For A Dear Friend

A dear friend of mine will be moving away later this month, so of course I had to make something for her to remember me by.

My friend and I are members of a small art quilting group that has gotten together every few months over the last several years. When the group learned (more than a year ago) of the upcoming move, we decided to create something that wouldn't be just a plain old quilt. Sure, we could make a nice quilt, but what would she do with it? One of our members had the idea of having each one of us make a small quilted piece (5 x 7 inches) that could have holes punched into the left side so they would all be put together into a memory book of sorts. The rest of us loved the idea and got to work.

What you see in the photo is my contribution. And there's a story behind it --

First, it's a block from the Jane Stickle 1863 quilt (commonly known as Dear Jane). Most of my readers know that I have made my own version of this quilt, so I thought it would be appropriate to make a block from it because it's definitely a reminder of me.

Second, the name of the block is "Eye of the Cyclone", which fits perfectly because I suspect that that is an accurate description of what my friend's life has been like while she's been preparing for her move (and, frankly, it describes my life recently as I help my parents prepare for a move). The block is far from perfect, but that's what happens when life is hectic.

And third, the block is made with red and white fabrics because it is only thanks to my dear friend that I was fortunate to see the famous red and white quilt exhibit ("Infinite Variety" ) in New York City a few years ago. (If you have not seen photos from that exhibit, click here for a sample.) That day was probably one of the top ten days of my life, so I will be eternally grateful to my friend for inviting me to join her that day.

Our quilt group gave the finished book to our friend last week, and I think we all agreed that it was a wonderful creation. Each page was unique and represented each quilter perfectly. Although we are sad to see our friend go, we really enjoyed taking part in making something special for her as she starts the next stage of her life.

Art From Friends

Over the last few years, I've been a member of a small art quilters' group where we've challenged each other to make things that weren't traditional quilts. I've posted about them once in a while and you can see some of the projects by clicking here.

Our last project was what you see in today's photo -- we made Quilter Trading Cards for each other. I am so pleased with what I received from my dear friends and now I have a work of art from all of them!

Wine and Art in Wellsboro

If you're anywhere near Wellsboro, PA tomorrow (Saturday, September 21st), you may want to go to the Wellsboro Wine and Art Tour. Reservations are suggested, but if it's like last year, people signed up at the last minute at the Chamber of Commerce building at the corner of Main Street and Central Avenue. There will be wine tasting at 12 different venues around town, and each place is also featuring a local artist, author, or musician. This year, the members of my art challenge group are delighted to be the featured artists at the Penn Wells Hotel, right on Main Street. You can taste wine and see some of our fiber art pieces on display. Included in the price (I believe it's $15 per person) is a wine glass to remind you of your day.

The above photo shows the glass from last year's tour...(the part that's out of focus is a picture of the Wynken, Blynken, and Nod statue on the town green). I believe this year's glass features a gaslight...something that Wellsboro is known for...

So come have some wine and enjoy the art!

Latest Challenge

My art quilt challenge group met yesterday to reveal our latest project (a piece inspired by a living creature, real or imaginary, any technique, any size) and what you see here is mine. It's approximately 10 inches by 14 inches. (the colors are lousy in the photos)

Here's a closeup --

The creature that I used as my inspiration first started out to be an inchworm, but then it evolved into worms in general...basically, the worms that appear on my driveway after a rain.

I started with a pieced background of several white fabrics covered with a hairy ribbon that I had in my supplies...

At first, I was planning on couching the ribbon, but decided that that would be too much work, so I found some round pieces of green tulle and arranged them like so...

I pressed some Mistyfuse onto the tulle...

And then fused the tulle onto the top of the ribbon and fabric base...using my applique pressing sheet for all the steps in which I used the Mistyfuse...

Then I added some beads and secured the tulle with some machine stitching in green thread (you can see that in the closeup photo earlier on in this post). I searched high and low in my quilting studio for a small vial of beads in various shades of green that I had used in a previous project, but couldn't find it anywhere, so I settled for some other beads that I could find...The hot pink and red beads were the wrong colors to use, but there were enough white/pale pink/sparkly beads in the pack that worked just fine.

I think I'll call my piece "Kindergarten Art Project" because it looks just like something a five-year-old might bring home for parents to proudly display on a refrigerator. "Look Mommy and Daddy, I'm an artist!"

Small Things

I'm afraid I won't be using up too much of my stash this month -- I've mainly been busy with spring cleaning (yuck) and there are a couple of small quilting projects with deadlines that need my attention. One is due on May 1st and what you see in the photo are the supplies I hope to use. I have a plan, but no guarantee that the plan will work...

KISSing

As I've mentioned in the past, I'm fortunate to belong to an art quilt challenge group with a few of my local quilting friends. For more than a year now, we have been challenging each other with a new project every three months or so. What you see in the above photo is my finished project for the latest challenge -- we were to use a letter or letters of the alphabet in our quilt. No other restrictions.

For the first several challenges, I stressed and worried about what I was going to do, but while working on the one from last time, I decided to just KISS it (Keep It Simple, Stupid). This whole experience is supposed to be fun and enjoyable, not something that keeps me up at night. So I continued with the KISS approach with this one as well.

I started with this....

....lots of scraps...

...even scraps that were already sewn together...

I then randomly placed about 5-7 layers of scraps on half of the wrong side of a piece of black fabric, about 12 x 25 inches...

I folded the other half over the scraps and sewed through all the layers in a pattern resembling the letter "V". Some of you may realize that this is basically the technique for making chenille...

I then started to cut through the top layer of black fabric using sharp scissors...

But I decided that I needed to cut through more layers of fabric in order to get more of an interesting design in the end...so I remembered that I had a chenille cutter somewhere in my sewing box....

That made things a lot easier and gave me the results that I wanted... 

But it needed one more step in order to get to what it looks like in the very first photo. I had to put in the washing machine and dryer..

And it came out just fine...and surprisingly, there were very few threads on my husband's underwear when I finished the load!

I call this piece "V Is For Victory", because I was victorious in completing this project without any complaining, whining, or stressing!

To see my previous challenge pieces, click here.

Challenge Defined

Something that requires thought and skill for resolution...

If you're a regular reader of my blog, you know that for the last year or so I have been part of a small art quilting challenge group (click here to see all my previous posts about it). This time around it was my turn to issue the challenge. So, here's what I came up with -- we were to create a piece that was monochromatic and had to be based on a color that started with the first letter of our first name. No other rules about size or design. Only one-word colors were allowed -- that meant we couldn't use Persian Blue if the name started with P or Hot Pink if the name started with H. 

The color I came up with was Asphalt, although when one of my quilting friends saw the fabrics I was using, she thought my color was Ash. Either one works.

Since this piece was due the day after my 54th (yikes!) birthday last week, I had the title for it before I had a design. Eventually, the design idea came to me. But of course, I waited until ten days before the deadline to start working on it! 

I call this "54 Shades of Gray" and the 54 pieces in it are all different and represent my natural hair color at age 54. Some of the pieces are the reverse side of fabrics...that's how I was able to come up with 54 different shades from about 30 fabrics. Simple flip-and-sew technique, so the quilting was done as soon as the pieces were all sewn together. Nothing else special or unique. 

I've been a bit concerned that most of my challenge pieces have been quite simple. But at this stage in my life I'm going to follow the wise wisdom of Henry David Thoreau who said: "Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify."

That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

Talent Everywhere

Yesterday, I blogged about my recent art quilting challenge piece, and today you get to see all the pieces from the talented quilters in our group. I love the variety that we all bring to the project -- and I especially love seeing our creations in person.

Shall We Dance?

After writing yesterday's post, I realized that I had not yet shown the last quilt I made for my art quilters' challenge group. My piece is called "Let's Do the Twist(er)".

The challenge was to use a photo for inspiration in any way we wanted, so that meant that we had a lot of freedom in what to create. The only other requirement was to use yellow somewhere in the quilt. I decided to kill two birds with one stone and try to make it something that would also fit the challenge for my guild's September exhibit as well. That challenge was to interpret a phrase, book title, song lyric, etc in a quilt. Lots of leeway there.

I don't know how I decided, but I settled on using a photograph that I found on the Internet of the Twister game. I'm sure most of you are familiar with it. Here's my writeup for the label at the exhibit --

This is my interpretation of the childhood game, Twister, with some fun word play on the popular dance we’ve all danced at weddings, The Twist. Of course, in my version, the circles are a bit frayed and the quilting is a bit off-kilter, but then...I’m usually a bit frayed and off-kilter after a round of The Twist or a game of Twister! 

The piece is fairly small, about 15" x 17", so I quilted it in a square spiral on my Bernina.

Looming Deadline

The deadline for my art quilting challenge group is just over two weeks away and all I've done for the last two and a half months is decide on a title for the piece and the fabrics! Yikes, I better get going with the actual quilt! Something tells me it's going to be fairly simple.

Group Challenge Number Three

As promised yesterday, here's a shot of all of the quilts from the latest challenge of my art challenge quilting group. 

One person wasn't there for the group shot, but you can see her project below.

All of these look so much better in person....

Challenge Fun

This is my latest project for my art challenge group -- The mission this time was to use the theme of "spring" to create a piece using scraps from the other quilters in the group and a solid fabric. When I first selected the scraps, I had no clue what I was going to make. I just picked everyone's fabrics with dots. I thought about all of the usual spring holidays and themes -- Easter, flowers, bunnies, baskets, etc -- but nothing really moved me. So I did some more thinking about spring holidays and remembered the Maypole. So, what you see here is my version of the view looking up to the sky through the center of the Maypole.

Here's a shot of the quilt on point...I think setting blocks on point make quilts more visually interesting, so I wanted to take a photo of this piece on an angle (the dark background is not part of the quilt). It's not very large, only about 16 inches square.

Here's a closeup...

 I quilted the spiral using the walking foot on my machine. As you can see from the shot of the back, I didn't start right in the center. It was a bit wonky at first because it was a tight curve, but got a lot easier as I went out.

This journey with my fellow quilters has been a wonderful experience. I love each challenge, even with the frustrations involved, and am quite happy with all of my finished pieces. No, they're not masterpieces, but nevertheless, I'm proud to show them off. To see all my blog posts about the various challenges this group has had in the past, just click on the "OOLQ" label on my blog's right sidebar.

But you'll have to wait until tomorrow to see a photo of the "spring" pieces from the rest of the group...All of them are wonderful!

Finally!

After several weeks of waking up at 4AM and stressing about what I'm going to make, and after hours and hours spent thinking and looking through books and magazines and the Internet for inspiration, I believe I may have finally settled on an idea for the current "mission" of my challenge art quilting group.

When we last met, we were given the theme of  "spring" and told to go through each other's scraps looking for pieces to use in our assignment. We are free to interpret "spring" any way we want. One additional rule is that we are to also use "a recognizable piece" of a solid fabric in the final project. I'm still deciding between two solids, but that will be a much easier task than coming up with the design.

I'm glad this headache is over....now to actually get working on my piece (due in just over a month)! Wish me luck!

Only God Can Make A Tree

I'm certainly not very good at it...

My local challenge group met several weeks ago to reveal our latest projects. The challenge was to use the Gail Garber-style curved-flying-geese method in our piece. What you see in the photo is the small quilt that I made. (the greens are much nicer in person)

The inspiration for this piece came from the Christmas card that was sent to me by my friend Nancy. Since Nancy was the one who assigned this "mission", I felt that it was appropriate. Initially, I was going to make a larger quilt with three trees, but after many days of frustration, that piece wound up in the trash (for many good reasons).

The deadline for the reveal was getting closer and I was starting to sweat it, but I decided that there was no reason to stress out about it so much. This is supposed to be fun and a learning experience, not something to raise my blood pressure and keep me up at night. And I did learn something new...not just the curved flying geese, but I also learned how to embellish with seed beads.

So I went with something small and simple, but I think it fits the goal of the challenge quite well. And I'm happy with it, and that's all that matters.

You can see my previous posts about this challenge here and here...Eventually, I'll post a photo of all of the completed projects from the group, but in the meantime, you can see Susan's and Madalene's.

And, if you're interested in seeing my first quilt from the group's first challenge, you can read about it here.

Can't Pin Me Down

I don't usually pin much in my quilting except for when I sew borders on a quilt (that's a definite must-do!), so this recent challenge from my art quilters' group was definitely a challenge... I've discovered that "planned" curved seams are a lot harder to sew than the free-form Gee's-Bend-style curves of my finished quilt in the last challenge.

Seeing Beyond the Trees

The stress of attempting to be an "art quilter" is sometimes worse than the stress of a real job!