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I walk Basset Boy early in the morning during the hot summer months. It’s so early that both night and morning people are sleeping. The stars are usually bright and visible. I LOVE that hour: all is still-even air conditioners, there are no cars, no pedestrians and the whole earth is shrouded in peacefulness and quiet. There is virtually no color and I see most things in silhouette. It’s beautiful. When Elizabeth gave us our Sept assignment and asked us to work with “lost edges” I was, well, lost. I wrote about part of the process here. I am fairly…
I’ll be teaching again at the Houston International Quilt Festival-and this year is its 40th anniversary! The Festival organizers ask each teacher to consider donating a small quilt to an on-site silent auction to raise money for the non-profit IQF. I really enjoyed making my donation quilt this year, come take a look: I started with an eco-printed wool panel purchased from Tin Thimble. If you’re local, you really have to spend a day at the old Loomis Fruit Shed: have a lovely lunch in the atrium, browse one of the coolest nurseries around, enjoy the shops (olive oil, wine,…
I recently developed a new workshop titled “Your Quilt, Your Way” in which I work up several quilting design plans for students based on a submitted image of their work. I just taught it over the weekend and I think it was a good workshop. I worked with 9 student quilt tops (as other participants observed), most of them art quilts. Many times an art quilt demands mindfully chosen but very simple quilting; quilting that enhances, yet neither shouts nor shrinks. If the quilt design is strong on its own, the very best quilting choice may be parallel lines or…
I’m working on the Elizabeth Barton Master Class assignment for this month which calls for “lost edges”. Lost edges recede into the background to create the illusion of form. It was a new concept to me-or so I thought. The more I researched it the more I realized I knew exactly what it was. And indeed, I’d been fascinated with lost edges since the beginning of my quilt making: I made this quilt in 2001, straight from Alex Anderson’s star book. This is one of the blocks. See how the edges of the saw tooth star fade into the background?…
If you’re familiar with Julia Cameron’s classic book The Artist’s Way, you’ll know that she encourages a weekly self-date to view art. I don’t always honor my weekly date but I try-it really does fuel the creative spirit. My date last week took me to Gallery at 48 Natoma in Folsom. Their current exhibit, Bird’s Eye View: Aerial Art, paired one of my favorite textile artists, Linda Gass, with watercolor artist Elaine Bowers and it was a powerful combination: The gallery’s description of the exhibit: “During this historical time of drought, Californians are connected to the water in our region…
I completed my latest piece, “Poppies”, on Sept 2, barely in time to submit for consideration in the Pacific International Quilt Festival. It was a wild ride, down to the wire. I will hold off on photos of its completion until it shows, but I do want to share some of my “learning curve”. Believe it or not, this was the state of affairs 20 days before submission. I had another idea in mind and had started that piece, but realized I did not have a clear view of what I wanted. So my Plan B was to work on…
The Fall Quilt Show Season has opened! It’s been awhile since I’ve been to a show so it was especially nice to be able to briefly visit the Gold Bug show. They were in a new location this year and it was fabulous-lots of great light and more vendors than I remember. And they had a CHOCOLATE vendor (Cello Chocolate)-now why haven’t other guilds thought about that one, huh? Quilters and chocolate-duh! Oh it is great chocolate too-they had samples of each of their 8(?) types, each from a different region. It was almost like a wine tasting-fun. There were…
August was a “beyond busy” month and I did not even get to the mock up stage of my design for Elizabeth Barton‘s Master Class. Our theme was letters-letters of any kind or language. I was pretty stumped at first on this one but some of the designs that other students came up with made me realize that I should include this in my bag of tricks for the future. I came up with 2 ideas-we’re allowed 3 for critique-and they are very different from each other. Now I admit I was pretty clueless on what to do with the…
Sometimes I have a forehead-slap moment. This has been a tough week. I have many simultaneous projects/commitments and I’m trying to finish a piece for the Pacific International Quilt Festival deadline-yeah, that’s 12 days from now. So I’m petal-to-the-metal trying to get this piece done. My plan for this piece is to create acres of this background, then lay down the design afterwards. I used this same technique on Breeze II. This technique involves a crazy amount of thread. Of course, being The Thread Snot, I am using silk thread-oh I love this stuff! I am particularly drawn to this…
Although it’s been a very busy week, I just don’t seem to have a lot to show for it. I was hell bent on fixing my Tabula Rosa vest as well as my July “Take 5” Elizabeth Barton Master Class quilt. Both are going to take longer than I thought but as always, I’m sure to learn a lot to learn along the way. In review, here is the “before” shot of the vest: the proportions were all off-the vest was way too long for me. After shortening the front of the vest about 2 1/4″ and tapering to 1…