spring update

Our newest grandchild arrived via emergency C-section, accompanied by a strep infection which he shared with his mom, but after a week in the hospital, they both came home and seem to be recovering nicely. His name is AMITAV DJANGO WALEN. Go figger. I'm madly in love!!!

But let's go back to quilting, since this is a trunk show...........

I took a one-day course on making a variant of a "pineapple" block, and decided to use the shelf of floral fabrics which I collected when I'd just begun making quilts. I barely made a dent in this stash! I started out making scrappy blocks, but soon determined that they looked better with just a one-color pattern, with variations of fabrics of that one color. When I put them up on the wall, I realized they could form a pattern, a diagonal line of one color, and then another. So here's the top, at the point where I stopped adding to it (full view and detail):





I've also been slowly working on Dave's 70th Birthday Quilt. I'd sent out squares of white fabric to all his children, grandchildren, "adopted" children, and his older brother, and asked them to decorate their block with sharpies or paints or whatever they wanted. I love kids' quilt blocks, and I think my favorite on this quilt comes from the youngest...almost 2 years old (upper right). I'm slowly hand-quilting it,and if Dave's lucky, it'll be ready by his 71st! Please forgive the wrinkly photos!


And a little closer view...


Since I'm still in full-avoidance mode of my UFO's, I started another project I've wanted to do for a long time. Dave and I took our honeymoon to Japan, and we brought back many photographic souveniers. One of my favorites was of a tiny toddler, whose parents got her to pose in front of some "hello kitty" type of posters. I snapped her picture too, and always wanted to make a quilt of it. I'm making the flat-colored background up first:



I'll show you the finished product in my next randomly occurring entry.

Finally, let me tell you about my first ONLINE COURSE...at Quilt University. I'm taking "Realistic Fabric Portraits" with Marilyn Belford. For this, I selected a little picture of my granddaughter, Ana. It's a wonderful feeling to study and study and study a face you love, as you decide how to illustrate it in fabric. Marilyn is a generous teacher, with fulsome handouts and lots of daily feedback, but working as she does is very exacting. I'm ever more impressed with her work as I stumble along making my Ana.
Here are some shots of the Ana piece in several stages. Right now, I'm stuck on how to show her lovely curly blonde hair, but I'm sure Marilyn will come to my rescue..... BTW, I highly recommend trying the Q.U. courses; I know I'll go back.

First, here's my mischievous Ana around age 6:


Here's my working drawn pattern of the photo:


And here she is after several weeks' work, with me stuck on the hair problem:


So much to do, so little time......

What I've just finished....or almost

We have a new baby coming into our family soon, so of course I asked my son, Alec, what colors they would prefer....pink, blue, yellow? They (foolishly) said it was "artist's choice." Hoo hah!

Now I love to go to the 5-cent baskets in quilt stores, and now have a HUGE basket of my own filled with pretty bits of fabric that I wouldn't buy if it were yardage. I pulled out all the fabrics I thought my grandchild might want to look at, went through my old stash of commercially printed fabrics, and cut out 3 1/2 inch blocks, putting them together fairly randomly. After I'd sewn several rows, I thought that the onlooker needed a calm space to rest the eye, so I inserted a large (maybe 12 x 12) square of a restful orange with white polka dots, and then kept on with my scrappy blocks. Stand back....better, but now the middle is boring. So I filled it with funky little appliqued houses. Originally, I was going to put a splended mola of fishes in the center, but I decided to move it to the back. Then, after playing for several hours on my design wall, I decided that the back had to be all REDS. The binding is a mess o' reds connected together in one long strip. The quilt turned out bigger than I thought. It's actually more like a floor blanket, but it got a nice reception at the Space Telescope Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University. That's where my lovely daughter-in-law, the astrophysicist, works. She was told to come to an Important Meeting in a room off the cafeteria, and voila!...there were all her colleagues, friends, and us family.





And here's the back:






In quite a different mood, I just finished a large piece (31 x37) based on a photo I took in Seattle. I call it SPRING COMES TO THE INNER CITY.





I've also been trying to hustle on doing a 12 x 12 for the 2009 SAQA auction. I've long been interested in Ms. Josephine Baker, and what an astonishing life she has led. She's a much more complex woman than the beautiful young black girl who danced almost naked in Paris! Here she is.........in progress.






Wait'll you see her with her JEWELS on!!! I call it THE MARVELOUS MS. JOSEPHINE BAKER.

Happy Dances

If I could just stop clapping my hands and dancing around the room, I could get these boxed up and mailed off!

My SELF-PORTRAIT: IF YOU'RE HAPPY AND YOU KNOW IT...." was selected by Juror Pam RuBert for SAQA's juried exhibition: A Sense of Humor. It will go to Houston, Chicago, and Long Beach, which is much more traveling than I've done in years!


















"MASTERPIECE FOR NANCY" was selected by Juror Bruce Hoffman to go into the SAQA 2009 exhibit: "Points of View". This show will debut at the Long Beach Quilt Festival.
















THE WATER CARRIERS was selected by Jurors Judy Schwender, Caryl Bryer Fallert, and Freida Fairchild to show at the Yeiser Art Center in Padukah, which will run simultaneously with the National Quilt Show.



















THISTLES FOR JANE was chosen by Jurors Jodi Walsh and Trudi Van Dyke for a juried exhibition entitled "Tribute to Fiber Art" at the Black Rock Center for the Arts, in Gaithersburg, MD.





















Perhaps the one I feel most deeply about is SUE'S BLUE FISH QUILT, which was juried into this year's Sacred Threads Exhibition, which will be held in Reynoldsburg, Ohio, at the same time as QSDS and Quilt National, after which it will be sent to live with Sue's daughter in Chicago.




















Finally, Diane Herbort invited those of us who bought some of the GORgeous fabric dyed by Heide Stoll Weber at QSDS last year to use some of it in a quilt that would be displayed as a special exhibit entitled "Inspired by the Fabric", which will be shown at the 2009 Quilters Heritage Celebration in Lancaster, PA in April. My piece is entitled A WINDOW IN IRELAND, and is based on a photo taken on a long-ago bike trip through Ireland. I just loved the colors and the chickens looking in the window~

What a wonderful time of life!

Hey, if someone had told me how good RETIREMENT is, I would've done it earlier!

Well, its winding-down-from-the-show-time. All the quilts have gone home or to a new home. I feel particularly blessed in that regard. Two of my quilts ("Dear Mr. Obama" and "Home") were purchased by a gentleman who has a lifetime collection of political art, especially inaugural art. His collection is so big that his wife insisted he get it out of the house, so he apparently built a two-story building in their back yard to house it. I'm told that his will stipulates that upon his death, the entire collection is willed to the OBAMA LIBRARY! It doesn't get any better than that! Since President Obama couldn't make it to our show, at least part of our show will go to him! (If you want to see these two quilts, scroll down in this blog.)

The third quilt I made for the show was a simple one: The word OBAMA, under which was "11-04-08" and "1-20-09"; attached was a book for visitors to record their memories of this period. Here are a few of the comments which moved me:

Throughout the election process…I held my breath and prayed. I prayed….and held my breath. Election night I celebrated on U St. and danced in front of the White House. On Jan. 20th, I braved the cold for 8 hours to hear my President.
Yes, we can!
Yes, we did!
Yes, we will change the world.



My wife works at the federal courthouse at 3rd and Constitution, so we were able to be inside on a very cold inauguration day, but only about 200 yards from the Capitol. The thing I’ll remember most is taking our 16-mo old daughter to the event and thinking that she will grow up in an era in which there is no longer a glass ceiling for African Americans to ascend to the Presidency. She will never have a recollection of a time when being of African descent prevents a person from leading the United States government…how cool is that?!

At the People’s Concert, what I most remember is the peace in the moment. All the people of different colors and nationalities laughing, singing together,standing in the cold waiting to see our next President. The Joy of it all!


And here's what some kids wrote when they came to the show:

I like it.
I love it cause it expired me.
O to the Bama. ALL DAY!
Don’t H8T on Obama cause he’s da bomb. Like tic! Tic!
#1 is Obama.
Obama I love you!!


We even got some lovely comments on our quilts:

Moved me to tears~ C.H.


Most beautiful quilts I have ever seen. The emotion is overwhelming.
JS, Hedgesville, W.Va


Never knew such emotion could be expressed through textiles.
LB, Silver Spring


I cried! This exhibit brings back those tears. RW



I was emotionally moved by the pieces in this exhibit. I smiled and was filled with pride. MF



I have been to this exhibit five times – three times I brought friends. Each time I see something new and wonderful and never cease to be amazed at the talent of the quilters, but more – the love that flows from the quilters’ art work. JB



It's true. It was a love fest. And so is our beautiful book.

Here's some PR I sent out:

Thought you'd like to see our PR on our "new baby":

Our new book based on the exhibit "President Obama: A Celebration in Art Quilts" is now for sale online. Below is a copy of the description on the Blurb Book website. We're already a "best seller!" The book is beautiful, truly.

Here's the BEST part: ALL PROFITS FROM THE SALE OF THIS BOOK WILL GO TO SCHOLARSHIP FUNDS FOR ART STUDENTS AT MONTGOMERY COLLEGE, THE HOST OF OUR QUILT SHOW!

To find the book easily, here's the DIRECT LINK:

Direct link is http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/596799


The ObamaQuilters are 60 fiber artists who formed a grassroots, all-volunteer, multi-ethnic group of quilters from all across America. We produced a vibrant quilt show, which was held at the Cafritz Art Center of Montgomery College in Maryland, from Feb. 9-March 5, 2009. This book is based on that show, and includes photos of the quilts, the quilters, and copies of the artist statements, which in many cases, are as moving as the quilts themselves.

We ObamaQuilters are excited to share our passion for art quilts and our gratitude for being alive to see the historic election of President Barach Obama come to pass.


Tell all your friends! And won't these make lovely holiday/ celebration gifts????

The ObamaQuilters Show

What a group! Through the internet, we forged bonds, of kindness, helpfulness, and obamaness. The day of the opening reception for the show, Feb. 13th, 2009, began with a luncheon at my place so that at least some of these women could meet each other. We had a blast! And what do quilters do when they get together? Show and Tell -- so we got to see Lucky's latest (including one in which she actually wrote out the entire inaugural speech plus her own comments!), a new piece by Sherry Shine (showing both Rosa Parks and Barack Obama in the same bus, which blew us away), and other gorgeous stuff. Here are some home photos:










...and here are some of us in Susan Shie's sketch book!:



Then there were more photos at the Cafritz Center:






And now there's our BOOK! All profits from the sale of the book will go to scholarship funds for art students at Montgomery College, the host of our show.

President Obam...

By ObamaQuilters

Book Preview

THE ELECTION

I will never be able to describe in words the joy, excitement, pride in my country that I experienced the night of the election. I couldn't let down my guard until I saw the 11 pm postings, and then I couldn't stop crying and laughing...for hours. I woke up, still giddy, the next morning, and went to the Obama campaign office in Bethesda, which was being rapidly torn down. Many people came over to me as I gathered up my "Dear Mr. Obama" quilt, telling me how much pleasure it had given them, and it also made a great backdrop for photos of each other.

As I drove home with Mr. O on the passenger seat, I began wondering how many other ObamaMama's there were out in the country who, like me, was driven to make a celebratory quilt. I thought about how wonderful it would be if there were such quilts, to bring them together for the inauguration. So, after running the idea by several friends as a "sanity check", and asking Susan Shie if she'd be willing to contribute, I sent out this notice:

I have this crazy idea: wonderful "Obama Quilts" on display in
Washington, D.C. for the inauguration.

I see two major challenges:
(1) Can we get enough quilts to make it possible?
And,
(2) Can we find a great place(s) to display them?

I plan to tackle both challenges at the same time.

So, to you wonderful Obama-mamas out there, I'm trying to get a
sense of the "inventory" we could amass in the next month and a half.

I'm excited to tell you that Susan Shie has promised to send a large
Obama quilt to help us jump-start the effort. So, please tell me if
you
have an "Obama" quilt to display.

While this is going on, I am going on a hunt for places to hang
them. This week I'll start making phone calls. If any of you know
people I could call to get the quilts displayed, please let me know.

I'm open to all suggestions, comments, advice, and tips.

Sue

Well....within 30 hours I had over 40 quilters raring to go. So the first question was answered: we did have an inventory. Now where could I find a venue in a town that had no more hotel rooms left? After many days of fruitless searches, we lucked out.
One of my many emails crossed the desk of an art teacher (David Phillips) at a local college (Montgomery College), and he was heading off to a meeting with several people from their Arts Institute, and he thought that our proposal might fill a gap in their winter schedule that they were having trouble filling. He presented the idea and they liked it! In fact, they got excited too. The college had received a donation from the Cafritz family to build a new Arts Center, and that's where we'll be. It's a wonderful, modern urban museum space with high spaces, good windows, good walls. It's perfect. And the college is being so gracious to us: they will insure the quilts, unpack and repack them, have them professionally photographed and hung, prepare accompanying matrials, and do some PR work. They will make a DVD of all the quilts which will play in their lobby. They will print a binder of all the Artist Statements, which in this group, are sometimes even more moving than the quilts! They even hope to produce a book about this historic exhibit, the proceeds of which will go to scholarship funds for the students, many of whom, like Obama, came up the hard way and are inspirational in their own right.

Now, heading into the home stretch, we are a group of 61 art quilters: all-volunteer, grass-roots, multi-ethnic and very talented. We come from all corners of the US and as far away as Australia. We'll have two large Susie Shie pieces, a group quilt by Fiber Artists for Obama that was shown in Houston, a piece by Michelle Flamer that went to the DNC convention, banners, flags, portraits, and more. Many of the quilters (like me) have been moved to do more than one entry. It's going to be a FABulous show.

The show is called: "President Obama: A Celebration in Art Quilts".
It will hang at the Cafritz Art Center, 150 King Street, Silver Spring, MD.
Dates: Feb. 9 to March 5.
Opening reception will be Friday the 13th from 6 pm -->.

You are all cordially invited!!!!


You've seen my original Obama piece, but I'll share two other works (in progress):
"HOME" is made for Malia and Sasha (in my mind), and it depicts the happy new White House on a bright sunny day, with dad going off to the oval office, and the rest waving goodbye to him. The sun is so happy he's wearing sunglasses, but he could also represent the secret service guys whose job it is to protect all these wonderful people.

The second piece is to be an interactive piece, displayed with an attached notebook and pen. The title is "What was it like for you?" It's composed of many different pieces of plaid fabric to represent the diversity of us all.








One of the lovely spin-offs of development of this show was that a number of us were invited to be interviewed by Karen Musgrave who is with Quilter's SOS -- Save Our Stories, a project of the Alliance for American Quilts. The tapes and accompanying photos will be part of a public archive that will be made available for the public and future researchers and quilt lovers. The project has more than 800 interviews online, archived at the Library of Congress. (www.allianceforamericanquilts.org/qsos/)

Now, wouldn't it be lovely if this tribute show to a most popular president at a historic junction in our history could be seen outside of the D.C. area? Let us know if you want it to visit your town!

The Fall

I finally put the finishing touches on my Pelican quilt, which is a collage of a bunch of photos Dave and I took when we toured southern Florida. We spent three hours watching them at the Bird Santuary run by Laura Quinn on Key Largo. These are such amazing birds, and when they come in for a landing, they look like pterodactyls with their 7-10 foot wing span. Some, like the guy in the center, are quite cheeky. You see that look in his eye? He's saying, "You got a fish...I know you do...hand it over!" It was fun to figure out how to attach all the shells (many sewed on, others glued), to make a wave (a piece of lace curtain), to show distance (size as well as size of chicken scratch quilting stitches), and to show a storm coming in from the right (luckily found several scraps of sky fabric). I even found a use for the tiny metal fish charms I bought. Now, having hung it in one quilt show, I've realized how heavy all that stuff is....and my horizontal lines are separating in spots, so it's going back to the shop for some overhaul. The photos are from before completion, but they tell the story.











Veggie Update: I added another veggie to my series..a charming beet, who allowed me to pose all her leaves all spread out on a beautiful silk moire background. Not an easy fabric to quilt, let me warn you! But it's so pretty when the light hits it just right. I call it "The Expansive Beet."









Good Things:
(1) first place for "Homage for Donna" at the Young at Art show in Va.
(2) Mississippi John Hurt sold at the SAQA auction and went to a good home.
(3) Viewer's Choice award for "Gotta Dance" at the Nimble Fingers show (a local guild)
(4) Two small pieces sold at Needle Chasers of Chevy Chase show (Homage to Donald Sultan & The Coneflowers)
(5) Masterpiece for Nancy was accepted into SAQA's 2009 "Points of View" show.

This ain't why I quilt, but it sure is nice when it happens. I quilt because I "have to."

Obama!

I got a notice about two weeks ago that MoveOn.com was sponsoring an artists' call for ObamaArt, and I got so excited! I've been an ObamaFan since I first heard him speak at the last Democratic Convention. I've found myself cutting out photos of him and saving excerpts from his speeches, as I came across them in newspapers and magazines. I've read his two books, and I continue to experience him as the most remarkable political figure and the most inspirational since JFK. So I buckled down (that is, told my sweet husband, David, that he was on duty to make the suppers until further notice), and produced the quilt below within the two week window of opportunity. I photographed it and sent it in before the deadline, but I still need to do the label, the sleeve, and a bit more surface quilting.

The idea of the image is that from a distance, I hoped it would look like Mr. Obama is looking out of a multi-paned window. Up close, each pane is a page of a letter that I wrote to him. It's called "Dear Mr. Obama." If I'm very very lucky, it will be selected to be shown at the Democratic National Convention. If not, it will be placed on MoveOn's eBay page and auctioned off, proceeds to go to liberal causes. Here's a shot of the quilt, and a detail of page one.

What I've Done This Summer

Well, the summer started with the discovery of a new spring veggie to add to my series: a ramp. I bought this little fellow for 5 cents and took him home and posed him and photographed him and drew him from several angles, and several hours later I began to realize that there was a funny smell in the air. By evening, my ramp was in the garbage can OUTSIDE. So here's the final product. It's only 9 by 11, and the letters are done by couching perl cotton.



You may notice a little red triangle at the bottom of the ramp; that's my new "secret signature." I tried all sorts of arrangements of my name, my initials, and finally fell upon this as I picked up some scraps of red silk from the floor! It'll be hiding in my quilts from now on.

The next piece I finished was unearthed during the above clean-up. It began as a study of negative space and flower suggestion, with just the outline of a line of coneflowers. I noticed that the color values were very similar, which was why I had set it aside for who knows how long. Now, finding it again, I kind of liked the similar values, and decided to continue that theme, adding a tiny inner border and outer border. It's hand quilted with metallic thread, and beaded for practice. I don't know whether it "works" or not, but I like it.



Another project I started is to work slowly through the Art Quilt Workbook by Jane Davila and Elin Waterston. I'm loving this book,and learning a lot! Each chapter teaches several things,and includes a list of websites to visit and artists to learn about, whose work illustrates the topic of the chapter. The chapters end with production of a small (9 x 12 inch, vertical) quilt. I'm only up to chapter 4, but here are some of the small quilts that have come from this work. The first is called "Thistles: A Color Study." My goal in this piece was to practice showing distance (which I did by having farther flowers be smaller and less distinct, and using overlap to show what's in front of what) and to break the borders. Here's the quilt, and below it I'll tell you what I REALLY learned.




You've probably noticed it already. The orange flowers, which were to be behind the thistles JUMPED in front of them. Why? Because warm colors come forward and cool colors recede. I hope I won't forget that again.

The next exercise, in Chap. 3, was to do a little pear from a pattern. Here's "The Pink Pear." I added the leaf, which is two-sided, and has a little bit of wire down the middle vein so the leaf is 3-D and can be "posed" in different ways.



The quilt made for the final exercise of Chap. 3 is called "My Lily" and is based on some lovely lilies that grow in the shady part of my backyard. They're short lived but have large flowers with fluffy, ruffled petals, strong red-orange pistels (or maybe they're stamens?), and sturdy leaves and stems. I must have tried a dozen times to draw one to get a "pattern" for a quilt, and finally a friend suggested that I lay tracing paper over my best drawing, and deliberately leave out lines, simplifying the image. I could do that several times until I got one that worked. That was a very helpful suggestion.




One of the artists that I discovered through this Workbook is Raoul Dufy, and I found his early work particularly appealing. There was one picture that looked like blobs of color, over which he would do an outline of a flower. I had just been practicing my hand at dyeing fabric, and several of my fabrics look like "blobs of color." (And some look even worse than that!) Anyway, here's my attempt to do an "Homage to Raoul Dufy":



A group of friends will be getting together to work through the book this fall, so I get to take a hiatus from homework till they catch up.

Another wonderful thing that I did this summer was to spend a week at QSDS, where the "big girls" play. It was exciting all week, just being in the company of so many artists working up and down the hallway in the hotel where it's held. Several times a day I would prowl through the Master Class to see how their work was progressing. Wow.

Now, I studied with Jane Sassaman, one of my very first quilt teachers, in a course she calls "Shape Shifting" -- but by the end of the week, I still had the same shape! If you ever have a chance to take a class from her, do so. She's organized, inspirational, kind and supportive...qualities that are hard to find in the aggregate. I think I was still stuck on thistles (pardon the pun), so one of the pieces I worked on was an abstraction of them; I'm going to call this piece (if I ever finish it) "Thistles for Jane." Below is a shot of Jane taking a photo of an early stage, and below that is a shot of where it stands now.






The actual color of the background is somewhere between the two pictures above. My next step is to decide where the borders will be -- e.g.,when the center is "done." My daughter, who is an artist, used to paint these enormous swirling abstract paintings, and I recall asking her how she knew when it was "done." She looked at me in amazement. "Mom, the picture tells you when it's done!" I keep listening, but so far no objects have spoken up.

I started a second piece in Jane's class; I got an urge to do a black and white study...so, of course, I began with a piece of the brightest pink fabric I had with me. You can see it below as it sits in my "to do" pile. I don't know if I like it enough to continue working on it, so I'll let it marinate a bit more.

TWO NEW PROJECTS

At the end of April, I went to the Hudson River Valley art workshops to study for a week with Margot Lovinger. If you don't know her wonderful work, just google her. Margot taught how to use layers of sheers to achieve depth and dimension in quilt art. We all brought as many different colors of tulle as we could find, and it was a hoot as we opened our bags and the stuff exploded! We were asked to bring a photo from which we could work. We drew it's major outlines, blew it up in size using an overhead projector, and ultimately traced the image, using a lightbox, onto a piece of artist canvas.



















We fused Wonder Under to large pieces of fabric which would form the major shapes in our picture, as you can see in this next picture....














and then we began to build layers of sheers to define shapes, make shadows, modulate color, and create depth.




The sheers are hand sewn through the canvas with tiny "tacking" stitches, often layer upon layer, to get the desired effect. Ultimately, we auditioned different colors of tulle to use as an overlay (mine turned out to be a vibrant purple!). The fabric picture was made 6 inches larger on all sides so that we could use the mounting Margot taught us. Foam core board was affixed atop wood framing. This layer was followed by one-inch foam, cut to the edges of the board, and topped with a layer of batting. The quilt-canvas is the top layer, and it is stretched around the framing and stapled to the wood in the back. The image, therefore, continues around the sides of the piece. Here's a picture of my final project, which I call "Water Carriers."





The second project I recently completed was to try to make a 12" x 12" square for the SAQA online auction to be held in October, proceeds going to support the organization. As an Old Folkie, I'd long wanted to make something in honor of one of my folk heroes, an old bluesman named Mississippi John Hurt. John was born in Avalon, Mississippi in 1892, and I got to hear him in a club in Washington D.C. shortly after he was "discovered" and shortly before he died (1966). John's family were very poor sharecroppers, but his mother managed to squeak out $1.50 for his first guitar when he was 9 years old. Nobody taught him to play his syncopated finger-picking style; as he said, "I just make it sound like I think it ought to." This wize, but gentle and soft-spoken man wrote some great hot songs, like "Nobody's Dirty Business" and "Candy Man Blues." This is my quilt for John:





Now go see all the amazing quilts that are piling up on the SAQA auction site, and buy one!