal the shweshwe fabric underneath.  (Yep, I know -- why did I put the paper on the black layer?  I had a reason at the time -- which I can't remember right now but trust me, there was a reason.  But after having to pull all those teeny bits of white paper off of the black fabric, I was wishing I'd sewn from the back where the teeny bits wouldn't have shown so much!)  And look -- my very sharp Havel scissors go perfectly with the color palette, don't they?

So here's the finished quilt again.  It has the sort of hand-drawn, primitive look I wanted.

Here's a detail shot.  For some reason I really like those hilly shapes and how the blades of grass look.

You can click on their names to see what Gerrie and Terry did with their shweshwe fabrics!

If you'd like to use some of these beautiful fabrics, they are available through online ordering.  In Europe, do try Magie's African Fabric shop.  In the US, Magie will ship here ... but if you want to avoid international shipping, a google search will show you where you can order them within the US.

Swirl, Sniff, Sip

Quilt content!  Bet that's a surprise, huh?  But I recently finished a submission for an exhibit on the theme of "Rituals," and I thought I'd show you. It's 24x60 inches, which is 5 feet long.  Big!

As I thought about the rituals theme, I found myself thinking about the rituals associated with wine tasting.  I live in the wine country of northern California, so the wine industry is a huge part of life here.  When we moved here, we weren't huge wine drinkers... well, no more than the average household, I'd say.  But once we settled here, we made so many friends in the wine business -- wine makers and grape growers and buyers and  tasting room employees -- most folks here have some connection to the business.  We used to joke that we were the only people on our block that didn't own our own winery, which was almost true.

In any event, our wine palates have become educated and we have learned a lot about wine without even trying.  It's a way of life here.  So I got thinking about the shapes of wine glasses, and how there are reasons for using a specific shape for a specific wine, and the steps involved in properly tasting wine... and of course, it occurred to me also that a wine bottle was the perfect base shape for this tall, vertical size! 

Here are some of the progress shots.  I started with hand-dyed fabric, onto which I stenciled a swirly grape vine.  I stitched down a bottle, then used tulle to create the effect of a transparent champagne glass.

Here it is with all three glasses in place (I was wishing I'd put that white wine glass a bit more to the left, but oh well...)  I'm very pleased at how the tulle worked to make the glasses.  Each glass is a double layer of white tulle, which I outlined with white oil pastel crayon.

Using tissue paper outlines of the words I wanted to add, I tried various placement ideas.

And I ended up here, having stitched through the tissue paper, then pulled the tissue away to paint the words on with Lumiere gold textile paint.  I love that stuff.

You can see in the finished quilt above that I add some more swirls with a stencil, painting them in with a purple-gold Lumiere paint that gives a really interesting irridescent effect, and then I machine quilted it.  As usual, I got started in with machine quilting and ended up with a pretty dense quilted texture.  Here's a close-up:

I had a very fun time making this.  Gosh, I'm in the mood for a nice glass of zinfandel.  Wonder why?

Midsomer Tomatoes

When I was at the Festival of Quilts in the UK this past summer, I met Chris and De, the delightful owners of Midsomer Quilting in Bath.  They have been early and enthusiastic supporters of the Twelve by Twelve challenge, and were the first to ask if they could exhibit the full set of quilts.  And when I met them, Christ told me about how visitors to the exhibit were so excited at the thought of making small quilts on a theme that he announced a shop challenge on the theme of fruit.  He asked if I'd submit something, and I gladly agreed.  Here's the piece I just sent off.

I remember my puzzlement at learning, when I was a kid, that tomatoes are considered fruit because (according to the Oxford Dictionary) true fruits are developed from the ovary in the base of the flower, and contain the seeds of the plant.  We eat cherry tomatoes all summer long around here -- so that led me to picture them for this challenge.  And it's doubly fruity!  Cherry! Tomatoes!  Brilliant, yes?!





I started with a photo of a carton of cherry tomatoes, then used Photoshop to identify color areas.  From there, I used batiks to "paint" the tomatoes and machine quilting to add more color and dimension and texture. (It's 12x12 inches square.)  I realized I really like working this way -- gosh, I should do it more!

Chris and De at Midsomer Quilting have been amazing supporters for Twelve by Twelve, and I'm happy to contribute something to their challenge.  I only wish I could be there to see all of the entries when they are exhibited.  

Back from the Ranch

 

So remember I told you that I had to use that cowboy fabric in a challenge quilt for my ranch retreat?  Well, here's what I did.  

I started thinking about how, at the Bishop's Ranch site of our retreat, our group is known as the "Ranch Hands."  And that led me to think about what a cowboy would expect if he heard that the female ranch hands were putting on a show, which led me to suspect that he would NOT show up for a quilt show.  So I settled on the idea of putting a confused (and disappointed!) cowboy in the middle of one our show-and-tell shows.

Over the years at ranch retreats, I've taken tons of pictures during our show and tell.  I started working with photos in Photoshop, to scale my friends up to a size that would work in proportion to that rather large cowboy.  Once I had the images scaled, I printed them onto fabric with my inkjet printer.  I still find my inkjet printing results to be pretty muted in color no matter how I boost the saturation before I print, so I took Tsukineko inks to paint fresher, brighter colors onto everyone.  That cowboy is pretty garish (not to mention, ORANGE) so I was trying to make the colors a bit more compatible with his tones.

Then I fused everyone into position -- arranging the quilt show was the most fun part, I think -- and then stitched it all down with monofilament thread.  And yes, I put myself in it:

That's me, holding up the black and white quilt.

I even fired up the embroidery part of my machine and figured out how to add the caption, which reads "Tex heard that the ladies at the ranch were putting on a show... but this wasn't what he imagined."

The quilt was a big hit when we revealed our challenge quilts -- but I'm most pleased that I've created a wonderful souvenir of my great friends and fun times at the retreat.

Flight Path

We are revealing another set of challenge quilts over on the Twelve by Twelve blog.  Our challenge this round was to use a color palette of brown, blue, and sage green.  My response, titled "Flight Path," is here -- I had great fun making this small map and I've described the details of how I did it over at the Twelve by Twelve blog.

Go check it out -- as always, the different interpretations and the creativity of my fellow Twelves are very exciting to see!

Wings of Night

Last week, I had a window of time with nothing pressing.  No work, no deadlines, no projects that had to be finished.  So I gave myself the time to just play, and ended up making this quilt.

I started with some of the prints from my first screen printing experience this summer.  I have a thing for spanish lavender and so made a whole batch of prints with spanish lavender blossoms on them.  I love how they looked against this hand-dyed fabric. So away I went.

It felt so fun to just play, move things around, test the "what if I try this" sort of thing.  I'm happy with the result, but even happier with how fun and free the process was.  I also had a great time machine quilting (on the new Bernina 830) and I couldn't believe that I was able to do all of the vermicelli quilting with ONE bobbin.  I love that enlarged bobbin.

Here's a detail.  Yep, I couldn't resist breaking out the Neocolor crayons, and adding some hand stitching.

  

"Wings of Night" is a variety of spanish lavender -- isn't that a gorgeous name for a flower?  So that seemed perfect for the name of this quilt.

I'm hoping to get some more play time this week, but a work project landed in my email inbox this morning.  So we'll see.

October's End

Today is the reveal day for our Twelve by Twelve colorplay challenge.  Terri chose our "rusty" color palette which she defined with rusty oranges, peaches, and the blues and greens of patina'd copper.  This is my response, called "October's End."

My process?  I started with a stunning piece of fabric dyed by Just Imagination's Judy Robertson.  I cut some strips, and spent a lot of time moving them around.  No meaning, no attempt to make them an abstraction of a particular image -- just moving and looking and aiming for something that I liked. Same with the circles.  Moving shapes, playing. Some people work this away all the time.  For me, it feels ... unfocused?  Unsure?  It was enjoyable, but my mind keeps trying to overlay an image or meaning onto what I'm doing.  


Goodness, I'm having a challenge with using a color palette as a starting point.  That's the idea, of course, a challenge.  But it makes me realize how strongly I connect words to images, and how I immediately move toward a specific image to translate into fabric.  I go back and forth, too, with whether that's a good thing (moving toward one's natural inclination) or whether I should push myself in the opposite direction.  For now, I'm trying to get away from the literal, and I'm making myself play with abstraction.  It's a stretch, and sometimes it's uncomfortable, but it feels like a good thing.

All this creative angst, eh?  Maybe I've been watching too much Project Runway.

I actually made two pieces this round, which I've never done before.  This was actually the first piece I started with, inspired by an amazing piece of batiked fabric made by my friend Judy Bianchi. It's called "Make Your Own Way."

To be honest, I'm not crazy about it.  But it was time to stop and move on.  I think this reflects that I WAS trying to say something in this piece in an abstract way (about being different in a field of similar things) and then it moved away from that idea in a way that is visually confusing.  Still, the exercise was fun and I still have a hunk of that lovely fabric for more exploration.

And here's my goal for the fabric work I'm doing now:  Lighten Up!  Stop Analyzing!  Just Play!

Charming

I've mentioned here before that I've been playing with small quilts that incorporate old photographs.  In part, that is due to family matters presenting me with scads of old photos... and in part, it's because just when the pictures presented themselves to me I was charged with the task of identifying a series I wanted to explore this year in my Practical Design Workshop.  In January, when it came time to designate what my series would be, I didn't want to take on any big series idea.  And the idea of making a small quilt each month as a) my series work and b) an ongoing exploration of how to transfer photos to fabric and use them in a whimsical, non-sentimental way in quilts fit my mood.

My July project involved a photo I fell in love with. 

As I was sorting through a box of photos from my recently deceased mother-in-law, I came across this near the top.  It's my husband's brother Ron when he was about 10 years old.  Their next door neighbor was a professional photographer who did photos for catalogs and magazines, and apparently he enlisted Roger's family members as models from time to time.  This one?  Who knows what the point was -- selling the air-filled plastic snake?

In any event, it needed to be a quilt.  So, here's my piece for this month, titled "Charmer":

It's about 14" x 16".  I had a great time making it.  I printed the photo onto fabric with my inkjet printer, and added color with colored pencils.  I was happy to find the green snakeskin-like fabric in my stash.  I used Markal painstiks to stencil the word "Charmer" onto the background fabric, and then I added square spirals from a stamped I carved.

Here's a detail shot:

I inset a flange of the green fabric -- it needed the inner border to my eye and I liked the raised texture of the flap.  The dense stipple quilting gives a snaky texture to the background, too.

All in all, a fun project.  It's heading off to Ron for his birthday -- I wouldn't be surprised if he has totally forgotten he ever posed for this picture.

Ready for the Fun

I've been continuing in my exploration of using photos in quilts, and this is the most recent in the series.  That photo is me, at maybe age  2 or 3, somewhere in there.  (Looks like it was taken right before a birthday party or some such event.)  I was experimenting with inkjet transfer and for some reason when I transferred a black and white photo onto a pale lavender fabric, got an image that was a lovely shade of blue.

The background fabric is one I painted ages and ages ago, and then I fused organza on and added stitching.  It was a very fun process.

I'm looking forward to playing more with inket transfers... looks like many wonderful effects can result.

Purple and Yellow together

Using complementary colors together can produce exciting effects -- and that was the seed of our challenge this round in our 12x12 "color play" challenge.  We were charged with using purple and yellow.  Click on over to the 12x2 blog: today is reveal day and it's wonderful to see what everyone did!

Me, I hemmed and hawed for a while as I wasn't coming up with any ideas right away. But eventually I started thinking about the simple #2 yellow pencil, and how much a part of my life it has been -- through school, required for tests, a new batch symbolic of the new school year, etc.  And that's what led to my piece.

What would you do if you had to use purple and yellow in a piece?

Dad and the '49 Mercury

We're back from our various family adventures (Miss C at camp, R and me in SF) and we all had fun and are dragging ourselves around here with contented exhaustion.  It was good to get away and have some fun, and now it's good to be home.  I'll post on what we did later.

BUT... seeing as how quilt-related posts have been few and far between here lately, I thought I'd show you something I made a while back and gave to my dad last week for father's day.

I've been wanting to experiment some with different photo transfer methods.  And when I came across a great photo of my dad sitting on a beloved car (his 1949 Mercury, which he lovingly customized), I knew it'd be fun to play with.  When I asked my dad about what the car was -- because, to my dad, what the car IS is a vital piece of information -- he replied with the details about the car, and then went on to say that after my mom gave birth to my sister, he had to sell the car to get her out of the hospital and pay the bill!

So that was the seed of this little collage.  The picture below shows my mom holding up my sister Laura, who has a very funny tongue-sticking-out look on her face.  The text says "He traded the '49 Mercury Custom for the baby ... and never looked back."   My dad tells me he was wearing actual blue suede shoes, with a matching blue suede jacket.  Pretty cute guy, huh?  Not to mention a WONderful dad. 

This was a big hit for father's day and I was delighted.

No Small Peanuts

Seems like my days have been occupied with all sorts of mundane errands, and nothing exciting enough to warrant a blog entry.  Amid the usual family stuff, I've been trying to weed out some of the stuff that accumulates around me.  As I write this the back of my car has a few bags and boxes for Goodwill, and the garbage bin is half-full.

In my closet-tidying, I came across some packets of pre-cut quilt squares that my local guild puts together for assembly into charity quilts.  And yesterday -- a gray, rainy day -- I had a peaceful afternoon stitching up three (count em!  3!) quilt tops to be donated to a community charity.  I enjoyed the rhythm of feeding squares through the machine and am pleased to have another thing out of the closet.  And of course the Peanuts fabric was fun to work with, even if it wasn't anything I would ever have chosen.  Very satisfying! 

And speaking of Peanuts, I just learned about a program in California organized by the California Association of Museums to get a California license plate with Snoopy on it.  You may recall that Snoopy was born in Petaluma (about 30 miles north of San Francisco -- about 30 minutes south of where I live) at the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm.  His creator, Charles Schultz, lived in Santa Rosa which houses the Charles Schultz Museum (which is totally fun) and Snoopy's Home Ice Arena.  So it makes me happy to think that one of these days I could have Snoopy doing his original happy dance on my very own car.

The colors of Kilauea

Today is reveal day over on our Twelve by Twelve blog!  Our theme this month, designated by Hawaiian resident Kristin, was the colors of Mount Kilauea.  It presented a veritable challenge but the results are amazing.  Go see what everyone did!

Eucalyptus Road

One of the projects I worked on last week at the ranch retreat was this small abstract landscape.  I applied a layer of tulle over it, machine quilted it, and applied a facing finish.

So it SHOULD be finished...and yet I'm feeling that this needs something more.  I think what is bugging me is that the values are not quite right -- there needs to be some lighter light somewhere, maybe?  Maybe the judicious application of neocolor crayon or colored pencil?  I'm not sure, so it is sitting on my wall where I can comtemplate.

Any suggestions?  Why does this seem not-quite-right to me?  How would you fix this?

Wonder-full fun

 

  This past weekend, I was in the mood to just play in my studio, so I did something I've been wanting to try.  I painted Wonder-Under!  It was fast and fun and only slightly messy.  I painted one side of Wonder-under with watered down acrylic paint, spreading it around and blending colors right on the surface of the W-U as I went.  Once it dried, I cut shapes out of it (paper and all) and ironed them to a piece of fabric I'd dyed some time ago.  The stripes just appear as the W-U dries and shrinks up a bit, causing the backing paper to wrinkle a bit.

The effect was quite different than I thought it'd be.  Once I peeled up the W-U backing paper (which was far easier when the shapes had cooled completely), the colors were vibrant.  And there's no sticky residue at all.  I just have to remember not to iron this with some parchment paper over the top.  

Stitching was fun and free and kept me going through the closing ceremonies of the Olympics. 

 

Hmmm, I'm going to have to play more with this.  By the way, I've not come up with a name for this yet, so if you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them!

Feeling Blue?

 

Today is another eagerly- awaited  reveal day on our Twelve by 12 blog.  This challenge, the second in our "Colorplay" series, was on "blue, white and a bit of black."  Here's my response -- you can read about it and see the 11 other amazing pieces here!    

Face It!

Yesterday, I finally found a bit of time to begin the steps of finishing the fuchsia quilt.  (Yeah, sorry, you're probably getting tired of seeing this...) First, squaring up -- there is something about the quilt blocks on two sides that creates an optical illusion of being out-of-square, and that stumped me for a while.  I kept measuring and marking.  I pulled out the Ricky Tims DVD on finishing techniques ("Grand Finale")  to remind myself about what HE does to square up quilts -- his finishing techniques are impeccable and I highly recommend the DVD.  More measuring, more marking, and finally I trimmed.  Sheesh. The quilt is actually square in this shot, although I think the photographic angle (necessitated by my shoving myself up against the closet door behind the sewing table to get an almost-straight-on shot of my teeny design wall behind the door) makes it look wonky. Oh, and after I took the shot, I trimmed a few inches off of the top edge, so the leaves feel more like they're at the top and not hanging there in the middle. Nothing like making precisely pieced blocks to hack them all off...

Then, I turned to my friend Brenda, who just happens to be an expert on finishing techniques!  I have a copy of her DVD on finishing techniques, so I popped that in to the computer to see her tips for making the best facing.  Excellent!  Brenda provides a free tutorial on her facing technique here, in case you need help as I did.

And that consumed my fabric-play time yesterday.  Sigh.  I am looking forward to sitting down with a movie and hand-sewing the facing, now.

Life is better with a sister

A while back, I had an evening to myself and decided to watch a few of the Quilting Arts TV shows that I have on DVD.  In one episode (#202-4, to be exact) Pokey Bolton demonstrated a fast and adorable project that just looked like it'd be so much fun.   She strip pieced a background, fused a photo-transfer image of a pet (manipulated in Photoshop to make it look colorful and sort of funky) and quilted it all up into one charming little quilt.  I was so taken by the project that I got to work the next day -- I was in the mood to do something fun and fabric-y and for no reason other than I was in the mood to play.  I pulled up a photo of my sister Laura's sweet german short-haired pointer Katie (taken on a morning walk), assembled some of the pink scraps leftover from the 12x12 "pink" challenge, and I was on my way.  I really had fun machine stitching Katie's fur.  You can find the project instructions on the Quilting Arts website, here. 

Today, Laura came over so we could bake our family's "must-have" Christmas cookies together.  What a great time we had -- we made tons of cookies, for us and for our parents, we had holiday music playing in the background, and we chattered away.  The rolling and cutting and pressing and sprinkling went so much faster doing it together ... and now we are well-stocked with cookies and fudge for holiday desserts. 

At the end of our baking (and tasting) session, I couldn't wait and gave Laura this Christmas present a few days early.  She pretty much squealed with delight and made me very happy.  It's great when something you've made is truly appreciated, isn't it?

What a fun day, and how lucky I am to have my sister close by to bake cookies with!

Feeling Pinkish -- in a good way!

In case you haven't noticed, it's the twelfth day of the twelfth month, and to celebrate this momentous day, the twelve of us 12x12 collaborators have chosen today to reveal the first set of our new "Colorplay" challenges!

This theme was mine to choose, and knowing how many people avoid the color pink, I chose that for my challenge theme. All we were told was "Pink!" and with the usual cleverness, everyone went off in amazing and fun directions. Go over to the 12x12 blog and see everyone's responses!

I'm trying to break away from my usual literal/representational style, so I'm challenging myself to try to be more abstract in my responses. For this piece, I wanted to illustrate the gentle, soft, pleasing sense I get from the color pink. I've called it "Whimsy in Pink."

I can't wait to see what up is next...