A Diversion

Sometimes you just need a break from the business of making art. It's work. Sometimes you just want to play with fabric and sew. I was presented with the perfect reason to take such a break - a new great niece was born three weeks ago. Time to make a baby quilt. At a sewing retreat I attended earlier this month someone showed some blocks she had made using a pattern that wasn't very difficult in itself, but when tiled with other similar blocks made a very cool design. I dusted off my template making skills, and they needed some serious dusting, along with several attempts to make them come out the way they were supposed to come out. And this is the result.

I really like how this came out, and almost want to make a bigger version. Almost, but not quite. It started out at 40"x40" but I have washed it and it has shrunk up a bit. I like that because it makes the quilting show up better. Click on the image for a larger view.

 

 I quilted the white sections with a heart and feather type design and I tried to photograph it so the quilting showed up. Not very successful, so I upped the contrast and downed the brightness in Photoshop Elements and this shows a bit of the quilting.

Tomorrow I'm headed down to Bethesda, outside of Washington, D.C. to install my portion of this show. There will be seven of us exhibiting (there are eight names on the card, but one has dropped out due to family issues). The location is at the Dennis and Phillip Ratner Museum on Old Georgetown Road, just outside of the Capital Beltway. The show runs February 1 through the 27th, and the artists' reception is Sunday, February 5 from 1:30 to 3:30. Super Bowl Sunday - might be a bit of a conflict.... For more information, visit the website.

Off to Dhaka

I had to look this up in Wikipedia. Dhaka is the capital of Bangladesh, which is in southeast Aisa, east of India, and at the top of the Bay of Bengal. My quilt is going there, not me. It has been selected for the Art in Embassies program and will be picked up tomorrow and shipped off.  It's fairly small, 40" x 33" and is a whole cloth piece, painted. The background is made up of gelatin plate prints of hosta leaves. The three large leaves are also hosta plants, but I enlarged the images and drew the outlines with an airpen, stitched along the lines, and then brushed white paint lightly across the top to highlight the leaf shape.

Three Leaves ©2009

Three Leaves (detail)

This is a companion piece to Fading Glory, also gelatin plate prints of hosta leaves. This piece is larger, 57"x42", but is also a whole cloth, at least the background. As I made each print on this piece and then removed the fabric, there was still paint on the gelatin plate. I used this remaining paint to do the images on Three Leaves. The appliqued yellow flower is an image of a dying coneflower, greatly enlarged. The lines were drawn with an airpen, then quilted. The back of this piece is pretty cool because I rubbed paint over where the coneflower quilting is, which almost makes this a two-sided quilt. 

Fading Glory ©2009

Fading Glory (detail)

This piece is also away at a show being held at the Muse Gallery in Longmont, Colorado. 

And the show at the Torpedo Factory opens this week. This is the show that I had to quickly substitute another piece because I forgot I sold the one that was supposed to be in the show. Happy New Year!