Wordless Wednesday

not Photoshopped

A New Book

Last year I received an email from Joen Wolfrom saying that she had seen two of my quilts on my website that she would like to include in her new book to be released in 2011. Was I interested? Of course I jumped at the chance, knowing that she is the author of twelve other quilts books, all of them excellent. My autographed copy came the other day and I was not disappointed. It is a beauty!

She uses 153 quilts made by quilters and fiber artists from around the world to demonstrate the Elements and Principals of design. You will recognize a lot of the names and I was honored to be in such illustrious company. Each quilt illustrates one or more of these Elements or Principals.

Here on page 97 she uses my quilt, Fiesta, to illustrate Repetition, Rhythm and Harmony.

And here on page 48, she uses my Blue Ginkgoes to show a Complementary Color Plan.

Joen also writes a fabulous blog, in which she recently went through the color wheel, illustrating each color with the most amazing nature photographs that she has taken. Scroll back a little to see them all. It's worth the effort.

To read a much more thorough and complete review of the book, please go to Dara Williamson's blog, See How We Sew.

Playing on the Surface

As promised, here are pictures of another show, this one by the Scrapbag Art Quilters. This is the small group, of which I am a member, that meets weekly at members' homes. Each year we have a challenge and the results are hung at the Booth Library in Newtown CT. This year the theme was Surface Design and we used the Surface Design Association's definition: "Any process that gives pattern or color to fiber and fabric. These include spinning, felting, papermaking, weaving, knotting, netting, looping, dyeing, painting, stitching, cutting, piecing, quilting, and embellishing."

The quilts were all approximately 25 inches square. The show will hang thru October 14. Please stop by if you are in the area. All pictures are clickable for a bigger view.

The quilts were hung on fabric covered screens, two on each side of a square with quilts hung on both sides of the screens.

Carolyn Cooney, our resident landscape specialist, did Sterling Woods. It hangs on the outside of a screen, facing you as you walk into the room and its visual impact is terrific.

Paula West is one of our newest members and comes to us from a knitting background, among other arts. This piece, made up of "scrumbles" made of free-form knitting, crocheting, beading and embroidery, is called Heartland.

I posted a side view so that you can see how dimensional it is.

Nike Cutsumpas' Reticulation. Nike used pieces from an older quilt to make this new one and added lots of her signature hand stitching to add more depth and texture.

Norma Schlager's Afterimage, uses shibori, stamping and stitching with heavy thread.

Nike Cutsumpas' Musical Coloration - Overload! uses many different techniques such as paper, couching, collaging, etc.

Margaret Clayton-Amey's Seafood Salad , has stenciling, beading, couching, and stitching.

Janet Bunch, who has moved to Florida, sent us Palm Island, which uses parts of a real palm tree.

Norma Schlager's Iris Redux used paint on top of an already heavily machine quilted, pieced quilt.

Heloise Wilkinson is our founding member. Now in her 90's she is living in an assisted living facility. These four small pictures were of the view from her porch in the four seasons. She hasn't attended meetings for a few years, but we often think of her with great fondness and admiration. She was always a source of inspiration.

Chris Aulicino, our newest member and Heloise's daughter, comes to us from a weaving background, which she still does. She is new to quilting, but made these two coordinated pieces for the show, Yellow Cottage Transformed 1 & 2.

Andrea Shedletsky's, Dressed for the Wedding. Her only daughter got married Labor Day weekend and most of Andrea's time was consumed with decorations, planning, baking, etc. yet she managed to produce this lovely quilt.

Barbara Drillick's Jugando en la Playa. Barbara started with four pieces of white fabric that she painted, stamped, marked, etc., then cut into strips and wove together. She mounted the woven piece onto a piece of foam board to give it some dimension.

Barbara Drillicks' My Tables. Each square has a different surface design.

A Colorful Show, Part 2

Here are a few more of the quilts from the FANE show at the Mahopac Library, running though September 27, A Colorful Show.

Barbara Drillick's, A Box Of Chocolates, done with her usual precision piecing and great use of prints.

Vivien Zeph's Rex Ray Gray inspired by the painter Rex Ray's # 2754.

Nancy Mirman's all black quilt. I know it looks like shades of gray here, but it was all different blacks and many different fabrics and textures, accented by black and silver beads. It was stunning!

Andrea Shedlefsky's beautiful piece uses hand painted silks and cottons and exquisite hand sewing and bead work. See detail below.

That's it for now. Try to get to see the show if you can and see what I left out. There are many more stunning works of art to discover, including some more of my favorites.

A Colorful Show

On Saturday I went to the opening of the FANE show, A Colorful Show. I talked about it in my last post. I thought it was a wonderfully cohesive show, due to the theme and the mounting of the quilts on white canvases. All the monochromatic quilts were 9" x 20" and were mounted on 12" x 24" white canvases . The white just popped off of the camel colored cork walls and made every quilt look so special, which, of course, they were! Excellent lighting was a big help, too. I am not going to show you every quilt, first because I don't have the names for them all and second because I want you to go see them for yourself and have a few surprises when you get there. I will show you a few today and a few more tomorrow. All pictures are clickable for a bigger view.

Here are three of the quilts in a row, which gives you an idea of how they were hung. I thought the hanging committee did an excellent job.

You'll probably recognize this as mine, using a small sampling of all those greens I dyed awhile back.

Carolyn Spiegel came from a painting background and uses it in her quilts. She had several different types of fabric and paint for some wonderful texture.

Anne Louise Lyman's beautiful self portrait of herself at a much younger age. Isn't she pretty? And she still is!

Carole Hoffman always does the most incredible faces and she didn't disappoint this time. This one uses a piece of a friend's hand painted fabric in which Carole saw a face and capitalized on it.

Nike's Cutsumpas's , Yellow Rudbeckia , so happy and sunny.

Joyce Sullivan and her study in gray of a beautiful swan pond.

MaryAnn Healy's, "View From an Old Irish Church Looking Down on Forty Shades of Green". How's that for a title? I liked the juxtaposition of the rough gray fabric against the green piecing.

I'm back.

My friend, Janet, says I am her most peripatetic friend. I do seem to be traveling a lot lately and that accounts for the dearth of posts. This time it was a two week long riverboat cruise from Budapest to Amsterdam with three extra days in Amsterdam. It was fabulous trip, in spite of the fact that I was pick-pocketed on my second day of the trip. Yup, wallet with three credit cards and some cash, gone from my zipped purse. Credit cards got cancelled and it was an inconvenience, but not the worst thing that could have happened in the overall scheme of things like lost luggage, serious injury, etc. Life goes on.

I've been so busy since I got back on Tuesday night. I took a lot of pictures, of course, and will post some of them when I get my life back on track.

The postcard is for a show I am in, opening tomorrow, put on by the FANE (Fiber Artists of the North East) group, of which I am a member. The theme this year was monochromatic and I chose green, since I had those forty yards I had dyed awhile back. That's a slice of my quilt in the middle of the card. Stop by if you're in the area of Mahopac, NY. I'll post some pix of the show soon.

Wordless Wednesday

Iris Redux

Last year I made a quilt that was inspired by Van Gogh's "Iris in Yellow Vase". I spent a lot of time piecing and then free motion quilting, but it did not turn out as I had hoped. I blogged about it here and asked for advise from Quiltart, an online art quilt group, to see if "this quilt could be saved". I got a lot of comments on my blog giving many different suggestions and lot of emails, including one that said "this quilt cannot be saved". So I folded it up and put it away.

Fast forward to now. My small quilt group puts on a show at a local library every year and we always have a theme. This year it is Surface Design. I made one quilt and decided to see if I could revive my iris quilt somehow for a second quilt. So I spread it out on the table and found an area that had the most interesting quilting and cut out a 28" square. Then I took some pale aqua paint, actually a sample of wall paint for my bathroom, and brushed over the top of the quilt, being sure not to go into the valleys created by the quilting. And this is what I got.

I got a whole new pattern and design. I then trimmed it to 24 inches and put binding on to match the quit. I usually face my quilts, but the paint made it a little stiff and I thought it would be difficult. All pictures are clickable for a bigger view.

If you look at the details, you can see what's really going on. The blue is the paint and the orange is the fabric beneath.

More of the same.

I have a new camera, Sony Cyber-shot, and I'm very pleased with the Macro shots. You don't even have to switch over to Macro, if you get close enough to the object, it just automatically goes to Macro.

Postcard

My good friend, Claire, is moving to my neighborhood, so I made this postcard for her.

Collaboration

I have been an admirer of Kathy Loomis since I saw her work, Memorial Day, at Quilt National in 2009. It was a huge quilt made out of 4,083 tiny flags, one for each US military killed in Iraq at that time, and won the Quilts Japan Prize for that year. She has been in QN a total of three times, won Best Of Show at Quilt=Art=Quilts at Schweinfurth last year, has been in Art Quilt Elements and SAQA@20 last year. She has taught all over, including Japan. She also has a thoughtful, well-written blog, Art With a Needle, no surprise there since she was a journalist in another life.

I follow her blog and a couple of weeks ago she blogged about a quilt, Brown Planet, that she had started in a week-long Nancy Crow Master class. She started the quilt, pictured above, and didn't have time to finish it in the workshop, so she rolled it up in the white sheet to which it was pinned and put it away, never to be finished. She went to another Nancy Crow workshop and did a similar quilt in blues. I left a comment on her blog saying that I loved the brown version and that if she didn't want it, she could always give it to me. I was just kidding. Much to my great surprise I got an email a couple of days later saying that if I really wanted it, I could have it as long as I would promise to make something out of it and show her the results. It would be a collaboration and the quilt would be mine to keep. I said yes!

I mostly make small or medium sized quilts, no bigger than 60" square and usually much smaller. This one is huge, a whopping eight feet by four feet. It will fill my entire studio design wall. It arrived a few days ago and I unfolded it on my family room floor. She just had one pin in each strip and they had all flopped around. So I went around on my hands and knees and straightened it out and put several pins in each strip. I folded it back up and put it away for now because I won't have time to work on it now, with upcoming trips and other projects to finish. It will involve a lot more piecing, including all those tiny strips on the left hand side and in the background. I'm going to try to follow her plan as closely as possible. Wish me luck!

Please go to Kathy's blog and read all about it here. Be sure to read the comments. Mine is the last one.