Nice Surprise

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that my quilt was chosen for the cover art for the postcard for the invitational show I am in. I will have three quilts, all part of my Configuration, City series. This one, Configuration IV, Salsa City, has always been one of my favorites. It was originally made for a juried art quilt exhibit, "Town and Country", that premiered at the big show in Houston and then traveled for three years.
Bridgeport is only about an hour from me so I will be able to attend the opening on Sept. 7.  Stop by if you're in the area.

In the Works

Lest you think I am frittering my time away, perhaps I am a bit, but I have been working on my Presidential Fabrications. I wrote about it here when my fabric choices turned out to be too pretty for the topic.
I had set aside this group of fabrics several years ago. I had parfait dyed the gray/orange fabric on the left and I don't know what colors I used to achieve it. I paired it with some Dupioni silks in grays and orange and there it sat waiting for this moment. I think the colors (hint, hint) are perfect for what I have to say. It is all pieced and just needs the quilting. The quilting is a big part of my "statement" so I don't want to show it until it is finished.
I promise to have it by next week. I'm linking up with Off the Wall Friday.

Sun #9

My prompt for this month was to use a material or technique I had never used before. I had purchased this package of metallic mesh several years ago and it had been languishing on my shelf. Fortunately I was able to locate it. The piece had two finished edges and the other two edges were very loose and unravelly. I taped those edges with scotch tape and then pleated it, holding the pleats in place with fine pins and then sewed that to the background blue.





The face is made of ultra suede. I have a bin of odd pieces and this was the only color that was sun-like. I decided to give her a very feminine face since the rays are so girly. This was the only one where the face is not stitched. I did it all with permanent markers.

I'm linking up with Off The Wall Friday.

New work

You may remember awhile back that I dyed a couple of pieces of velvet when I was doing all those napkins. These were in pastels but the velvet pieces took the dye much differently and they were very vivid.

I knew that I wanted to use them in a quilt and then the perfect opportunity came up. My FiberWorks theme for this year's show is Wild Fabrications, to be interpreted any way we choose. I decided to use my wild fabrics and dye some more velvet to go along with it and make my quilt "Presidential Fabications" also know as LIES. 

I ice-dyed some more velvet using the same colors and although they were not quite the same, I thought they would all go together.

Pretty wild, hey? Pieces of my velvet just slapped up on my design wall. Those little strips of white were going to be lies told by presidents, not necessarily in that color or size. I thought I would do them in chartreuse. It has to be 30 inches square.

Then I started to piece it together and thought it really needed some other colors. Otherwise it looked like a big mishmash. As I added in the other colors, fuchsia and chartreuse from my hand dyed stash,  something terrible happened. It was looking PRETTY, not what I wanted for this quilt, so I stopped piecing and made it into a much smaller quilt. It's about 33" x 22".

I loved the texture that I achieved by quilting on the velvet. One of my friends said that I should put a sign near it that says "Please touch". It does feel scrumptious.

I free-motion quilted it all over with random flowers and leaves. I will give it a flowery name, perhaps Le Jardin.

Even the back is pretty. I had some of this ice-dyed fabric left over from another quilt.

My Presidential Fabrications is well under way and I used much more appropriate fabrics. I will post it when I am finished. 

I will be linking up with Off the Wall Friday. Please go see what some talented people are doing. 

Using those napkins

You may recall that I dyed umpteen vintage napkins awhile ago. Last night one of my book clubs had its annual pot luck dinner. We read a book with recipes, usually a memoir, and then everyone makes something from the book. We always have it at my house because I have a big deck, perfect for alfresco dining. We hope for a good weather day and last night was absolutely perfect. Last year it was super hot and humid, so we ate inside and one year it rained.

I set up two tables and used the six vintage placemats that I had shibori dyed and paired them with some shibori napkins. I only had six of those placemats so the other table had purchased placemats with matching napkins. No picture of those.

I should have taken pictures of the food. It was a feast! Last night's book was "Delancey: A Man, A Woman, A Restaurant, a Marriage " by Molly Wizenberg. The book was pretty good but not the best that we had read, but it did have great recipes.