Springtime on my windowsill

and the fragrance is heavenly! I wish I could find perfume that smelled as nice as any of these.

I Need a Name

I finally got around to quilting this top that I made a few months ago. I was away a lot and busy with other projects and wasn't sure how I wanted to quilt it. Ultimately I just let the piece speak to me and quilted each section separately according to its design.

If you saw it before, you may remember that everything in this piece, except for the pink Dupioni silk, started as plain white fabric. It was all then hand dyed and had one or several forms of surface design applied: soy wax resist, thickened dye painting, stamping, painting, or bleach discharge.

It measures 31" W x 42" L.

I even like the back, although the quilting shows up more in person.

Sooooo, I need a name, something I usually have no trouble with. Since it's all about surface design, maybe something to go along with that.... "Playing On the Surface", a name that my FiberWorks group once gave to a show that was about surface design.

I like the way the fabrics talk to each other, so maybe "Conversations".

It has a lot of circles, so maybe something with a circular name.

I don't know, I'm open to suggestions.

Massacre In My Garden

I purchased this charming little decorative birdhouse as an ornament for my back garden a few years ago. This year for the first time it was occupied by a cute little bird that I think is a Jenny Wren. I would watch her go in out of the the house, presumably to sit on her eggs.

BUT this is what greeted me this morning. As you can see, the house and its stand are pulled way over and nearly out of the ground.

I haven't done any planting yet this year and thats why things look so sparse.

On the ground beneath the house are the remnants of the nest. No sign of the eggs, which I assume were eaten. I wonder what could have done this. I'm thinking it was a raccoon because their nimble little hands could have reached into the small opening to pull out the nest.

I feel so bad for momma bird. I wonder if she will make a new nest and lay more eggs. What do you think?

By a Thread, part 2

I'll show you a few more that caught my eye, but am leaving a lot to see if you can get to the show. It will be up until June 19, open from Wed.-Sun. from 12 to 4, with gallery talks every Sunday by featured artists.

This was one of my favorite pieces in the show, The Red Boat by Jennifer Coyle Queen. Her favorite Medium is teabags and these panels use those teabags, a digital print of a photo taken by the artist and thread. This was a rather large piece, as you can see by the shoulder of a viewer.  Detail below.

Here is Sooo-z Mastropietro with other of her fabulous jersey tube pieces. This time she covered a whole Chippendale style chair. What can she not do with those tubes?

Red Curve by Jenny Walker. See a peek of my red quilt above it. There is a lot of red in this room.

Stuck on Band-Aids by Peggy Dembicer, the same artist whose piece I purchased at the CT Scissorhands show.

These three pieces by Steven Needham really blew me away. The label only said cotton thread, so I'm not sure if they were petit point or embroidery. Either way they were fantastic. Titles are: top to bottom: Shaky One, George,  and Ben.

                                                      Detail of George.



Hopefully this will whet your appetite to see more and you will visit the show if you can.

By a Thread

I did something to my back this week, I wish I knew what. I so seldom get sick that it was a real eyeopener to me. I cancelled all activities on Friday and hung around icing my back and taking pain killers and doing stretches, but I was bound and determined to go to this opening on Saturday. I took a strong painkiller in the morning and by 3PM when I had to leave I was feeling pretty good, not 100%, but not too bad.

I was so glad that I was able to attend since the opening was fabulous! There was some amazing work there and I was so pleased to be included in this show. The opening was very well attended and it was pretty much wall to wall people for the three hours I was there. Fortunately I got there early to get a parking space and to be able to take pictures. I will show you a few today and please come back for more. Remember to click on any picture for a bigger view of all.



Here is one of my pieces in the show, Ravishing Red. I know that you have seen it before. I like the way it was hung near  Sooo-z Mastropietro's piece made out of jersey tubes, her medium. We both used turquoise and red to good advantage.



A better view of Sooo-z's.





Again my piece, Salsa City, was well placed near Redbird by Jodi Ann Etrmiska in the corner. Her medium is cut paper and nylon thread.





This very large piece, Snowmoon by Jennifer Davies, greeted you as you entered the first room. I am only guessing about the size, but I would say it was about 5 feet in diameter. It was made of string, ink, and handmade paper. It was stunning!



Kimono Form: Very Loud Message From Fukushima by Arle´ Solar-Weinstein. Vinyl tape, cotton, thread, ceramic beads, ink cartridge rollers.



Majesty of the Slow White Crawl by Ellen Schiffman. Made from Q-tips. Detail below.



Ellen does the most amazing things with unusual items such as Q-tips, tape, metal hardware and recyclables. From a distance this looks like coral.


For some strange reason Blogger is not allowing me to post pictures in the usual way and I have to drag them into the post, rather tedious. So please come back and I will show you some more and hopefully Blogger will be in a better mood. I've never had this happen before.

Opening

I was very pleased to be curated into this show that is opening this Saturday. The curator, Nancy Moore, went to 60 studios over the course of several months to pick what she wanted, an exhausting, but accurate way to do it. I will have two pieces in the show and I am the only quilt artist. There is every other mode of fiber that you can think of. When I went to drop off my work last week I was very impressed by what was there and there was a lot more to come.

If you live anywhere near Ridgefield CT please come to the opening or stop by any other time during the show's duration.

SAQA 2016 Benefit Auction

This is my contribution to the SAQA Benefit Auction. It was part of a piece that I made last year for my FiberWorks exhibit and since it was the required twelve inches square, I thought it would be a good fit. I was pleased to see that it was chosen as one of the three pieces featured in the May SAQA monthly update email. It uses Dupioni silk and my hand dyed cottons. I was pleased to see how the quilting shows up in the picture. I'm not sure if they used my photo, which was a good one, or if they took the photo.

The auction doesn't start until September, but the quilts had to be in by June.  Since mine was already made I sent it in last week.You can read about the auction and how it works on the SAQA website here and also see some of the other pieces available.

I am linking up with Off The Wall Friday one day late. Go see what everyone is up to.

More From the Guild Show

As in the past several previous years, they picked two Best of Shows, which I think is an oxymoron but nobody asked me. This year there was very little difference in size between the two, but here they are in all their glory. Please remember to click on any picture to see a bigger view of all.

Best of Show, Small. Tuscany by Donald Gough, who leads a special interest group in the guild for landscapes. This was truly beautiful and it looked like you could walk right into it. He also won the Best Use of Color.

Best of Show, Large. Ode to William Morris by Carole Peterson. It was gorgeous with impeccable workmanship.

My Baltimore Journey by Darlene Donohue and quilted by Ruth Quinn. I was a clerk at the judging and I think this might have won Best of Show, but it was not eligible because it was quilted by someone other than the maker. Not to take away from the quilts that did win because they were stunning. This one also won a Best Hand Appliqué ribbon. You can see below the exquisite appliqué and machine quilting. I'm usually not a big fan of these quilts, but this one was very special.

Here are my two small quilts, Fractured IV on the upper left  and Fractured VI on the lower left. Notice the lack of ribbons.

My Ravishing Red only won an HM. Oh, well, it is on its way to be in a curated show next week. More about that on another day.

Below are a few that caught my eye.

Shades of Misty by Renee Fleuranges-Valdes was tribute to Misty Copeland.

Renee does the most incredible machine quilting on her Bernina.

Two Heads Are Better Than One by Donna Chambers. She won a blue ribbon and Best Original Design. All those little squares in the border are individually attached.

Donna paints beautiful faces, altho she said that she did appliqué the lips to get the bright red she wanted.

Judy Dales was our invitational exhibit and there was a whole wall of her breathtaking quilts. I have long been an admirer.

I found this simple, but very effective quilt, Louvre Pyramid by Dianna Sharkey, to be very pleasing to look at. The way the triangles change value across the quilt and the straight line machine quilting keeps your eye moving along.

You can see that the judges like Dianna's work, too. This one, Type Between the Lines, uses selvages as she has done in several other quilts. 

You may remember the button piece that I made for this exhibit. Each piece had to be twelve inches square with a yellow road running through it. I thought it was a pretty cool exhibit.

How neat is it that he one above mine also used buttons. Hers looks like a road with the buttons being cars. Is the checkered one a taxi cab?

And that's it, folks. If you want to see all the winners you can go to the website here. Whoops! Just realized that they are not up yet, but they will be soon so check back in a couple of days.

NSQG Show

This past weekend my guild, Northern Star Quilter's Guild, held its annual quilt show. It was in a new venue this year. After being held at JFK high school in Somers. NY for over thirty years we were forced to find a new place for various reasons. This year it was in the O'Neill Center at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury CT. It was a plus for me because it was much closer to home and it was a much larger space. All the quilts and the vendors were in one enormous room, rather than being scattered all over the school as previously.

Several of my blog readers asked me to show the results of the Fiber Fall challenge that  the FANE group did and exhibited at the show, so here they are. Please click on any picture for a bigger view of all.

You can see that there was so much diversity, even though we all got the same instructions, no two were even vaguely alike. Most members of the group made three.

My three were to the right of the snowflakes with the white buttons on black being in the middle of mine.

Please come back and I'll show some more pictures of the show, including Best of Show.