Two quilts

This morning I posted my quilt of the month on Interpret This!  I think my piece is successful but not outstanding However some of the other interpretations are magnificent.  Check them out here.

Today I have sent in my two submissions for the SAQA show, No Holds Barred, held at the New England Quilt Museum.  Send me good thoughts, please!  This is my first attempt to get in a juried show.  I started to show you a peek at a detail from The Center of the Universe but I am afraid it will be disqualified if I do.  Sorry, no peek.

Natural Spring in Saratoga Springs NY

October was my month to submit a picture for the 'Interpret This!' challenge.  I had to submit three choices so I did but I really REALLY wanted the picture of the fountain in Saratoga Spring NY to be chosen.  IT WAS!  YEAH!

We went there 3 or 4 years ago for a work conference, spent a week, and did lots of sightseeing.  My favorite sight was the Hawthorne Fountain.  The fountain itself is made of stone and is smooth and has a wonderful shape to it.  The bowl of the fountain is filled with amazing colors from the years of mineral deposits from the water. The water comes out of the fountain spigots in sporadic curly short bursts.  It all just added up to magic.

Here are some more pictures of the fountain.

Out of Eden

Out of Eden is my art quilt for Interpret This! 

 Here is a corner. 

Check out the rest of it on IT!

Field of Dreams

 
I didn't like it (well, not hated it but it definitely needed more) and didn't like it and didn't like it but I think the last touch finished it.  I kinda like it now.  For more details and pictures, check out Interpret This!

June's picture for Interpret This!

Here is the picture for the Interpret This!  June challenge.  Beautiful butterfly, isn't it?  I am one of the first to reveal this time so no time to spend pondering--I need to come up with an idea for my quilt quickly!  I am unsure how so far how to turn the picture into a lovely quilt design.  That is the first step, of course. Then I have to consider technique.  I have thought about batik, pool dyeing, or lino printing but have not committed to any technique yet since I don't have a design in mind yet.  I want to stay in the whole cloth category in my design.  I think I will spend this evening with past issues of Quilting Arts and Cloth, Paper, Scissors and see if anything jumps out and inspires me.

If any idea immediately strikes you for the overall design of the quilt or the technique to use to achieve it, let me know.

May Reveal on Interpret This!

Here is my May Reveal for Interpret This!  For more details about the techniques used I will refer you to the posting at Interpret This!    Here I want to leave the forum open for more of a critique on the piece.

Here are some of my thoughts.

1. I like the dimensionality of the piece. This is not a flat quilt.
2. I like the shape.  I was concerned about the diamond type shape but the fact that the piece is not flat softens the shape for me and lets it work.
3. I love the subtle colors of the silk fabric which were achieved through dyeing repeatedly and then accented with shiva paint sticks.
4. I like the driftwood hanger but  I am not sure the blue really works on the driftwood.  It is a bit jarring for me.  Perhaps a different color would work better.

I am also really pleased with with my progress through the monthly Interpret This! challenge. Through this deadline my art has become a daily activity.  My growth as a fiber artist has been really  accelerated over what I would do left to my own devices.  You know what I mean, the daily press of life often pushes our dreams and goals to "if-I-have-time-at-the-end-of-the-day" status.  Here are some areas that I think I have grown in.

1. The direction I am going in my creativity.  I am moving out of my box of quilts as something to keep you warm and into quilts as part of a multi-medium approach to art.
2. The increase of surface design techniques I can use (sometimes  successfully LOL).  I still have a ways to go to master dyeing and shrinking but I am becoming more competent about what works and does not. 
3. My seeing the quilt as a complete package--hanger, surface, quilting, embellishment, etc.  The entire presentation is important and needs to be considered.

Feel free to leave me comments, good or ..  uh.....areas to grow in.

A peek at Roots and some Dyed Work

Here is a picture of Roots, my April Reveal for Interpret This!  For more pictures and information about the art quilt, please checkout the blog over there. The one thing I will tell you here is that I am mega impressed with myself.  Okay, the quilt is not perfect and I can find lots of faults in it but I am so excited that it used to be just a plain piece of white fabric.  I designed it.  I dyed it.  I carved a lino stamp.  I printed it. I embroidered.  I quilted.  I thread painted.  I whatever.  It used to be a plain piece of white cloth and now it is an art quilt.  And I did it all myself.   Isn't that just way too cool?

Anyway, on to the reason I started writing this post.  I have been doing some other printing and dyeing the last few weeks.  Here are a couple of the pieces I like the most. ( Like, do you really want to see my failures??)

This piece is a late spring snow dye.  A couple of weeks ago on a Saturday morning it was supposed to rain.  Well, it snowed instead.  Big, huge, wet flakes.  The ground was too warm for them to stick but our cars ended up with about an 1.5 inches on them. " Ah HAH!"  I said, my last chance of the season to snow dye.  I quickly got my wicker laundry basket, put a piece of white fabric in the bottom, covered it with snow, and ran to get my dyes.  Then it occurred to me that I really should have wet the fabric with a soda solution or all the dye in the world would not help.  Hmm... what to do.  Not enough snow to dump and start over.   I mixed a little soda water with a little dye, squirted it all on the snow, and hoped for the best.  I think it turned out pretty well!

This piece stared out as a jar dye project but I did not add enough dye. Way too much white.  So then I folded it and placed some triangle resist shapes on it and overdyed it.  Better but nothing special.  After printing my Roots lino for my Interpret This challenge, I used the leftover dye to print a wooden trivet I had bought for 50 cents.  Ahh...  now I think the fabric is starting to show some promise.

Take Home from Shanghai

Okay, I did not print fabric tonight.  Just too tired.  Maybe I will tackle it tomorrow night.

I did finish my first ATC in my Take Home from Shanghai series.  I am using the little bit of leftover silk from the Dinner in Shanghai art quilt I made for the February Interpret This! Challenge.  This one goes to Kate North.  Let me know if you would like to trade an ATC for one of mine in this series.

Rehash Dinner in Shanghai

Okay here is my February Concept for Interpret This!  For more detail about the quilt please check it out over at Interpret This!  Overall I am quite pleased with it but would love to hear your evaluation of what worked for you and what did not.  Like someone was blogging about recently--it is not "intuition" but a lifetime of learning that makes us good artists.

Just like last time, feel free to make good or bad comments on any part.  Here are some of my thoughts to get you started.

1.  My husband does not care for the bead work on the gold spirals in the background. What do you think? (I promise not to take offense if you side with him or gloat to him if you side with me. Well, maybe only gloat a little.)

2.  This is the first quilt that I have ever put on stretcher bars.  Does it work?  What other type of finishing would you suggest?

3.  I really like quilting like Kay had on her January Concept piece but I worry that a lot of quilting in the background will draw attention away from the fore ground.  Is there enough quilting on this piece?  Any suggestions about how I could have beefed up the quilting and still made it secondary to the overall design?

4.  I know that I tend to have a fairly spare touch with embellishment and have tried to push it a bit more here.  What do you think?  Any visions of additional embellishments come to you as you look at my piece?

5.  Any overall comments on the strength or weakness of the design?

By-Products

Unlike Libby, I am not done with my February "Interpret This!" quilt.  I probably won't be till the minute before the reveal.  And I can't show you my progress on it.  BUT I can show you some by-products.

I am still learning to judge how much dye to make for a project so I had tons of leftover, activated dye left from my February "Interpret This!" quilt project.  I quickly grabbed some pfd fabric, gathered it by hand, and dipped it into the dye.  Here is the result.  I really like it.

Our Love Story

I spent the first 30 years of my quilting life cutting large fabric pieces into small fabric pieces and then sewing them back together.  I spent the next few years sewing the scraps back together into fabric pieces large enough to quilt.  Now I am interested in surface design techniques that will allow me to minimize the cutting and sewing back together stages of the process.  This year in the Interpret This! I want to focus on making small whole cloth quilts using a variety of surface techniques. 

My first piece--Our Love Story--will be revealed this afternoon on Interpret This! (see above for the link).  Here is a small piece of it to encourage you to see the rest.  The primary technique I used for this project was painting with oil paintsticks.  I learned a lot.  Here  are a few of the things I want to remember for next time I use oil paintsticks.

1. They do have a wonderful opaque quality that allows you to use light over dark.
2. The best tool to use to apply them with is a very stiff brush. 
3. The painting technique is much closer to scrubbing then painting.
4. Getting the oil on the brush works best for me by brushing the tip of the oil paintstick directly.  I tried various other palette options but wasn't happy with them.
5. Mixing colors worked best as 1 swipe on the black and 2 swipes on the red paintstick (see my comment above).
6. If you don't like the results, let it dry and paint over. (can be repeated as needed!  LOL)
7. They work very well with stencils.
8. They work poorly as fabric monographics--just not wet enough.

Madeline

Madeline...Oh, Madeline...Wherefore art thou, Madeline?  I have my self-portrait for Interpret This! under control (check back on Thursday for the reveal) and have some time today to get you started.  Even better, I can add a row to you and turn you into a Project Linus quilt for a child in Haiti.  Now, where did I put that pattern?

How was your weekend?

Mine was pretty good.  How was yours?

I made a run to an art supply store an hour away to get more supplies for my Interpret This! self-portrait.  While there I got more supplies for fabric dyeing.  I see I will be spending more time doing that coming up soon.  I am so excited!

I spent quite a bit of time on Friday and Saturday on my self-portrait and then I rewarded myself by making more blocks for my Black, White and Red All Over quilt.  I have now started to assemble the blocks into strips.  Not quite as much fun now that size and shape matter.

If you compare the fabric in the Snowball quilt and the Black, White, and Red All Over (I gotta come up with a shorthand for that name!) you'll see a lot of overlap.  Makes good sense since the second quilt is a scrap quilt and believe me, I made lots of scraps in the process of making the Snowball quilt!  Wasn't that good planning on my part?  Tee Hee

No pictures today.  The self-portrait is a secret but I'll post more in-process pictures of the BWRAO (does that work for shorthand?) quilt soon.

Interpret This!

If you want to hear about the picture I chose to turn into an art quilt for the first challenge, follow this link.  Just as the original picture was a present for my mother, this one when finished will be a present for her too. The reveal of the art quilt will be on the Interpret This! blog on January 28.

Interpret This!

I have been invited to participate in a 2010 Challenge making art quilts!  I am sooooo excited!  The other invited artists are art quilters and they, plus any followers on the site, will make comments (good, bad, and ugly) about my work.  What an opportunity for growth! 

I know in the art classes I have taken that my favorite part has been when we all had the same assignment and then to see how we each handled it so differently.  That would always open my mind to so many other possibilities that I had never considered.  I am hoping this opportunity will do the same for me. 

Please come and see me at Interpret This!