fiberstudio

A Diversion

2012-01-30T11:38:00.001-05:00

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

2012-01-09T10:25:00.002-05:00

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 (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 (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!

It's a Mystery

2011-12-16T16:31:00.000-05:00

Once again I have let posting go by the wayside. It seems that everything else is getting in the way and I'm not really doing much art anyhow. Maybe it should be a new year's resolution to be more consistent. I think I've said that before, and look how well I've done.

So what's the mystery? I know this has happened to others. I went to the Closet Gallery to find a quilt that was going to go off to a show. It's a group show, not a juried show, and so I didn't send in any images. That would have really been awful. The day before I'm supposed to deliver the quilt I go look for it. My quilts are stored rolled and in a bag and the bags are individually labeled with the name of the quilt. There are a lot of them, quite a pile. I go through the pile once, no quilt. I go through it again, more thoroughly. No quilt. Starting to sweat a bit here. I go to the secondary closet and search there - no quilt. I keep a database that tracks all my quilts, where they've been, and where they're supposed to go, and most of the time it works pretty well because I've never double booked anything. It doesn't add any new information. Then I go to my web site and look there and it's marked SOLD. This is a surprise because I for sure don't remember selling it, and it's not like I sell so many that I would lose track of that. Can't find any information in my Quicken records either. (I hate that program, btw.) Luckily, I could substitute another piece but that surely doesn't solve the mystery of what happened to the quilt.

Rising Sun

I will keep looking for it and checking through my financial records because it really bugs me that I have total non-recollection of a sale event. A real mystery.

Update - I am not going crazy. I found the receipt. The quilt was sold through The ArtFul Home in July of 2009. Good. I feel much better now.

I got a new camera

2011-11-03T11:05:00.000-04:00

Testing out my new camera on a walk in my neighborhood.

Getting back to work

2011-10-29T12:44:00.000-04:00

Now that the remodeling is finished, I have no more excuses for not being in the studio working. But I sure am out of the habit, in addition to feeling very un-creative. So I thought I would prime the pump by doing some fabric painting. Several weeks ago I bought a Gelli plate from Gelli Arts. This is a substitute for a gelatin plate except it doesn't deteriorate nor does it need refrigeration. I thought it has a lot of positives, first off being that you don't have to plan ahead to mix up the gelatin. So I got mine out and began to play with it. The first thing I noticed is that it is much firmer than gelatin. When I tried putting leaves and other stuff on it to make an impression, they tended to slide around a bit. Also, I often put too much paint on and so ended up with a very blotchy print. I haven't quite decided if I'm in love with this or not - I think it needs more practice.

Next I watched Kerr Grabowski's Adventures in Surface Design I've taken classes from Kerr and also have her Deconstructed Screen Printing DVD, and both are fabulous. This new DVD focuses on paint, instead of thickened dye as in DSP. She does some screen printing with torn paper stencils and also works with water soluble crayons and oil pastels. These would be some fun techniques to add to my gel printed fabrics.

On this piece I tried to use her technique of doing a repeat design. I didn't line my screen up very well so the prints are a bit offset, but it's not a big deal. The green layer is from the gel prints. And I also used a curved tip syringe to do some scribbling.

On this piece I drew on the screen with the oil pastels, and then pulled the transparent paint base to transfer the colors to the fabric.

This is a torn paper stencil along with brush strokes. I think this piece of fabric will look a whole lot better when it's cut up.

I used the fabric crayons to do a rubbing from a sink mat onto the fabric, and then screened it with yellow paint.

For this piece I did a rubbing onto the screen, and then pulled it with yellow paint. This works a bit like deconstructed screen printing since the crayon slowly transfers to the fabric and you get color outlines.

For this one I drew directly on the screen with the crayon. It was a grid with random x-es. The x marks deconstructed and lasted a lot longer than the grid. By the fourth pull, the grid was pretty much gone.

I suspended this piece of fabric, filled a syringe with watered down paint and then drew lines, letting the paint drip down the fabric. The paint was pretty dilute and it mostly just spread out. It would be really cool if the paint would form drip marks and not be absorbed into the fabric, but I don't have a clue how that would be accomplished.

Random brush marks, then dip the fabric in very dilute paint, wrinkle it up, then let dry. The dilute paint migrates and makes interesting effects.

Here again I drew on the screen, filled circles and scribble lines. I love the outlines around the circles and lines as the crayon dissolves from the screen onto the fabric. One major difference between working with paints and working with thickened dyes is that the paint cannot be allowed to dry on the screen. If it's not washed immediately, it dries and the screen is ruined. Thickened dye can be allowed to dry on the screen and then it becomes part of the next design also. These little remnants of color really spark up the fabric. I guess I will have to get out the dyes....

Post remodel observation: Since the kitchen level is now insulated to nearly an R-15 and the rest of the house has no insulation we are finding that the kitchen is the warmest room in the house. Used to be the coldest, and in the dead of winter I always had a space heater running under the table to keep me warm. But now we have a dilemma. The thermostat is on the kitchen level. When it's set at 68 degrees, it's fine for that room, but the rest of the house is at least 2 degrees colder, and it's noticeable. If we jack the thermostat up to make the rest of the house 68 degrees, it's almost too warm in the kitchen. Insulating the rest of the house is not an option, so we're going to have to think of some other method of redistributing the warm air. It's tough in a split level house to get good airflow. And it's supposed to snow tonight. There have only been 4 recorded snows in Baltimore in October. With leaves still on the trees, branches will fall. Bummer.

Ta-da

2011-10-17T10:49:00.000-04:00

It's pretty much complete except for a very few minor things. The POD arrived on Saturday morning at 7:30am and we had it totally emptied out by the evening. That doesn't mean everything was put away, that took much longer. And I'm still not sure that everything is in its permanent place. There will be some re-arranging.

A trip to IKEA resulted in these bookcases that are in the mudroom. They will hold the odds and ends and shoes and boots and gloves and scarves that never seem to have a home. I think we will add a second shelf above the coat rack. There is room and there is never enough storage space. I have to go back to IKEA for some more shelf liners but I think I need to put blinders on. It's very difficult to get through there without picking up lots of stuff. And they conveniently position carts and bags along the way so that when you fill one up, there is another just waiting for you.

The view into the dining room area. The dining room table and the buffet have not yet been put in place in this picture.

There isn't a picture of the other side of the room, the family room, because the furniture there is stacked on end. I'm going to do my best to sell it asap. It's old but still in decent condition, and it's perfect for a rec room or college student's apartment.

It's amazing to go back and look at the pictures. Here is the post from the "garage" stage:

http://fiberstudio.blogspot.com/2011/08/week-2.html

And here is the old space:

http://fiberstudio.blogspot.com/2011/08/phase-i-before.html

I can hardly remember what it looked like! Doesn't take long to forget.

So close....

2011-10-12T19:29:00.000-04:00

We are almost there. Another visit from the plumber and from the electrician and the work will be complete. The dumpster left today and the POD comes back on Saturday. I tried to get it sooner but they were all booked up with deliveries already. Meanwhile I've been moving stuff from the temporary kitchen into the new kitchen and trying to put things in logical and efficient places. This is a challenge. And of course, keeping in mind that there is a ton of stuff on the POD that will also need a place to stay.

The first official meal is spaghetti. We had to give up our weekly spaghetti because it was just too difficult to cook when I could only use one heating appliance at a time.

The refrigerator is still not pushed back into position because the ice maker line leaks. Hence the visit from the plumber.

Looking towards the (empty) dining room. Waiting for the table, chairs, and buffet to come home.

Here you can see the stove with my painted tiles on the backsplash. The tile guy thought they were really neat. In front of the sink is the new felted wool rug I bought over the weekend at a studio tour.

Back door with tile entrance and the mud room, which is already collecting stuff. We need to put up a pole for hanging coats and get some cubbies for storing stuff.

Standing in the corner of the dining room. That little blue thing on the floor is Rosie the cat's feeding dish. We will be getting 3 more stools so that the grandkids can eat at the island when we have Sunday dinner.

The family room area. Looks pretty naked right now. The desk that belonged to my Mother will go in this area and we will have some chairs aimed at the TV.

And the view of the bathroom.

Good bye, old kitchen. You served us well for many years.

Milestones

2011-10-09T11:13:00.002-04:00

A lot has happened this week. First, the plumber came and hooked up the water supply to the sink. Goodbye, outdoor washing station. Running water inside, so 21st century!

Then the electricians arrived, so along with Steve, our main contractor, his helper, and the 2 electricians, it was a hopping place. At the upper right of this picture you can see the shims they are using to even out the spacing on the boards being used to box in the support beam. The support beam, which has been holding up the house for more than 50 years, has a little bit of a sag. Don't we all. But after it's boxed in, it will be all nice and even.

The pendant lights are installed, the recessed lighting has been recessed. Up to now there have just been hanging bulbs. The electrical outlets are all faced, the dishwasher is installed.

The stove is in place. This is an amazing stove. It has 2 ovens, a small one on top for warming, pizza, and little things like that. Then it has a lower oven for the main meal. There are 5 burners on top. And 2 can be "connected" so that you can put a griddle on there and it will heat evenly. And a warming burner. And a special burner that can be adjusted for small, medium, or large pots. Amazing what they have come up since I last purchased a stove. Fifteen years ago.

We also bought a new chandelier. That is a broom stick that looks likes it's hanging from the chandelier. Look at that island top. We could make fudge on there.

I was so excited to have a working oven! Luckily I hadn't packed away the mixer and its accessories. Had to borrow some cookie sheets, but I made a batch of chocolate chip cookies to christen my new oven. All the workmen were thrilled.

The tile man is here yesterday and today, laying the floor tile and the back splash. He really liked the painted tiles I had done. They look wonderful above the back of the stove and add a nice bit of color. It looks like we may be completely finished by the middle of this week. Then I have to get the POD back and get it unloaded and start putting stuff away. Need to plan a bit where things will go because once they have a place, they will probably stay there. I think we will be getting rid of a bunch of This End Up furniture that we have had forever. I thought that company went out of business, but apparently not. I found their web site and they still carry the style of furniture we have; it's called "Classic". That means the old stuff, I think. Anyhow, if I were to purchase new what I have now, it would cost $2,000. Wow, but I won't be getting that much for it now. It has some signs of wear and tear. I'll put it up on Craigs List and see what the market will bear.

8 Weeks

2011-10-04T09:18:00.000-04:00

This is the 8th week, not that I'm counting or anything. All of the cabinets have been installed and they are getting their hardware. The range hood is in its place, waiting for an electrical connection, and a range to vent.

To the right of the window are the cabinets that will hold the microwave and my mixer in an appliance garage. So I won't have to haul a heavy mixer out from underneath a cabinet, which will be nice. Maybe I will use it more often, like for making bread and other high calorie treats.

The plumber is coming today and I sure hope that he gets the sink hooked up because we are really tired of washing dishes outside, not to mention that it's now cold and dark at 7pm.

Over the weekend I gave a lecture and taught a class at a local guild. I took 25 quilts, the earliest dating from 1994 and ending with ones I just finished. It's really interesting to see how my work has changed over the years, at least to me. The group enjoyed the talk, and some even came up afterward and said they were inspired to get back into their studios and get to work. It's a good feeling to know that I've motivated people.

After the lecture I taught a mini-workshop of hand stitching on quilts. When the group asked me to do this class, I thought it was sort of odd because I don't really do a lot of hand stitching. At least I didn't think I did, but when I went to my quilt database and searched on hand work, I came up with quite a few pieces, more than I would have thought. I tried to include as many of those pieces in my lecture as possible, but it seems that a nice percentage have been sold. Can't complain about that. Anyhow, in preparation for teaching this class, I got out some hand dyed threads and a little book of embroidery stitches that I bought years ago, and began experimenting with stitches. It was fun using the basic stitches and playing with variations on them and I think I have inspired myself to include more hand stitching on my work.

I need to get back into my studio and get to work. This remodeling has been disruptive, but I am feeling the siren call of my fabrics and thread and sewing machine. The place is pretty straightened up and I still need to sew on some sleeves and other maintenance work, but it's time to just get in there and do the work.

This is my acquisition from the SAQA Auction. It's by Deborah Boschert Deborah is the SAQA co-rep from my area, and she and I worked together for 9 months before I "retired" and she got another person to co-rep. I've been really fascinated by Deborah's work and I'm very excited to own this piece.

Countertops

2011-10-02T11:35:00.002-04:00

On Friday the countertops arrived. The place is really shaping up. The appliances are here but obviously not yet installed. We need the electrician and plumber to come back and make the hookups. Can hardly wait for the dishwasher to be installed. Actually, I would settle for a working sink. It's getting a little dark and chilly to be washing dishes at the outdoor station these days. I'm hoping it will all be complete by mid October. Maybe I should start a betting pool on the finish date...

Counter top and floors

2011-09-27T10:25:00.000-04:00

The first coat has been applied to the floor. We decided to not have a stain put down, so it is a natural finish to the oak. Today is the second coat, and tomorrow the third.

See how nicely we have taped shut the opening to the rest of the house. Trying to keep the dust to a minimum. Seems to be working pretty well.

I have been impressed by the specialized equipment that the workmen bring. They have machinery that is designed to do a specific task, and to do it well and efficiently. Time is money. This is the thingie that was used to measure for the countertop. I wasn't home at the time, but Jim took pictures and a video. It's fascinating. It has to be accurate because there isn't any ease in stone. Not like cotton fabric that can be steamed into submission.

Here is a video of the measurement action.

The appliances will be delivered on Thursday. The automated message from Sears Delivery came this morning with the warning to make sure the appliances will fit through the door and into their designated spaces. I already knew that the doors to the house and the doors to the refrigerator will have to be removed. But I thought I would check the space. A moment of panic - it's only 1/4 inch wider than the refrigerator. I called the cabinet lady and she reassured me that that will be just fine. It was designed to give the refrigerator a built in look and it will fit. She's been right every time before, so I am trusting her once again.

Yesterday I mentioned the start of the third section of the SAQA Benefit Auction. If you were waiting for the price on my donation to come down, you're too late. !!!!! It was purchased at the top tier price and I am thrilled. And a bit stunned. Thank you, Ms. Private Collection! There are still plenty of wonderful pieces available. The price drops to $550 today at 2PM. Further reductions as the week goes on.

Cabinets mostly in

2011-09-26T10:48:00.000-04:00

The cabinets are mostly installed. A few have to wait until the countertop is set in - one holds the microwave and another has an appliance garage so I don't have to haul out the mixer from cabinet netherlands whenever I want to use it. One very cool thing is a little step stool that will slide into the toe kick under one of the cabinets in the island. When I need something from a high shelf I can just pull this little stool out and set it up. Not sure it will me reach all the way to the very top shelves, but it will be really handy for the medium high ones.

The back side of the island will have a panel that matches the rest of the cabinets. The refrigerator will go into the space to the left of the window and the stove goes to the right. Today the floor is being sanded and the first sealing layer going down. Towmorrow and Wednesday they will return for additional layers. Thursday the appliances will be delivered and on Friday the countertop will arrive. By next weekend it will look like a kitchen!

There will still be several weeks of finishing - trim on the windows and other places, finishing touches for painting, installation of the dishwasher and garbage disposal, lighting, finishing on the column, floor tile by the door and into the mudroom, tile on the backsplash. We're looking at about the middle of October. Then the POD will return and we can unload all of the furniture back into the space.

PS Today the 3rd section of the SAQA auction begins; my quilt will be up on the block starting at 2PM today. Bid early!

Lookin' Good

2011-09-20T16:41:00.001-04:00

Yesterday boxes and boxes of cabinets were delivered. They nearly filled up the entire room. It took Steve all day to unpack them, since he had to check each one to make sure it was correct. This morning he and 2 helpers arrived at 6:30AM (and it's not very light at that hour any more) to start installing them.

Look at this equipment. These are really the big boy tools.

This is what they accomplished today. It's much more than just putting the cabinets into the correct spot. They used their very long levels to make sure each one is leveled front to back and side to side. When I look at what is already installed, I think that it is nearly equal to the storage space I used to have. But - there are still more wall cabinets and base cabinets, plus the entire island yet to be installed. Now, a lot of that space is very high up, and will be difficult for me to reach, even with the little step stool that will be stored in one of the toe kicks. So that will be for the once-a-year stuff.

Rosie checks out the space. Not going to be nearly as much opportunity for mice to sneak into the kitchen - all the holes to the crawl space have been covered up.

A close-up view of the cabinet door. The wood is hickory and the doors are inset into the cabinet with a bead of wood inside the door frame and also on the door panel. Gorgeous!

Painted Tiles

2011-09-17T08:17:00.000-04:00

Behind the countertop is going to be a tile backsplash that will extend its entire length. Going to the tile store was like going to the fabric shop - so many wonderful things to choose from! However, unlike the fabric shop, the prices ranged from reasonable to the-sky's-the-limit. It would have been quite easy to add several thousand dollars to the price of the remodel just by choosing one of those beautiful tiles. So before I got myself in love with something that would break my already overburdened wallet, I asked to see the tiles that fit into the allowance in our contract. Hmmm - had to go in the back to get those. I chose plain white tiles, 4 inch to go directly above the counter top, then a 1/2" grey liner that picks up the grey/black speckle in the counter top, then 6 inch tiles set on point to extend up to the cabinets. Behind the stove there will be more space since the backsplash will go up to the exhaust fan and I thought it would be interesting to have some tiles with design there.

There is a little shop nearby that has pottery that you can paint and then they fire it for you. Lots of fun things in there and it seems that anybody can do it. While I was there I saw people with their young children who couldn't have been more than 4 years old. The really good stuff takes a lot of practice, but I wanted a more folksy look. Much easier when things don't have to be exact. These are the three tiles I painted. This is not going to be a new hobby - it takes a steady hand and lots of patience. Each color needs 3 layers of paint in order to show up well, and that is tedious. It took me about 3 hours to paint these tiles. I had worked out the design ahead of time and created a template so I could easily transfer the design to the tiles. I like how they turned out and sure do hope they will fit on the wall!

Looking pretty good

2011-09-16T20:38:00.000-04:00

It's been a bit of a slow week. Workmen were here 3 days out of 5 - 1 day for putting up trim, 1 day for painting, and 1 day for laying the floor.

First, the powder room. This was not part of the project, but it needed some updating, so Jim took it on himself to strip the wallpaper and paint the room. We thought about replacing the vanity but all the ones in the stores were cheesy fiberboard and the one we have is solid oak, so it stayed and got new hardware and a new faucet. This picture shows the color as bright yellow, and that is totally wrong. It's actually a peach, which matches a flower in the tile in the floor.

This is after the walls have been painted. The trim is white and the walls are a very pale yellow. It's going to be very cheery with lots of natural light.

And here is the oak floor all down. It looks like a real room again. Because the walls were built out further than the original walls, the windows are set in much deeper and there is a nice wide window sill. I'm sure I can find something to put there. Maybe African violets, it's a northern exposure.

Looking towards the back door and the mud room, which now has a door.

The cabinets will be delivered on Monday and it won't take very long to get them installed. The floor will be sanded and finished, but I'm not sure where in the process that will happen. Once the cabinets and sink are in, they can measure for the counter top. It's really all coming together!

SAQA Benefit Auction Starts Today

2011-09-12T10:21:00.000-04:00

Nothing going on in the kitchen remodel today. Tomorrow the carpenter will put up trim and then the painters come in and then the floor gets laid. So by the end of the week it will look like a room instead of a garage.

Meanwhile, the SAQA Benefit Auction begins today at 2:00PM. This is the fifth (I think) year that SAQA has held this auction of one foot square quilts. It's a reverse auction, so the prices start today at $750 and you might be surprised at how many pieces get sold at that price. Tomorrow at 2pm the price drops to $550, and each day there is another price drop, $350, $250, $150, and finally $75. Next week a second set of pieces go up for sale, again starting at $750. My piece is in the third group and they will go up for sale on September 26. There is always a bit of apprehension about whether one's piece will sell or not and what price it ends up going for. I've contributed a piece every year and the price people will pay for my piece has steadily risen. That's a very gratifying feeling. And I hope I haven't jinxed myself with saying that.

This is my donation for this year. I posted it right before I sent it in and asked for suggestions for names. Jamie Fingal suggested "No Way Out", several people seconded that, and I liked it also. So there it is.

Slow week

2011-09-08T16:55:00.000-04:00

This doesn't look very much different from the pictures taken earlier in the week. After the wallboard was put up on Tuesday morning, the mud guy has spent three days spackling the joints. He spends about 3 hours spreading the spackle compound. Could not have picked a worse week in which to do this as we have had nothing but rain for the last 10 days. Like about 10", what with Irene and the remnants of Lee. Which is still spreading its deluge around here. So we have been running 5 fans nonstop to help with the drying.

Tonight we are going to really seal up the plastic separating this area from the rest of the house and also vacuum up as much dust as possible. Tomorrow he will sand and that will generate tons of dust. Want to keep that out of the rest of the house as much as possible. Will have to change the air filters on the furnace also. Next week the trim goes up, and then they will paint. Don't get excited about paint possibilities as they are all variations on white, white, and white.

We have walls!

2011-09-06T11:01:00.000-04:00

This morning the wall board installation team arrived bright and early. Like about 6:30am, which is the normal starting time. One of us gets up around 6:15 to go down and unlock the door and turn on the lights. I've noticed that it has gotten quite a bit darker at that hour of the morning. Fall is definitely on its way.

It took two guys about 2 hours to get all this wall board up. Now it has to be taped and then mudded so that we will have nice smooth walls.

We've been telling the grandkids that this little room is the time-out room. They're not sure if we're kidding or not.

More progress

2011-09-06T10:55:00.001-04:00

This is the drywall delivery truck. I wasn't home when this came so I didn't get to see them bring it inside. Must have been a lot of trips up the driveway hill and around the dumpster.

These boards attached to the joists are where the crown molding will go when the cabinets are installed.

The electrical receptacles, switches, and connections are all roughed in.

Now, you may wonder why there is a picture of a toilet here. This bathroom is not part of the remodel even though it is on the same level, but in a fit of parallel construction, my husband stripped off the wall paper and primed the walls.

Now they are peachy to coordinate with one of the colors in the floor tiles. This is more color than we usually put on the walls, but I like it.

Cleaned up

2011-09-02T10:13:00.000-04:00

All the compressors, saw, nail guns are removed and the place is cleaned up. The electrical rough in is complete and we are ready for insulation and dry wall. The insulation was put up this morning and the dry wall will be installed next week. Prepare for dust.

There used to be a downdraft vent from our old oven that vented outside. Our new oven will have a hood over top so the hole from the old vent has been bricked up. The brick on our house is a real hodge podge, some painted, and lots of variations in color. The story is that it was salvaged from an old hospital that was torn down. It would be difficult to match but we have had a pile of unused bricks sitting around for ages, aging. I think that once the mortar dries it will be difficult to determine where these newer bricks are.

The effects of Hurricane Irene are still with us, many schools still closed, power still off for many people, traffic lights still out, day care facilities closed. Yesterday I saw 2 utility trucks from Illinois so you know that many people from many areas are working to restore power. And this was just a tropical storm here.

Into the 3rd week

2011-08-31T13:34:00.000-04:00

The mudroom has been roughed in. I'm very excited that we will have a space where everybody can drop shoes, jackets, whatever, and not have it lying all over the sofas and chairs. There will be a rod for hanging, hooks, and a bunch of cubbies. And a little stool to sit on while putting on and taking off shoes. And maybe it can also be a time out room for misbehaving children....

The under layer for the tile has been laid by the back door and into the mudroom. This will have 12x12 tiles and the rest of the room will have an oak wood floor.

The electrician is here today putting in the recessed lights and receptacles and switch locations. Had to think a bit about where to put the switches and what they should control. We used to have a 3-way switch that turned on the light over the kitchen table. Except it wasn't installed correctly and you could only turn the lights on from the switch used to turn them off. Both switches would turn the light off, so we were constantly going from one end of the room to the other trying to get the light turned on.

There is another hurricane brewing in the eastern Atlantic. Right now it's still a tropical storm, but it's forecast to become a hurricane later today, named Katia. Let's hope she just spends all her time out in the ocean.

A Brief Interruption

2011-08-31T13:23:00.000-04:00

Unless you're living in a closet, you heard about Hurricane Irene. Around here, we're enough inland that it was "only" a tropical storm. The wind howled all night long and it poured rain. The power flickered on and off at least three times and every time it did the doorbell rang. At 5:30AM the power finally went off for good. Our usual Sunday pattern is to meet up with family at the local Panera. But it was closed, as was the nearby Starbucks (this is serious). Drove to another Panera location, and had to divert around a tree fallen across the road. It too was closed. Finally found our Sunday treat at a bagel place. Back home we cleaned up all the fallen leaves and twigs in the yard and my husband got out his chain saw (guy toys) and cut up the large branch that fell out of a tree. Luckily, we have a dumpster right in our driveway ready and waiting for debris (tree-bris?).

So this is what the place looked like on Saturday. The chairs are from the deck since we didn't want them blowing around. The studs are nearly all up and the wall next to the back door is roughed in.

The contractor drew the outlines of the cabinets on the floor so we can see where things will be placed.

Granddaughter Audrey took this opportunity to add her artwork to the soon-to-be-covered-up studs.

Zoe contributed her footprints.

Our power was restored on Tuesday afternoon at 5pm. The generator made the nearly 3 days bearable. The contractor was able to continue work during the day and once he left we ran an extension cord across the street so a neighbor could power her refrigerator. The schools were supposed to open on Monday but they didn't, and they were closed yesterday also. Today most of the county schools are open, but there are still 21 without power. What a way to start the school year - already using up the snow days.

Studs!

2011-08-25T16:57:00.005-04:00

The subfloor is down and now the studs are going in. And in between those studs will be insulation - hooray! There has never been any insulation in the kitchen and in the winter the temperature went down to 62 degrees. Inside the cabinets it was even colder, by 10 degrees. I had to heat up the dinner plates before putting any food on them or the food would be instantly cold. But not any more.

I'm writing a little note on the wall before it gets covered up. I wonder if anybody will ever see it. Sort of my own little stikman.

It took me a few seconds to figure out the what this picture is of. It's looking up at the joists holding up the second floor. The cinder block is the outside wall, and now there is expanding foam in the cracks. Another route for cold air blocked.

We had vintage (i.e. old and ugly) hot air registers. Gone now, and the hot air vent will be placed in the wood floor.

We're watching the weather forecasts and it looks like Hurricane Irene is going to give us some big winds and heavy rains. Going grocery shopping tonight because by tomorrow the stores will be jammed and the shelves empty. At least I already have toilet paper. Gee, an earthquake and a hurricane all in one week. Is somebody sending a message?

Week 2

2011-08-24T08:37:00.003-04:00

Just about everything that is to go out has gone out. We're down to the bare walls, subfloor, and joists. Now it's time for things to start coming back in.

The dumpster that holds the remains of the kitchen.

Here we have one of the subfloor boards that is cracked. Steve, our contractor, doesn't just cover this up. He takes it out and replaces it with a new piece.

Yesterday and today the plywood base is going down, briefly interrupted by the 5.9 earthquake that had its epicenter in Virginia. I thought it was the flatbed truck coming to retrieve the dumpster, but the shaking went on far too long for that. No damage here, thank heavens. I think we're going to have far more problems this weekend when Hurricane Irene tracks up the eastern seaboard. A prolonged power outage would be a very bad thing, not to mention a flooded basement.

Some of the original wiring in this house would not meet today's codes, I think. We already figured out that the microwave, toaster oven, and hot plate cannot be run at the same time. Add to that list the power thingie that Steve uses to drive in the nails. It seems that one whole section of the house is on the same circuit.

End of the first week

2011-08-21T10:05:00.003-04:00

Not much happened on Friday. More floor tear out. The kitchen floor is gone, down to the subfloor. Underneath the wood floor was tile and most of that is gone now.

The new plywood flooring layer is ready and waiting to be put down. After the demo and hauling comes the HVAC/electrical/plumbing rough-ins. I don't know how long that will take.

When we were going through the plans for this remodel and the contractor said they would be taking out everything to the studs (I mean, if there were studs), it just didn't really sink in that this is what it would look like. It looks a lot like a garage or an unfinished basement. The transformation is going to be spectacular!

Day 4

2011-08-20T08:06:00.005-04:00

More stuff gone. The closet that was to the left of the door is gone. That will be replaced with a mud room that will be larger and extend to the window. It will be a place to drop all the junk that has always been dropped on chairs or wherever. And maybe we can even train everybody to remove their shoes when they come in the door.

These are some of the holes in the cinder block wall that let in the cold air that made the kitchen so freezing cold in the winter. They will be plugged up, hooray, and it will be oh so much warmer in there.

This is looking at the corner of the kitchen. They are going to frame out these walls and put insulation in them. This changes the dimensions of the kitchen which affects the cabinets. The cabinet person came out and remeasured all the spaces. One cabinet will have to be remade, and the sink base trimmed by 2 inches. Cabinets will butt up closer to the windows than originally planned, but it will all work out quite well.

By the end of Thursday, most of the wood floor had been ripped up and tossed into the dumpster. All that's left for Friday is the linoleum floor in the kitchen and the tiles and felt liner under where the wood floor was. They are taking it all out down to the subfloor and then laying a new plywood base. This will make it all even and easier to lay the new wood floor on top.

Progress

2011-08-18T07:27:00.002-04:00

This is the set of switches that is next to the back door. The first switch on the left turns on the light right outside the door. The second switch turns on another outside light. The two switches on the right turn on lights in the family room and kitchen. We could never figure out what the middle switch controlled. Now I know why. It doesn't connect to anything. Might have once, but never since we moved in.

All the appliances and cabinets have been hauled away to the re-use center. I hope somebody gets good use from them, they are still in good condition.

It was not in the original plan to tear down the entire front wall, but when we discovered the joists resting on the brick wall, we decided to take all the wall board out and replace it with new studs, insulation, and wall board and it will all look better. And be warmer. Notice the change in color on the bricks. The previous owners had painted the dining room brick wall white. We tried to paint it to look more like brick, but that didn't work well, so in the first kitchen remodel we covered it with wallboard. Never thought I would see that wall again.

Another discovery - the cold air returns from the rooms on the second floor don't go anywhere. They should go into ducts that connect back to the furnace so there is an airflow. But they just empty into the space between the joists. Explains a lot about why the some of the rooms are never the right temperature. This house was built in 1957 and I guess there weren't very many codes that had to be followed. Or the builder just ignored them.

Problems already

2011-08-17T07:08:00.003-04:00

The dividing wall is gone. It really opens up the space.

See that lovely cinder block wall? On the other side of that is the outside brick wall. No insulation. No wonder the kitchen got so cold in the winter. Those were supposed to be 2x4s but they are only laths flat against the wall. Makes it much more of a problem to add insulation without changing the dimensions of the room. And that brick wall on the right is supposed to come down so that we could put insulation there also. Except it seems that the joists holding up the second floor are resting on those bricks. Big problem.

The refrigerator is now up in the living, so our mini kitchen is complete. Made spaghetti last night. It was a challenge because the we can only use one heating device at a time. Brown the meat, then cook the mushrooms, mix in the sauce, then heat it up. Boil the water, cook the pasta. Broil the garlic/cheese bread. Reheat the spaghetti sauce. Might not be having spaghetti any more. And the new refrigerator is an inch wider than the doorway.

Sigh.

The demo begins

2011-08-15T19:53:00.006-04:00

What a mess! Glad I don't have to clean it up.

The temporary kitchen - the outdoor washing station.

The indoor cooking station.

Remodel - empty rooms and a plan

2011-08-13T08:32:00.004-04:00

It is truly amazing how much stuff is in a kitchen. I started packing stuff into boxes a month ago. When the POD was delivered last Monday, we loaded the furniture and the already packed boxes into it. Then I proceeded to continue packing up kitchen stuff and transferring what we will be needing during the interim up to the temporary kitchen. Which is in the living room. It seemed as if I was hardly making a dent. But now everything that needs to be put into storage is in the POD and it will be taken away this afternoon.

Here is the empty dining room. It echoes. Since the refrigerator is still in the kitchen and most of the utensils and other stuff is in the living room, there is a lot of back and forth necessary in order to eat something. When the demo crew arrives on Monday at 6:30 AM (aack), they will move the refrigerator up to the living room. We've hooked a wash tub up outside the living room door, for washing dishes, but this is going to be a real pain. At least it's not winter.

I used an architectural drawing program to rough out what the new space will look like. The counter tops will be white, not black. I hope these next two months go by quickly and without any setbacks.

Phase I: Before

2011-08-08T17:38:00.004-04:00

Next week begins the remodel of my kitchen/dining room/family room. We've lived in this house for more than 30 years and have redone the kitchen twice. This will be a much bigger project because the entire first level is going to be gutted. The wall between the kitchen and the dining room will be replaced by an island and there will be a mud room off to the right of the back door. Everything is going - floors, some walls, ceiling, cabinets, appliances, fixtures. I took some pictures to document the original layout, which has already changed. Now there are boxes everywhere and the corner cabinet is gone, purchased by someone after I posted it on Craigslist.

Family room view from the kitchen area. The new mud room will go to the right of the window and that existing closet is going.

View of the family room that you get as you walk in the back door. Stairs go up to the living room level.
View of the dining room from the kitchen. That corner cabinet is gone.

Another view of the kitchen.

The dining room. Doorway on the left goes to the basement aka my studio. To the right of the stairway is the powder room.

View of the kitchen from the dining room.

Dining room looking towards the family room.

The plan is to move the refrigerator up to the living room and make that our temporary kitchen. Bought a basement type sink and it's outside, ready to be hooked up to the bathroom sink via a hose coming through the window. Not sure how well this is going to work, but there has to be someplace to wash dishes. We plan to use plastic as much as possible, not very green, I know. Maybe the fact that all the old appliances, cabinets, and flooring will be donated to a recycling center will help make up for that.

Yum

2011-06-30T14:40:00.002-04:00

Look what the UPS man delivered today. I've been waiting and waiting for these threads. They're from Superior Threads and they are the new King Tut solid color cotton 40wt/3ply threads. These are heavy weight cotton which I've been wanting for quilting and up until now the King Tut threads have all been variegated. Variegated threads seem to be really popular among a lot of quilters, but it's not what I want to use. So now I have these solid colors.

I also ordered a bunch of the Superior titanium coated topstitch sewing needles. According to Superior's website, the titanium coating makes the needle stay sharp longer and outlast any other topstitch needle on the market. Since I know I use my needles far past their prime (it's that thwap thwap noise that is the clue), I am looking forward to using these needles. Also, the Topstitch needle is recommended for all the kinds of stitching I do - piecing, applique, quilting. It has a larger eye and a deeper groove and a sharper point (which should stay sharper with the titanium coating, right?) Sometimes the threads I've used fray from being pulled back and forth through the machine, so I hope this prevents that from happening. These needles are supposed to be great with metallic threads also, but I don't use metallics very often. Maybe I will now.

Back from QSDS

2011-06-22T08:58:00.004-04:00

Last week I took a 7 day Master Class with Judy Hooworth at QSDS. This year the symposium met at the Columbus College of Art and Design instead of in a motel conference site and just that one change made it feel much more like an art event. The campus is in downtown Columbus, Ohio and within walking distance of the Columbus Museum of Art and several art galleries. We were surrounded by art and even the students were highly decorated.

We stayed in the regular dorms, which were decent. Four people to a suite, with single bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. Better than any dorm I ever lived in, but that would have been back in the dark ages when women had to be in by 10pm. The classes were held in a former car dealership building which is in the process of being renovated. My class was held in the garage area, a huge cavernous space which dwarfed our little group of 9 people plus the teacher. The lighting wasn't great, the power kept tripping when there was one too many irons plugged in, but it was terrific to have unlimited space in which to work. When I needed an extra table to support what I was quilting, I was able to go get one and set it up, no problem, and I didn't infringe on anyone else's space. Occasionally the garage door would open and a truck drove in to load up or unload, but that also meant that I could drive my car in and load it up right next to my work space. Talk about convenient!

The class itself was terrific. With so few people, Judy was able to spend lots of time with every one of us. We went on field trips to the Museum of Art, The Wexner Center, and an exhibit at the Jewish Community Center. Of course, there was the trip to see Quilt National and all the fantastic art there (and some that I wondered why they were there, but that's always the case). We also went to the Riffe Gallery, where I have a piece in the show. This is a terrific gallery right in a downtown Columbus office building and it gets tons of foot traffic. The show is on the first level and it's hard to miss.

Back to the class ... I worked on a piece that was nearly finished but had some problems. I was able to resolve these, do the work, then put that aside to work on something else. I have been using small pieces in my backgrounds and had been thinking about using bigger ones instead, and I put together the beginnings of a huge (about 8'x8') piece. I have to think a lot about how I am going to proceed with that one.

I also worked on another small piece and painted the graffiti line in white on it. Judy suggested that I add more graffiti lines to give the piece more depth. I took a picture of the piece with the white line with my iPad, then imported it into a drawing app (ArtStudio) and was able to try out various new graffiti lines. This is the drawing I did. I've done it on the piece itself and of course couldn't quite duplicate this exactly. I like this effect and will continue to experiment with it.

There were some interesting sights in the building. The CCAD students do fashion design and here are some of the mannekins lined up in the storeroom.

Looks like they were experimenting with dripping paint. Cool design.

And have you seen one of these? We called him "Flat Man" because he is on the street in the crosswalk. There were 3 that we found on the campus, but I've also seen one in Chicago, and heard about them being in other cities. He looks like he is cut from pavement marking tape. I've used all sorts of search terms in Google but haven't found anything that is pertinent to this guy. Anybody know anything?

Thanks for all the suggestions for the SAQA piece title. I decided to go with "No Way Out". I've sent it off and it should appear on the SAQA site within the week, I hope.

The Birthday Boys

2011-06-11T06:00:00.001-04:00

These are the Birthday Boys. Today is my son's birthday. And 100 years ago today my Father was born. These two pictures were taken in the early 1970s and I thought it would be especially appropriate to post them today.

Happy Birthday, Brian! Happy Birthday, Dad! Love you both!

SAQA Benefit Auction

2011-06-06T17:23:00.004-04:00

It's time again to support the SAQA benefit auction with my donated 12"x12" piece. I really wanted to get one submitted in time for the early deadline to be eligible for the publicity stuff, but nothing I did was pleasing me. And I certainly don't want to have something up for auction that might not do well. I guess that is everybody's fear - that her piece will be unsold at the end. Even people that I think should not have to worry about that still worry about that.

There are quite a few pieces already donated. You can view them here. The auction doesn't start until September and then they do the reverse auction thing. Bidding starts at $750 the first day, then drops on successive days to $550, $350, and so on. I would love for someone to want my piece badly enough to buy it on the first day, but that's a pie-in-the-sky wish, I think.

Untitled

I need to give it a name. Untitled just doesn't cut it for me. I can't fill out the donation form until I come up with a name. Suggestions?

Time Sinks

2011-05-12T07:19:00.000-04:00

Once again I have neglected posting to my blog pages. I really admire people who have the discipline to post at least once a week, and am in awe of those who post every day. With pictures even. I thought I might wait a few more days to make it an even 2 months since my last post but by then I probably wouldn't have any readers at all.

I've gotten involved in 2 activities that have taken up pretty much all of my time. First off, I decided to rewrite the web pages I maintain using WordPress. For those of you already using WordPress, you're probably asking "so what's the big deal, it's not that complicated" and you're right. Except that when it comes to computer programming, I am never quite satisfied with the options that are presented to me and always want to make it do exactly what I want it to do. That involves getting into the programming behind the scene. I know just enough about computer programming to be dangerous and it's not something that you can just pick up where you left off the last time you worked on it. At least at this age, where the unused information in my brain tends to sneak off and hide somewhere, there is a pretty steep re-introduction period. Yet it's something that really grabs me, like a huge puzzle waiting to be solved. So eventually I will be moving this blog over to WordPress (but don't hold your breath, it may be a while).

So that's the first activity. The second is working on the genealogy of my family tree. My Mother started working on this several decades ago, back before there was so much available on line. She did a lot of letter writing and document research. I remember one time when she came out to visit and we went down to Washington, D.C. to the Archives and spent hours looking through microfilm copies of ships' passenger manifests trying to find the names of my great-grandparents. The information was that they arrived in 1882 from Ireland. I don't remember if we knew their point of departure, but it was probably Liverpool. We spent hours searching through copies of handwritten logs of the hundreds of ships that arrived in New York but never found them listed. The question that we wanted answered was this - was my grandfather born in Ireland, on the ship, or after they arrived here.

My Mother worked on this for several years, but eventually gave it up when the family lines all went back to Ireland, Germany, Canada, and Scotland. That made it even more difficult to get information. She gave me the box of folders and I entered into a genealogy program, and then stuck the box into a closet. Until several weeks ago when I received a phone call from my aunt whose son was interested in the family tree information. I dug out the box and began going through it, thinking I could just type it up and send it off. But just typing it into a word processor quickly led to smaller and smaller boxes as the tree went further and further back.

I went online to Ancestry.com and started typing the information in online. They have this little lure - when you type in a name that already appears somewhere else, a little flag starts waving at you, a hint to some information. If you click on the hint, it immediately wants you to sign up for the subscription (not cheap). Ms. Tightwad isn't willing to pay so she follows some other leads to another online source run by the Church of the Latter Day Saints in Utah. They have free software and a boatload of free information. I began to use that software to type in my data. They have lots of census data, even copies of the census forms that were filled out by the census takers, written by hand as they went from door to door gathering the information. It's fascinating to look at these logs. They also have copies of the ships' logs and once again I was sucked into looking through those logs, looking for my great-grandparents' names. No luck. But now the mystery had deepened because census data listed the dates of their immigration as 1882. My grandfather's information (from various sources) had him as being born in 1882 or 1881 or in Illinois or in Wisconsin.

So by now I'm really hooked and I buy the Family Tree software that comes with a 3 month subscription to ancestry.com. Yesterday I started uploading the data I already had, and the little flags were waving all over the place. I've already found at least 5 other public family trees with my own ancestors, leading to people who are my cousins many times removed. My Mother would have been beside herself with excitement if she had been able to access this information right from her easy chair.

So have I been doing any art? Nope. The best I can come up with is that I have a piece on display at the Riffe Gallery in Columbus, Ohio until July.

Life Lines

47" x 38"

I also have had 2 quilts accepted for The Art Quilt Experience at the Stone Quarry Hill Art Park in Cazenovia, New York. I will be shipping these next week for the exhibit that goes from June 12 through July 31.

Sundown

54" x 37"

Looking Out

61" x 41"

I was very pleased to have both pieces I entered be accepted into this show because of the high quality of the jurors, in particular Jonathan Holstein, who is a noted collector and author. His gift, along with Ardis and Robert James', to the University of Nebraska Foundation, was responsible for the formation of the International Quilt Study Center. Those are the kinds of eyes I want seeing my work.

Success!

2011-03-15T08:20:00.004-04:00

The show is over and all that is left to do is the final report, pack away pvc pipes and hooks, and pay the bills. It was a resounding success and all we heard were compliments. The only thing that could have been improved was the parking situation. Apparently a lot of students leave their cars on campus when they leave for Spring Break and those cars took up places that we could have used. Maybe next time we will offer valet parking, I think there are many people who would take advantage of that. Not me, I'm too cheap. And I can still walk without problems.

So here is the gym pre-setup. Very nice place, room for lots of quilts and vendors.

The truck from Reber-Friel showed up at 12:45PM, a few minutes early. I was overjoyed to see them and could feel the anxiety drain out of me. I could even eat my lunch.

The company is located in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania which is near Philadelphia. It's nearly a 2 hour drive, so obviously they are willing to travel.

Unloading the equipment from the truck. The drapes were already threaded onto all the pipes. They came in and I pointed them in the right direction. Three hours later the system was entirely up and off they went.

Quilts began arriving at 3PM and my setup teams began hanging them. Every quilt had already been assigned a position and runners delivered them to their proper cubby.

You can see the tape on the blue floor mat. We did this because in previous years people caught their feet in the gaps on the mat. There is a tape designed specifically for taping these mats. It sticks very well, is quite sturdy, and comes up easily when you need to take it up.

Here is another view down the aisle. This looks sooooo professional.

The vendors were located around the outside wall of the gym.

Plenty of space for viewing the quilts.

This was serendipity. Because I could use 10 foot wide hanging walls, instead of only 8 with the previous system, there was a lot more room to hang the 285 quilts in the show. The original plan was to have a demonstration area along the outside wall, taking up 2 vendor slots. I was able to give them space on the quilt floor, more than what they had, and free up 2 more vendor slots. If I had figured that out sooner, we could have done more with this space than just demos. Next time, Make It and Take It classes!

Joan and Barb are thrilled with their space.

Attendance was better than ever before. Early reports on the receipts are extremely good. Everybody was just ecstatic about how wonderful the show looked. And it did look good. Having a professional pole and drape system makes a huge difference; takes the whole show out of the local-type show and puts it into a much higher category.

I sold some t-shirts, bamboo socks, and a 4"x4" mounted quilt in the Quiltique, the members' sale table. And oh joy! one of my quilts that was on display was purchased. The quilt is committed to the QSDS show in Columbus, Ohio at the Riffe Gallery, so she can't have it until late summer, but being in a show just enhances its value.

It was a strenuous weekend and I'm glad it's over. But it was a tremendous ego-booster for me. I got compliments all around on both the hanging of the show and my quilts that were featured. It was the perfect reward for all the hard work that went into the show. Not only my own hard work, but all the other committee chairs. In particular, the Publicity Committee did a spectacular job on publicizing the show. It doesn't matter how good the show looks or how many vendors are there if no one comes to the show. Publicity is the foundation that the rest of the show depends on. So thanks to one and all.

Anxiety

2011-03-10T16:12:00.004-05:00

My local quilt guild's show is this weekend. I am filled with anxiety. Why? Because my volunteer job is to plan and carry out the hanging of the quilts. This is the third time I've done this and don't ask why I keep re-volunteering. A perpetual problem for guild shows is the system used to hang the quilts. Years ago we made stands out of pvc pipes. They were a bit difficult to work with, they broke fairly easily so someone was always running out to Home Depot to buy new ones as we were hanging, and we had the problem of storing them for two years until the next show. As you can imagine, no one wants to store a truckload of pvc pipes in their attic or garage. We finally ended up paying someone to store them in her barn. Of course, when they were brought out for the show, they had to be washed. The hanging process would go on into the wee hours of the morning.

Then several years ago we decided to dump the pvc pipe system and rent poles and drapes from a professional pole and drape company. Except we still had to do the setup ourselves and those suckers were heavy! Too heavy for a bunch of middle aged and older women to be hauling around. And the hanging still went on into the wee hours.

Next we decided to rent a hanging system from another guild. They had wooden poles and stands and white sheets. They didn't deliver. So now the setup involved renting a truck, driving to the next county, loading up the truck, driving back, setting up the poles, then hanging the quilts. And we also had to wash all the sheets ahead of time. This was the first year I volunteered to chair this committee. I tapped into a skill from one of my former careers: working with databases. I was able to assign a location to every quilt and put that information into the database. Now I could manipulate it and print out reports. Every little hanging area got a printed page with information on what quilts were to be hung there, their exact position, and which type of hanging pole to use. Once the poles and stands were up, the hanging of the quilts went fairly quickly and we were out of there by 9pm. Of course, when the show was over, the poles, stands, and sheets had to be taken down, loaded back into the truck, and driven back to their storage locker. Costs involved the rental of the poles and the rental of the truck. We needed a fair number of husbands and sons to help with the heavy work.

The configuration of the poles and stands was confusing and weird things ended up happening:

People improvised when they couldn't figure out what to do. Some quilts had to be pinned to the sheets, which is not a very good presentation.

Something had to be done. So this year is going to be different. I contacted another pole and drape company, and it just happened to be one that has done the Mancuso shows in Philadelphia. They will bring in the system and set it up. Oh Joy! All we will have to do is hang the quilts. When the show is over, they will come back and take the poles and drapes away. More Joy! We will have hooks that go over the top poles and connect to the hanging pipes and nothing will need to be pinned to the drapes. Tomorrow is the big day. My anxiety level is pretty high mostly because this is the first time we've done this and I can easily think of a million things that can go wrong. I will be taking lots of pictures, not of quilts, but of the process. I think it will look very professional. Of course, it will cost more than the previous system, but when I think about all the labor involved and recruiting people, it's going to be worth it.

Snow dyeing

2011-02-22T07:47:00.010-05:00

We haven't had an overwhelming amount of snow this winter, not like last winter, thank heavens. But there was enough to do some snow dyeing and my intention was to do t-shirts in order to sell them at my guild's show next month. Last winter I did snow dyeing on fabrics and while they are stunning I found them very difficult to use in my quilts. They demanded attention and did not play well with the other fabrics. However, the patterns make for stunning t-shirts. I thought I would put them up here for sale before the show. The shirts are $25 plus $6 shipping.

These are heavy weight cotton Gildan brand t-shirts.

These first three are size Medium.

T-shirt M-1

SOLD

T-shirt M-2

T-shirt M-3
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
These are size Large.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Extra Large here.

T-shirt XL-1

T-shirt XL-2

SOLD

T-shirt XL-3

T-shirt XL-4

T-shirt XL-5

I also dyed a bunch of bamboo socks but I'm not putting them up here now, maybe after the show.

You are my Sunshine

2011-02-10T08:51:00.004-05:00

This was her favorite song. My Mom's, that is. She passed away this past Monday. It wasn't unexpected as she had been in hospice care since before Christmas. We did everything we could to make her comfortable and to ease her journey but I think it was still a difficult road. I don't like to remember her like she was these past few weeks because it just wasn't the Mom I have known. I wrote about her on her 97th birthday in 2009. She was really thrilled to read it. This is a recent picture and you can see how much she enjoyed life.

Here she is as a young woman - spectacularly beautiful.

And a bit on the lighter side. Don't you think spoons are a wonderful accessory?

These pictures and others we have found are the way I want to remember her. We fly to Chicago tomorrow for the funeral Mass on Saturday. Only something as important as this would entice me to go to Chicago in February.

Making Lemonade

2011-02-05T18:18:00.005-05:00

You know that old saying - when you have lemons, make lemonade. I was working on a quilt that had lots of yellow with some inset bands of dark blue, all hand dyed by me. Following the procedure that I have been doing lately, after quilting the piece, I sprayed it with water to soak through to the batt, then threw it into the dryer. This makes a really cool puckery effect that takes on a whole new dimension when it's painted since the paint only hits the high points. Anyhow, I was dismayed to discover that the blue dye ran. Somebody didn't rinse the dyes out well enough, probably ought to fire her. I put the entire piece into cold water with Synthrapol and ran it through another cycle. This removed most of the blue dye except for right up close to the blue fabric. Not good.

The yellow parts looked pretty good so I decided to cut the piece up. There will be a SAQA Auction piece (12" x 12"), 4 small 8"x8" pieces, 7 4"x5" pieces, and a few ACEOs, those 2 1/2 x 3 1/2 inch pieces. Some of these are going to be mounted on stretcher bars just to make sure nobody thinks they're potholders or drink coasters.

A while back there was a discussion on the SAQA list about the "skinny envelope", the reply from the juried show that comes in the mail in an envelope that's only thick enough to contain the rejection letter. I've been waiting for the response from the National Fiber Directions show in Wichita and it arrived yesterday. The envelope was so skinny that there wasn't even a full size sheet of paper in it. I didn't want to open it, but you never know. The envelope contained the juror notification card, the part of the entry form that gets torn off and returned with the results on it. And hooray! one of my pieces was accepted.

Choices

Good year so far

2011-01-26T09:35:00.004-05:00

I finished up 2010 with entries to 3 shows: the QSDS Happiness:Quilted Expressions, SAQA's Volusia Wrapped in Fiber, and National Fiber Directions in Wichita. I've heard back from the first two with acceptances in both, one piece for QSDS and two pieces for Volusia. This, plus a sale through the ArtFul Home (fingers crossed that the buyer doesn't return the piece), is making for a good start to 2011.

I'm particularly pleased that my very large piece Graffiti will get another chance to be displayed. The prospectus for Volusia stated that the galleries have high ceilings and wide wall spans. Graffiti, aka "Too wide for Quilt National" is 130" wide. You can read about that little episode here and see a picture. This other piece that was selected is titled Looking Out

Looking Out

These two pieces will be on display at The Gateway Center for the Arts in DeBary, Florida from February 15 through April 2.

The QSDS show will be from May 5 through July 10 at the Riffe Gallery in downtown Columbus. At least I will have something in Ohio during Quilt National time.

Life Lines

I hope to hear about the Wichita show next week as they said the notification date would be January 31.

It's snowing here now, great big fat flakes and it's a wet snow so I expect to see tree branches coming down soon.

Good Grief

2011-01-04T14:38:00.005-05:00

No wonder my blog readership statistics have tanked lately. It's been more than 2 months since my last post. I won't give excuses because that just sounds whiney, so I'll just say I feel guilty for ignoring my fans (if there are any left.....)

I do have something to share. SAQA is putting together another trunk show of mini-quilts that will travel around the country. It can be requested by any group at minimal cost and maximum enjoyment. The quilts are small and will be matted so that only 8" x 8" will show. The due date for these quilts is January 21, and mine is ready to send off as soon as I complete the accompanying paperwork.

Last year I requested one of the trunks from the previous trunk show and showed it to various groups in the area. One of these groups, Metrothreads, decided to mount a similar type show and take it around the Baltimore Washington metropolitan area in hopes of getting a venue. Since I planned to participate in both of these events, I needed to make 2 pieces.

Only an 8"x8" window of each piece will show, but in order to allow for insertion into the mat, the quilt had to be at least 9"x9" and no more than 11"x11". Going for the mean, I chose to make my pieces 10"x10", and used the technique that I've been working with lately. The background is comprised of many pieces of fabric stitched into a grid, overpainted with red, and then overpainted with a scribble. This is what I got:

I neglected to block out the 8"x8" for the center and as you can see, the scribble is a bit too big. So I did 2 more:

These two fit the bill. The scribble will fit into the matted area. (Did you notice the center purple circle?) So I had these four pieces spread out on my work table and suddenly this arrangement jumped out at me:

This is total serendipity. I did not plan this at all, but because I always entered the piece from the left edge and exited from the right edge, the pieces can be arranged so that the scribble moves smoothly through all four. I really liked this and so decided to make a larger version, and made 4 pieces, all about 24"x24", but not exactly. I completed the grid quilting and then the project came to a screeching halt because I got taken up in other events, including several trips to Chicago, Thanksgiving, Christmas, family events, etc., etc. Today I pulled the pieces out and have put the first layer of paint over the grid. The project is back on!

Way last summer I signed up for the Sketchbook Project and that had been hanging over my head, contributing to my general anxiety. My theme was Outside/Inside and I agonized over how to represent that theme as the sketchbook lay near my work table, taunting me no end. I finally came up with an idea. I would make gelatin plate prints of small objects, and then sew the object into a little fabric sac with the print of the object showing on the outside. I used cotton duck to make the book pages (after removing all the paper pages that came in the book), and then sewed the little sacs to the cotton duck. On the inside front cover is a list of all the objects that are included in the book, but not in the same order. The reader will have to figure out what each thing is by touch. I was so glad to get this thing finished and off my list that I didn't take any photos, and just packed it up and shipped it off yesterday. I paid to have my Sketchbook scanned, and so I wonder what it's going to look like. Especially since you really have to touch the pieces to get the full effect.

What didn't get in

2010-10-24T10:34:00.003-04:00

In my previous post I promised images of my Quilt National entries. Since none was selected, I can share all three with everybody. A brief description of the process: dye and paint fabric, cut fabric apart, sew it back together, cut fabric apart, sew it back together, quilt it, monoprint it, throw paint at it, stencil it. In a nutshell.

Forest Concerto

60" W x 62" L

Forest Concerto detail

Amber Waves

54" L x 55" W

Amber Waves detail

Choices

60" L x 70" W

Choices detail

I'm working on getting these and a bunch more onto my web page, which is sorely in need of updating. I bought a new computer last spring with Windows 7 on it and now I can't get the ISS thingy to work anymore with my web page database. I can't explain it any better than that because if I could, I could probably fix it.

It's been a while

2010-10-09T19:40:00.007-04:00

I have been on the road for most of the past two weeks. The last weekend in September I went to my art quilt group retreat in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. We arrived on Thursday and unloaded our gear into a wonderful space where we each had 2 work tables and plenty of space to spread out. We all had plenty of projects and spent many, many hours working diligently. Of course, we also had lots of time to chat and share stories and, of course, to eat the goodies that everybody insists on bringing. I'm sure we would be better off without all the chocolate, cookies, and cashews that were consumed. To be sure, there were some healthy food choices on the table but I think a lot of them went home with whoever brought them. At least I didn't eat any.

We went our separate ways on Sunday, home to do laundry, unpack, and get back into the normal routine. Except that I had to pack up again on Tuesday to travel to Chicago and then on to Missouri. This was a family visit and it was really terrific to be at the wedding of my great niece (omg how did I get to be this old?). The ceremony was held on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River with the light of the setting sun. It could not have been more beautiful.

Home again on Monday, unpack, then repack for a trip to Syracuse, New York. A year ago I posted an entry about my sister and her role as the Chairman of the Upstate Golisano Children's Hospital Capital Campaign. When they asked her what she wanted to commemorate this accomplishment, she said she wanted me to do a quilt in her honor. I was thrilled and excited and of course said that I would be pleased to do it. I visited the hospital last spring and we toured the area looking for possible places to hang the quilt. We decided that the Resource Library was the spot and chose a space above the fireplace. I returned home and began work on the quilt and it was mostly finished by August. That's when I received an email from the hospital saying that the fire marshal had an objection to our chosen location. Apparently all things must be hung at least 18" below the ceiling so that the sprinkler system spray is not blocked, and the size of this quilt did not allow that. Luckily, there were other walls that would be suitable, also in the Resource Library. But...the quilt had to be made fire retardant. No problem, I found a fire retardant spray made especially for fabrics and it is sold by Dharma Trading Company.

I wanted to test this stuff before spraying the quilt and I had a piece of quilt scrap that I could use. First I tested the untreated scrap. Whoosh, it caught fire immediately and burned quite merrily. Then I tested the treated scrap. The flame scorched and charred the quilt, but it did not catch fire. I was quite impressed. And it didn't change the hand of the quilt. So I sprayed the entire quilt, front and back. It will not burst into flames, not even when everything else in the library is burning.

And then they decided it should be framed. I don't know who they chose to do the framing, but they did a superior job. They placed the quilt against a dark blue mat and recessed it slightly. The frame is green, and these colors pick up the colors in the quilt.

This is the quilt. It measures 35" L x 55" W.

A detail shot to show the various fabrics and quilting lines. The quilting echoes the rays.

Here we are at the presentation ceremony. The Board members of the hospital were present and there were some little speaches talking about how much they enjoyed working with my sister and what a wonderful job she did in raising the money for the hospital.

This is a picture of the hospital. It's actually built onto an existing hospital, but it extends out like a treehouse. The shapes of the windows of the hospital are echoed in the background of the quilt. It is a marvel of planning and thoughtfulness that really caters to the needs of both children and their parents during a hospital stay.

All in all it was a wonderful two, marred by only two events. First, I received my rejection email from Quilt National, boo. Second, on the drive up to Syracuse (5 hours) I left my purse in a sandwich shop in Pennsylvania and did not realize it until we had driven for 3 hours. Talk about frantic! We called the shop and they had found it and were trying to get in touch with us. Phew! They stored it in the safe and we picked it up on our drive home on Friday, everything was just as I left it. So that turned out okay. So I guess there was only one bad event. Since I didn't get into QN, I can post the pictures of the rejects. That will be my next post.

Starting today

2010-09-20T08:38:00.004-04:00

is the SAQA Benefit Auction. This is a reverse auction, with prices starting at $750 at 2:00 PM today. The prices drop every day to $550, then $350, then $250, $150, and $75. My piece will be in the auction that starts October 3. If I did it correctly, there is a slide show of the pieces above this post. I have my eye on a few pieces, so I hope nobody else bids on them until they come to my price range!

Waiting

2010-09-14T07:57:00.003-04:00

My entries to Quilt National were completed, photographed, and documented. Filled out the entry form, burned the CD, and sent it off on September 3, a full 7 days before the deadline. Of course, they still need sleeves, labels, storage bags, but the pressure is off. At least until early October, when the notifications go out. It used to be you could tell the results of the jurying by the thickness of the envelope - a thin envelope only contained a rejection letter and your returned slides. A thick envelope contained a whole raft of paperwork that meant your work was accepted. Now most notifications come via e-mail. A "thick" email has an attachment, and a thin email only a few consoling words. The major difference is that the snail mail is only delivered once a day but I can check email every 5 minutes, or more, and drive myself up the wall with anticipation and dread. Better to get distracted with something else.

The good news is that the District of Columbia Commission on Arts and Humanities has purchased this quilt, titled "Hidden Agendas". The DCCAH purchases art every year for the Art Bank which places artwork into government offices. This year the call asked for work with a them that related to D.C. urban life. I submitted several works and they chose three for further review, and then chose this one for purchase. I think that "Hidden Agendas" is a very apt description for the workings of our federal government.

Several posts ago I showed some sunflowers that I've been growing in my yard. They're ready to be harvested now so I'm cutting them down to let the heads dry, and then will let the birds and squirrels feast. But I'm not the only one around here growing sunflowers. This is a field of 300 acres of sunflowers growing on a farm about 20 miles from me. This variety is smaller than what I grew, but what they might lack in quality, they certainly make up in quantity! What an impact that sea of yellow makes.

And lastly, today is Primary Election day in Maryland. We have been bombarded with electioneering signs (which are only one step above trash imho) and robo calls (three steps below telephone solicitations). In case you are lucky enough to not be subjected to robo calls, these are automated telephone calls from candidates telling you how wonderful they are. Yesterday I received 10 calls, even one from "Governor" Sarah Palin. I think being endorsed by Ms. Palin, the EX-governor, is a point in the opposition candidate's favor. Anyhow, their dollars are wasted on me because I hang up as soon as I can tell what the phone call is about. If I'm near the phone that displays the caller ID, I don't even pick up. I wish I could say that I would cross off my list every candidate that called me, but then I wouldn't even need to go vote. I'm sure this will calm down a bit, but come November, the calls will ramp up again. Don't you just love that politicians exempt themselves from every law they pass?

Sunflowers

2010-08-08T10:34:00.004-04:00

I love growing sunflowers. Last year I had 2 and I promised myself I would grow more this year. Trying to get a head start, I planted a dozen seeds in little pots and put them in a sunny window. They sprouted almost immediately, but then didn't do much else for several weeks, except get stringy. I planted them outside and visited them every day. Much to my chagrin, the seedlings were eaten and nothing was left but a little stalk. So I planted a dozen more seeds directly in the ground. They also sprouted immediately, and also were eaten by the birds and/or squirrels. Argh! Next I bought a bunch of plastic cups to use as collars and planted a dozen more seeds. Success! The cups could stay protecting the cups until the true leaves came in, which must not be as tasty as the first set.

Sunflowers are amazing. In just a short time span they grow to 10 feet tall and then produce a magnificent bloom.

Here is the long view and you can see how tall they are. The blooms are in various stages - some have not yet opened, some are in the process, and one (nearly hidden) is bent over with the weight of the developing seeds.

It is fascinating to watch the process. The little blossoms open first on the outside rim, then work their way towards the center. The bees and the butterflies love them!

You can see here the outside blossoms have been fertilized and are growing seeds. The next band is the pistils that have just been fertilized. The next band is waiting for the bees to do their job, and the very center has not yet begun the process.

As the blossoms get fertilized and the seeds begin to develop, the head of the flower goes from flat to bowl shaped, and gets heavier and heavier.

This head has been entirely fertilized and is so heavy that the stalk has bent over and the flower is facing the ground. It will take several weeks for the seeds to develop. Once that is done, I can leave the head on the plant and let the birds eat the seeds from there. Or I can cut the head and hang it to dry, and then harvest the seeds. Last year I cut the heads off but I think that this year I will leave them out and watch the birds go after them.

New work

2010-08-05T09:47:00.003-04:00

I haven't posted new work in quite a while, it seems. Not that I haven't been doing anything, I'm just lazy about posting it. So here is something new. This is an experiment. The background is many small squares and rectangles, all raw edge stitched, then quilted in a loose grid. I did the background without any thought as to what the focus might be. But looking at the background, it seemed to be not background-ish enough, that is to say the yellow pieces clamored for attention and were distracting. A little paint applied in a random fashion took care of that. I thought about a foreground image for a while and came up with a graffiti-like scribble. However, doing this freehand with paint would not result in clean edges, so I made a stencil from freezer paper and ironed it down. The graffiti image is painted with opaque white paint then overlaid with some gold so it's not so stark. The piece is about 24" x 36", or a little smaller.

I really like the effect achieved when the painting is done after the quilting - if the paint is applied with a light enough hand, it does not penetrate into the valleys created by the quilting and so the quilting becomes more prominent. Of course, painting the fabric at this point in the process takes a certain amount of bravery but I've done it enough that I'm pretty sure what the effect is going to be.

In this detail shot you can see how the paint emphasizes the quilting and also lets some of the background show through, yet is still a strong focal point.

I'm working on a much larger piece constructed in the same fashion, also painted, and still in need of a focus. Not showing that piece for several reasons, the most important is that I intend to enter it into Quilt National, and they have such stringent rules on prepublishing images of the work that I don't want to take any chances. Entries are due in early September, so I need to get back into the studio!

Back into the routine

2010-07-27T08:12:00.003-04:00

Home again, back from a wonderful week at the beach with multiple members of the Kleeman family. We spent the week catching up, eating, sunning on the beach, swimming, eating, and just hanging around. The Outer Banks were in the throes of the East Coast heat wave, with heat indexes of 110 degrees. Not usually a problem with an ocean right there, except the water temperatures were in the mid 50s. It was numbingly cold and only the bravest (or most foolhardy) of our group spent any time in the water. But the houses come with swimming pools, where the water was just the right temperature. When it got too hot on the beach, we would run up, jump into the pool, then return to the beach. The most difficult decision we would have to make was what to cook for dinner.

This is my family - husband, son, daughter, significant others, and grandchildren. I hope you can see the t-shirts - click on the picture to get an enlargement. Each one is painted slightly differently and they were a big hit.

We returned home on Saturday to 100+ degrees only to find that our air conditioning wasn't working. A call to the service got us in the queue for repair and the man showed up yesterday afternoon. The compressor is under a 10 year warranty, but of course the problem was the capacitor, not under warranty. The compressor will wait until next summer, when it is out of warranty, and then go up. We are cool again, and happy. And ready to think about Quilt National. Time to get stitching!

Artful Home Studio Sale

2010-07-15T17:44:00.005-04:00

The Artful Home Studio Sale has started and will continue through July 29th. This is an opportunity to purchase artwork at a discount anywhere from 20% to 50%. I have a lot of work up there, some fairly recent but some really pretty old. The prices on the older work are not anywhere near where I'm currently pricing my work, and then they are further discounted. I would love to move these pieces out of my house and into someone else's!

OH NO 50!

This is a piece I did when I turned 50, so you know it's pretty old. Or maybe you don't, so take my word for it. This and other work is available here.

Next week is my family's triennial reunion, held for a week on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Actually, it's my husband's family. He's the oldest of nine children and nearly all of them are married and have their own children. Some aren't coming this time, so there are only 30 of us. We rent two houses right on the oceanfront and have a wonderful time. We always do a t-shirt to commemorate the event and this year I commissioned one of my granddaughters to draw the logo. I modified it into a line drawing, had t-shirts printed up, and then we hand painted each one individually.

Here is the drawing; I think it's pretty clever. And the painted ones are fabulous. When we do our group photo I will post it and you will get the full effect. Our houses are supposed to have wi-fi and I hope it works so I can post stuff.

The Sketchbook Project

2010-07-07T07:59:00.003-04:00

I joined the Sketchbook Project and received my book last week. The way it works is that each artist gets a Moleskin sketchbook and has to fill it with something. The dimensions have to remain the same and the books will become part of a touring exhibit and will be cataloged into the Brooklyn Art Library System. Each artist must select a theme. I chose "Inside/Outside". So far I have no entries into my sketchbook and as usual, when called upon to make something that fits a theme, my mind goes totally blank. Looking at some of the samples of previous entries, it seems that many people only loosely follow their theme. So I probably will just go ahead and do something and let the viewers figure out how it relates.

We are in the midst of a horrible heat wave. We had a 10 day stretch at the end of June where the temperature was in the 90s everyday, and hit 100 at least once. A few days of some cool weather that was wonderful, but now we are back into the 90s and above. Yesterday the official high was 105 degrees. It hasn't rained since June 16 and the grass is brown and crunchy. I've been hauling water and using the soaker hoses in a desperate attempt to keep plants and shrubs alive. And now even the trees are showing stress. No significant rain is in the forecast. We could use about 3 days of gentle rain but what will probably happen is a thunderstorm with a downpour. The ground is so hard that any deluge like that will just run off and not soak in. Wonder which will be more outrageous - our electric bill or our water bill.

SAQA Auction quilt

2010-06-18T07:49:00.003-04:00

It's time again for the SAQA Benefit Auction. You can read more about it here but essentially the way it works is that members donate 12"x12" pieces and they are auctioned off in a reverse auction starting in September. My piece is on page 3b, since I just sent it off this week. Take a look at all the pieces already listed. You would be hard put to not find something you like amongst all those works of art.

Ventanas 21

It's another piece in my Ventanas (or Windows) series. The background blue fabric is the result of hand dyeing and painting multitudes of fabrics, cutting them into strips, sewing them together to make a piece of fabric, then cutting that into strips and sewing them together. I've been doing this because I'm working on a commission piece that is going to have this style of background and wanted to figure out just how I wanted this to look. And also how to work with the strips. Everything is raw edge, so each strip is zigzag stitched to its neighbor. It sort of looks pieced from a distance. Overlapping produces less bulk than seaming, I think, which makes it easier to stitch over the joins. And I don't have to worry about getting curved seams to fit. An added benefit, which I haven't yet figured out what to do with, is that when I trim away extra bulk from the back, I get a pile of skinny strips of fabric.

ACEOs

2010-05-17T18:53:00.016-04:00

Here are the first ACEO - Artist Cards, Editions and Originals. These are all originals. Hand dyed and painted fabrics with leaf monoprints; machine stitching. Dimensions: 3 1/2" x 2 1/2". The price for each one is $20, which includes shipping. If Paypal isn't working, email me at cathy@cathyquilts.com

ACEO #1

ACEO #2

ACEO #3

ACEO #4

ACEO #5

ACEO #6

ACEO #7

ACEO #8

Comparison

2010-05-17T09:27:00.005-04:00

Been doing some soy wax batik and I realized that I haven't done it for quite a while. Since we no longer get a newspaper delivery, I had to scrounge newspapers for the ironing out process. I tried using a boiling water bath and it did work, but it took a long time, and was very messy. Good thing I did it outside because there were lots of wax drips.

So the good thing about soy wax is that it is soluble in water. This can also be a drawback, particularly if you want to get the "crackle" that is so much a mark of batik. Getting a good crackle involves immersing the waxed cloth in a dyebath. Soy wax will dissolve in a dyebath. Except now that I think about it, it wasn't all that easy to get the wax off in cool water, so maybe this is something to experiment with.

Anyhow, I was trying to get a crackle effect on this piece, so after doing one layer with a tjap and getting the sort of leafy effect, I covered the piece with wax, cracked it, and painted on diluted paint, working it into the cracks. I ironed this piece to get the wax out and since I knew that a lot of the paint was sitting on top of the wax, I figured that as the wax melted through the fabric, the paint would get deposited. Here is the piece after ironing. It's stiff as a board.

After washing in hot water and detergent, the fabric softened up and some of the heavier crackle disappeared, although not nearly as much as I was afraid it would. It's a little bit more subtle, if you can call red on orange and yellow "subtle".

I really like this second piece. I applied the wax with a paint brush and you can see the brush marks, sort of. I applied the first layer of wax onto white fabric, then painted on dilute light green paint. After that dried, I brushed on another layer of wax, crumpled the fabric to crack the wax, then applied a darker green shade of paint. I think that this was one of the pieces that I boiled the wax to remove it, then washed it. Here is the before picture.

And the after. It looks like the color has lightened up a bit, but that may be the result of less than expert scanning. I really like the painterly effects and the randomness and how the colors blend into each other. And the edges where the color falls off - love that.

Right now in the studio I'm making some small pieces to put in a sales gallery along with a show. My group New Image is having a show at the Lorton Workhouse Gallery in Lorton, Virginia. It's titled Yard Art at the Yard and is an interpretation of the various uses of the word Yard. My pieces in the show are done with leaf prints, so I'm making some small (5"x7") pieces mounted on painted stretched canvas using more leaves. As I'm making these, I'm getting some small pieces from cuttings that I thought I would make into those Art Cards, ACEO - Art Cards, Editions and Originals. They're really small - 2.5" x 3.5", the size of a baseball trading card. When I get them finished, I'll post some pictures.

Show report

2010-05-03T09:33:00.005-04:00

The show opening went really well. Since there were several shows opening, we all benefited from spillover as people wandered through all the galleries. I really appreciated the people who came specifically to see my show and I hope they felt it was worth the drive. It was very gratifying to hear the comments on my work, especially from those who were unfamiliar with quilts as art. Of course, I did hear the word "grandmother" once, but I think it was in jest. The space is well lit, bright, and airy and shows quilts well. I have pictures here but have to apologize for the quality. I have an excuse - I just got a new computer and Windows 7 does not like Photoshop Elements 3 and so I've had to use a different program to edit the images. Learning curve and all that.

Sundown on the left and The Green Flash on the right.

Left to right: Sun Dance, Yellow Brick Road, Symphony in Red, Spring Green

On the left are two Ventanas, on the right is Looking Out

Left to right: Looking Out, Fading Glory, Three Leaves, and two more Ventanas

Hidden Agendas on the left, Sundown on the right

Graffiti and two Ventanas on the left

Left to Right: Downtown, Sun Dance, Yellow Brick Road

Backyardhenge on the left, Life Lines on the right

"Ventanas" is Spanish for "windows" and it occurred to me later that it's an interesting juxtaposition to have those pieces around the actual windows. Not that I thought about it when doing the hanging plan, it just happened to be a good place.

The show will be up until May 30. The Museum director is hoping for some good local publicity and I'm hoping for some sales. I think she has a better chance of success than I do, but one should always be optimistic.

Hanging the Show

2010-04-29T19:18:00.002-04:00

This is the official postcard for my show that starts this Saturday. I really like how my piece is front and center. The Delaplaine has seven different galleries and each one is dedicated to an artist, at least for this month. Sometimes they have group shows; last year they had a National Juried Quilt Show, juried by Karey Bresenhan, of Quilts, Inc.

Yesterday with the assistance of three very wonderful friends, I hung the show. This is a lot of work. Thank heavens I planned the layout in advance, so there wasn't any shifting pieces around to make them fit. I had thought about how high the pieces should be hung and wondered - do they all hang with their tops at the same height, or does the height vary with the length of the quilt. While I was a Art Quilts Elements I observed that they hung the work so that eye level was at the center of the quilt and the heights of the tops varied. "Eye level" is defined by various web sites that give instructions on hanging at 58" from the floor. This is definitely not my eye level but I know I am shorter than most people. Using 58" as the midpoint for the quilt, I could figure out how high the top should be, and marked this on the quilt bag.

Once we got familiar with the process and assigned duties, the whole thing went pretty quickly. And we all agreed that it looks spectacular. I will take pictures when I go back on Saturday for the opening reception, 3-5pm. If you are in the area of Frederick, Maryland during the month of May, I hope you can take the time to see the show. And right around the Delaplaine are several antique shops and yummy eateries. You could easily spend the whole day!

Art Quilt Elements and more

2010-04-19T08:35:00.003-04:00

This past weekend I went to the opening of Art Quilt Elements in Wayne, PA. I also attended a one day SAQA conference held in conjunction with the opening. Both were excellent.

First, the show. This is becoming one of the premier art quilt events in this country, imho. The quality of entries is reflected in what is selected for the show itself. Fifty quilts were selected from the 600 entries by the jurors Jason Pollen, Deborah Warner, and Robin Schwalb. All have eminent qualifications for their roles as jurors and spoke at the conference. They reiterated things we artists have heard numerous times: have excellent photography, make sure the detail shot relates to the whole piece (in some examples shown, the detail could have come from an entirely different piece), composition and the elements of design are critical, and so on. I could have listened to them for way more than their alloted time. The keynote speaker was Sue Benner and it is always a joy to listen to her speak. Her topic was "Building an Artist Community" and she talked about the importance of having communities, not only for your art, but for your life.

Lisa Chipetine and Sandra Sider spoke about critique and technology and the importance of networking. The last session was small group meetings with AQE artists who were present at the conference. We could learn about their careers, their creative processes, and the particular piece that was in the show. Since there were quite a few of the artists present, it was an opportunity to absorb significant amounts of information. I also was able to put faces to names I had only seen online, always an interesting exercise, since nobody ever looks like what you think they might look like. I met several people who are regular readers of this blog and who gently chastised me for neglecting it, hence this post.

There is a catalog of the show available from the AQE web site for $30 (includes tax, shipping, and handling). It is a well designed catalog and worth getting (I bought 5*) even though catalogs never do justice to the work. You just have to use your imagination to visualize the vibrant colors and beautiful textural qualities in the work.

(* Four of the catalogs are for friends, but you probably guessed that.)

The "more" part of this post involves a new publication 1000 Artisan Textiles by Sandra Salamony and Gina Brown in which I have at least one piece. I haven't received my copy yet and I've changed computers since the original email so I don't remember which piece or pieces were selected for publication. I'll just have to wait and see. It's not just quilts, it's all kinds of fiber related works and it's available from Amazon.

The second "more" part of this post is about my solo show which starts on May 1 at the Delaplaine Visual Arts Education Center in Frederick, Maryland. My work will hang in the Kline Gallery and I plan to have between 15 and 20 works. The opening is Saturday, May 1, 3-5pm and the show extends through Sunday, May 30. Everybody is invited! Hope you can come.

35" x 42"

Not art

2010-03-16T13:55:00.003-04:00

I have been at my sewing machine every day for the past month, but not making art. We have two chairs that are probably 35 years old, and the upholstery was wearing out. Especially where I had scrubbed it because of animal accidents. Yet the chairs were still in good condition and very comfortable. They sort of swivel and rock. So I thought I would make slipcovers for them. How hard could it be? Talk about famous last words....

Now I know why it costs so much to have these made. Being a novice at this, I went to the library and checked out several books on making slipcovers. Read them thoroughly. Only one of the three actually gave explicit instructions. The other two pretty much left out the steps getting from "Buy your fabric" to "Put it on the chair."

I started out by making a muslin cover so I could figure out where the difficult parts would be and learn how to handle them. Well, I figured out where the difficult parts would be but didn't solve how to handle them, at least not very well. When I got the slipcover fabric I bravely set off. The book said to make the seat cushions first, just for a psychological benefit. So I did. But the first cushion turned out way too big, and then I decided I should buy new cushions since why go to all this effort and use old cushions? I'll save the cushion cover til later.

Anyhow, after a lot of bad language, ripping out, frustration, and hair pulling, I finished one slipcover. I took it to chair #2 to put it on. I had used chair #1 as my model. That's when I discovered that the chairs were fraternal twins, and not identical twins. More bad language, but no more ripping out. On to the second slipcover. Which wasn't any easier, and even developed its own new problems.

But finally they're done. They're not perfect but they are pretty good. Slipcovers can't fit as well as upholstery, so I can live with the wrinkles. They look much better than they used to.

After I was about 75% finished with the second slipcover I discovered a website of a guy who sells step-by-step instructions of how to make slipcovers, geared towards the beginner. I was particularly interested in the "tips for first-timers". He suggested to not try to tackle a chair with an attached back cushion, wings, or curved arms. Check, check, and check, my chairs have all three. Probably better I didn't know that up front.

And here is Rosie, now 8 months old. She supervised from her comfortable perch, or helped by chewing the tape measure, pulling out pins, and knocking stuff off the table.

And now gotta get back to doing some art. The snow has melted and Spring is starting. Hooray!

More Snow Dyeing

2010-02-23T11:19:00.004-05:00

This snow dyeing technique produces some unique markings, that's for sure. It's too bad it's limited, season-wise. Plus it takes a fair amount of space. I have to cover the pans to make sure the cat doesn't manage to get into them. After all, they are kitty litter pans, and she feels a certain ownership. So here I have these beautiful fabrics, which present the problem of how to use them. It would be difficult to overprint them and they don't seem to want to fade into the background. Front and center would make them happy, I think. So I thought that a good way to showcase these fabrics would be to dye some t-shirts also.

This blue one, which is nice, but not spectacular, will be my working-out-at-the-gym t-shirt. I can admire myself as I slog through my workout.

This second one I like a whole lot better. I used two different pans with different colors (obviously). The blue pan was the Brilliant Blue, with a little bit of Black Cherry and a little bit of Golden Yellow. I didn't mix the dyes so strongly this time, only 1 T per 1 cup of water. The second pan was mostly the Golden Yellow with some red and a small amount of blue. These pieces are to die for. Or is it dye for? Ha Ha. Sorry.

These next 4 images are all from the same piece of fabric and were in the same pan with the above t-shirt. It's amazing the variety of markings and colors that appear. And again these are fabrics that will have a difficult time playing with others, they are just too eye-catching.

Before the snow all melts I should try to do some with more dilute dye solutions to see if I can get subtler markings. I think I have some time, I'm betting there will still be some piles of plowed snow for another month.

Snow Dyeing and a Sweater

2010-02-12T11:26:00.004-05:00

There has been a lot of discussion on the various dyeing and surface design lists about snow dyeing. I have always thought that this was rather a strange method of dyeing fabric since one of the basic premises is that the dyes need a temperature of at least 70 degrees to fix to the fabric. Snow is obviously nowhere near that temperature, so why use it? But at the moment we are overwhelmed with snow and I needed to dye some backs for quilts, so I thought I would give it a try. Right outside my back door is enough snow for just about the entire world to try out snow dyeing. In case you hadn't heard, we here on the East Coast, particularly in Baltimore, have had two humongous snow storms in the past week. This much snow is unheard of around here. And this season, we have had three storms of more than 20 inches of snow, an event never before recorded. For a region that normally gets 18 inches of snow for the entire season, this wallop has pretty much shut down everything. So, back to the snow dyeing.

A little research showed me the methods that people had used: pre-soak the fabric in the soda ash/water solution, wad up and place into the bottom of a large pan. Gather up the snow and pile it into the pan. Pour the dye solution over the snow. The snow forms a resist of sorts so that the dye hits sections of the fabric unevenly. Once the snow melts, then let the fabric batch overnight. I placed my snow-filled pan in a sunny window to speed up the snow melting process, but it still took many hours. The pans were on a slant so that as the snow/dye melted and puddled, the fabric was not soaking in the liquid.

I used some blue dyes that are at least 10 years old, mixed at 2 Tablespoons dye powder to 1 cup water. This is pretty concentrated solution. I wanted to see if I could get saturated colors because most of the examples I saw on the web were too pastel for my taste. This first piece is a Brilliant Blue and Black Cherry, both from ProChem. The Black Cherry was mixed at 1 Tablespoon in 1 cup. When all the snow melted on this one, I drained out all the liquid.

This second piece of fabric is Cerulean Blue, again 2 T in 1 cup water. For this one I must have had more snow or it wasn't in direct sun because it took much longer for the snow to melt and I didn't bother to drain the liquid. Maybe those more solid areas were soaking in the dye all night.

The results are really pretty nice, but I'm still not convinced it's worth the effort and the time involved. And the close contact with snow, that stuff is cold.

In December I blogged about dyeing some cotton yard and knitting a sweater. You can read about it here and here. I discovered that it's difficult to get even coloration on the yarn and I was worried about how it would knit up. Actually I like the slightly variegated look. Here is the finished sweater. It crosses over in front and ties at the side. I haven't had a chance to wear it anywhere yet. I like the patterning and once I got the hang of it, didn't have to rip out very much at all.

Now I've got another knitting project going. I like to knit while watching TV in the evening. Hand sewing makes my fingers and hands hurt, so I do this instead. It seems a shame to just sit and watch and let my hands be idle. I can glance up enough to keep up with what's happening. Except for Lost, and particularly when they air the previous week's episode with little explanations written out at the bottom of the screen. I call this "Lost for Dummies" because it helps make sense of the plot. Sort of.

500 Art Quilts

2010-01-12T09:04:00.003-05:00

This new book will be available at the end of this month, 2 months ahead of schedule. I'm very pleased to say that I will have work in this book, although I don't remember exactly which piece or pieces they selected. Have to wait until I get my copy. There are 363 artists featured in the book and you can preorder it right now on Amazon:

The list price is $24.95 so the Amazon price is a pretty good deal. And if you buy more stuff, you can get free shipping, can't beat that. I get a small percentage if you purchase after clicking on this link and I appreciate that very much. It's too bad I can't that percentage on the stuff I order myself from Amazon, I'd be rolling in dough.

Right now I'm thinking about the month of May and the solo show I will be having at the Delaplaine Art Center in Frederick, MD. As it gets closer to the date, I will be posting more information. If you're going to be in the area I hope you can visit. Frederick is about 30 miles west of Baltimore on Interstate 70.

Filing

2010-01-07T07:56:00.005-05:00

Putting stuff back where it belongs is always a challenge. It's much easier to plop it onto a flat surface somewhere and leave it for "sometime". Periodically those flat surfaces, also known as my work table, get so covered with stuff it's impossible to work. And I'm forced to do a clean up, which is a good thing. As long as I don't just move it around, like stirring the pot, which means it all comes back to its original spot. Anyhow, this isn't really about the stuff on my work table, it's about the little basket where I tossed the slides that came back from my show entries, in either a fat or skinny envelope. That basket was full of slides, and since I haven't entered a show with slides in probably about 3 years, one can only surmise how long it's been since I refiled them.

So I emptied the basket and pulled all the slides out of their little sleeves and sorted them. I have notebooks marked by year for slide storage. There is an archive notebook for anything before 1998, then 11 books going from 1998 through 2008. Each quilt has 2 pages of slides since I always shot a full roll of 36 on one quilt. It was easier to have lots of originals than to do one original and then have dupes made. As digital images became more and more prevalent, I began to take them also, but continued to shoot slides. Here is a blog post I wrote when I put in my last order for slide film, in April of 2007. (By the way, I cut up the quilt mentioned in that post.)

Obviously I stopped shooting slides because there are only 2 quilts in my notebook for 2008. It wasn't because I ran out of film because I still have 3 rolls left, stored in the freezer. I would get my slides processed by Fuji, using prepaid mailers. Then Fuji stopped processing their own film and had everybody send them to Dwayne in Parsons, Kansas. If you have Kodachrome slide film, Dwayne's is the only laboratory in the world that still processes it. Kodak stopped producing Kodachrome film last June and if you have some, you had better use it because Dwayne will stop processing it at the end of this year. He will continue to process other types of slide film.

It was always a little apprehensive waiting for slides to come back and wondering if I got the exposure right or didn't see some errant threads that were centered right in the middle of the detail shot. Or if the lab messed up. Several times the film cutter got confused because I shot the quilts on a black background and it couldn't tell where to start cutting. It was was by a machine and it would look for the change in color that signified an image, except in mine that signified the edge of the quilt. That meant the quilt was not centered in the slide and the left edge was cut off. I had to enclose a note that said the image was shot on a black background, please center. Then I figured out a foolproof method - I shot the detail first.

So anyhow, now I'm totally digital and I have a very nice Canon EOS Elan II film camera body that nobody wants. B&H Photovideo sells them for about $80, used of course. This is a camera I think I originally bought for $600. I will take it to the local camera shop and see if they will buy it. Photography students at the local universities often use them.

And slide projectors are becoming scarce also. It's really a dying technology. Someday we will have boxes and boxes of slides and no way to view them. It's really pretty amazing how quickly this change from film to digital has occurred. According to Wikipedia, the first true digital camera that recorded images as a computer file was manufactured in 1988. It took about 10 years for the technology to become readily available and affordable for ordinary consumers, and in 1999 Nikon released its D1, a 2.74 megapixel camera. From then on it was a race to see who could cram the most megapixels into their camera.

Winter Song

This is the last quilt for which I have slides, from March of 2008. OK enough history, time to do some art.

Winter Song detail

It's time

2009-12-29T09:55:00.002-05:00

Christmas is over. It's time to get back to art. It's time to stop using all the Christmas prep as an excuse to avoid the studio. Of course, those were legitimate excuses: design Christmas cards, order cards, mail them out; purchase or make and ship presents for out of town family; purchase presents for intown family and friends and wrap them; make treats, lots of cookies and candies (short interruption for trip to ER to sew up thumb due to misuse of kitchen equipment); decorate tree, prepare meals, yada yada yada. I did spend some time in the studio but it was to sew labels and sleeves on finished quilts and make the storage bags. I'm on the last one and when I finish that there will be no more tasks that I can use to procrastinate. I will have to make some art.

At the moment I'm sort of devoid of inspiration and need a kickstart. Doing some surface design on fabrics always helps in that direction. Maybe some monoprinting with gelatin plates, or some soy wax batik (haven't done that in a very long time). Wish I had a foolproof method for getting up to speed....

What do you do?

Further adventures in knitting

2009-12-10T19:08:00.003-05:00

Good thing I decided to knit one sleeve at a time. So far I've had to rip out three different times, for a total of about 30 rows. And it's not the kind of ripping where you can take the needle out, pull the yarn, and then pick up the stitches. With the pattern - knitting 2 together and yarn overs - I know I would never get it right. So I have to laboriously unknit one stitch at a time. Sigh.

While I was doing the research, I kept reading about AddiTurbo needles. Everybody raves about them so I did some more research to see if I wanted to purchase some. They are definitely not cheap. But it sure looked like I wouldn't have the problem of the needle unscrewing itself from the cable or the permanent loop in the other cable. It quickly became obvious that nobody was selling these beauties at a discount. All the web sites I checked had the same prices and even had the same charts. Must have some master site with the information that everybody is supposed to use. But I found this one site Bob and Nancy's Services that did free shipping, so that's a discount of sorts. I ordered them on Monday, they were shipped Tuesday, and arrived today. Pretty good deal.

I haven't been doing much art lately, for sure. I have a bunch of quilts that need sleeves, labels, and bags to hold them. Boring work, but at least I'm in the studio and I can listen to audio tapes. The label fabric that I ordered from Spoonflower arrived and I embroidered titles and dimensions for about 6 quilts, and those have to be sewn on. Maybe while I'm in the studio I will absorb some inspiration.

Adventures in Knitting

2009-12-05T20:42:00.004-05:00

So I dyed yarn for a sweater, and found a pattern I really like at elann.com. It's a top down knitting pattern and I really like those because it nearly eliminates any finishing sewing, no side seams, and no sleeve seams if they can be knit in the round. This pattern is not real precise in its instructions and assumes that the knitter is fairly experienced. I thought I qualified for that until I got to this section:

Sleeves: Move sleeve-backs (underarm to back of shoulder) to one circular needle, and sleeve-fronts (underarm to front of shoulder) to a second circular need. Knit.....

Huh? I've used circular needles to knit in the round, but this use of two circular needles was new to me. I could not even visualize what this was talking about. Google to the rescue. I found lots of descriptions and videos of knitting with "2 circs". It actually seems easier than using double pointed needles, at least once you get the hang of it. But I couldn't find anything anywhere describing how to use this technique and knit two sleeves simultaneously. A little more searching revealed directions for knitting two socks on 2 circs at the same time. I thought I would try to adapt that to the sleeves.

This involves a lot of three dimensional thinking and my brain was clearly not up to the task. I threaded those stitches on the circs and they always came up in the wrong configuration - inside out or the beginning of the row was not at the needle ends or the whole thing was twisted. I struggled with this for a long time and it was not made any easier by the permanent loop in the one circular needle nor by the fact that Rosie the kitten thought all this yarn would be great to play with. Finally, I thought I had a workable configuration, and started knitting the sleeves. Disaster. Everything got tangled, I didn't put the right number of stitches on the separate needles so the pattern wasn't working out, and I finally surrendered. I'm knitting one sleeve on the 2 circs (notice how I've picked up the jargon), and it's going well. As long as I keep track of whether I'm doing a patterning row or a plain row. When knitting back and forth it was easy because the patterning row was the knit row and the plain row was the purl row. Now it's all knitting and I have to pay attention.

When I dyed this yarn I wasn't able to get even color throughout. I swooshed the yarn in the dye bath frequently and added the soda ash in batches and swooshed some more, but after I washed it I could see a definite variation in the color. I was concerned that it would look funny, like I had used different dye lots of yarn. But no, it doesn't because the variation is within the skein and it alternates lighter and darker. And it's really working out well - adds lots of depth to the patterning. I'm going to tell everybody it was intentional.

The last sweater I knitted I had to do a lot of reworking because I got the sizing wrong. Well, that and a lot of pattern errors and one sleeve knitted inside out. I certainly hope the sizing works out correctly on this one. I don't know if I have the heart to rip it all out and start over.

Keeping Busy

2009-11-25T08:02:00.003-05:00

This is not a creative time of year for me. The days are dark and often gloomy, the trees are bare, and everything feels gray. I can't seem to get in the art mode, but I want to be in the studio. So what better time to clean the place up? I wish the horizontal surfaces weren't such magnets for stuff: magazines, fabric scraps, paperwork, stalled projects, yadda yadda. If I'm not diligent in putting that stuff away my work surface contracts into about 2 square feet. So I spent a day or so putting things away and dealing with paperwork. And I have several pieces that need the finishing touches - sleeves, labels, bags, slats. Boring work, but I can listen to audio books and the time passes quickly.

In the past I've made labels using t-shirt transfer paper. I've never been very successful with that stuff, and I think the papers have gotten old, because I was even less successful this time. I couldn't get a good transfer no matter how many times I tried. I had the idea to get them printed at Spoonflower, and created a jpg of the label with my name and address information on it, and uploaded it. I'm getting a yard of labels, which I think works out to more than 50. That should last for a long while. The title of the piece and its measurements will have to be added to each piece, and I could either write it out by hand or stitch it by machine using the built-in alphabet. Or I could even freehand write it out.

On one of my email lists there has been a thread about rejections. I've hit the trifecta this season with 3 (or maybe 4, is that a quadfecta?) rejections, all in a row. I'm not sure of that last one because I'm not 100% sure I even entered. It wasn't a show, so I didn't have to put it in the schedule, and I don't have a copy of the entry form. I intended to enter, but maybe I didn't carry through. I was never notified either way, and since I'm not on the list of people who did get in, obviously I didn't. Sheesh, I hate this CRS (can't remember s*^%).

Winter time is knitting season for me, and I searched for a sweater pattern that had more interest than a plain stockinette stitch. I found one with an intricate cabling pattern and I really liked it. Knitted up a test swatch and tried to follow the pattern. Yikes - too complicated. I would never be able to get it right and would constantly be tearing out rows. So I've found another pattern that's not quite so complicated (I hope). Ordered more cotton yarn from DharmaTrading and dyed it the other night. For this sweater, I thought the yarn should be all one color and so I used three skeins and immersion dyed them. I know why variegated colors are so popular - they're so easy to do. Even coloration is very difficult, and I have the results to prove it. You have to stir the yarn in the dye bath to distribute the color, but the more you stir the more likely the yarn is to tangle. So I have different shades of the golden brown I tried to get. The skeins have been hanging on the line for 36 hours now and they're still not dry. Then I will have the task of winding them into balls, which will have the added difficulty of keeping the yarn away from Rosie, the kitten, who thinks everything is a toy. Once I knit the sweater, if the variation in color is too obvious or doesn't look good, I can always over dye.

But the news is not all gloomy - yesterday I shipped High Noon off to its new owners in California. They are celebrating an anniversary and decided to treat themselves to the purchase of my quilt. I think that is an excellent way to celebrate an anniversary.

We will be celebrating our Thanksgiving on Saturday again this year, since my daughter goes to her in-laws on the official T-day. It always feels weird to be cooking the turkey dinner when everybody else is still recovering from their celebration, or out shopping. So, whenever you celebrate Thanksgiving, have a great day!

One last thing. John Hopper, author of The Textile Blog, wrote a very complimentary article about my work last month. He writes about the entire gamut of textiles - quilts, tapestries, knitting, carpets, embroidery, and more. There are some very interesting articles on his blog (in addition to the one about me, of course).

Girlfriends' Weekend

2009-11-12T07:18:00.003-05:00

Last weekend I spent a delightful 4 days with 6 friends in Chicago. These are people I've met at the Quilt Surface Design Symposium in Columbus, Ohio and have enjoyed their company whenever I've been with them. As part of this trip, I attended the opening reception of "What's the BIG Idea" at the Northbrook Public Library, where I have a piece in this show. I have family in Northbrook and it was a real treat to have them come to the reception and see my work hanging on the wall. It's an all media show, with mostly painted works, and mine is the only quilted fiber piece. I didn't win any of the big prizes, but there is always hope for one of the Viewers' Choice prizes.

In Chicago we stayed at the Silversmith Hotel, an historic building in the Loop, two blocks from Millenium Park. The staff treated us like queens and we tried to not make too much noise as we partied in our rooms.

We wanted to visit the new Modern Wing at the Art Institute but had to kill some time before it opened and so explored Millenium Park. This is an amazing place. Here is the description from their web site:

"Millennium Park is an award-winning center for art, music, architecture and landscape design. The result of a unique partnership between the City of Chicago and the philanthropic community, the 24.5-acre Park features the work of world-renowned architects, planners, artists and designers. Among Millennium Park's prominent features are the Frank Gehry-designed Jay Pritzker Pavilion, the most sophisticated outdoor concert venue of its kind in the United States; the interactive Crown Fountain by Jaume Plensa; the contemporary Luri Garden designed by the team of Gustafson Guthrie Nichol Ltd, Piet Oudolf and Robert Israel; and Anish Kapoor’s hugely popular Cloud Gate sculpture."

I remember from my childhood that this area was railroad yards and parking lots, but in 1998 the City began construction of this park. What a change! We spent many minutes at the Cloud Gate, looking at our reflections in the highly polished stainless steel surface, and watching other people do the same thing. From one vantage point its curved surfaces reflect the skyline of the city along with the clouds in the sky. If you get close up you see your self contorted into very weird shapes.

We walked over the BP Bridge, designed by Frank Gehry, 925 feet long and serpentine in shape. There are panels that form the sides of the bridge and slope down to the ground and are an almost irresistible temptation to slide down. Slide marks from previous visitors attest to the fact that not everybody can resist the temptation.

We walked through the gardens which were showing the effects of late fall, and made me want to come back in summer to see them in full bloom. From the Park we ascended the walkway to the entrance of the Modern Wing of the Art Institute. This wing just opened last Spring and is another architectural marvel. We only visited a few of the exhibits, there is just way too much to see for a one day visit. We saw mostly contemporary art, both European and American and ate lunch in the gourmet restaurant.

On Saturday our goal was to attend SOFA - Sculptural Objects and Fine Art. I've heard of this show for years and never had the opportunity to see it. But first we had to get there, and that required a hike down Michigan Avenue, right past the old Chicago Public Library building. No longer a library, it now houses the Chicago Cultural Center and presents free art programs all year long.

From their web page:

"Completed in 1897 as Chicago’s first central public library, the building was designed to impress and to prove that Chicago had grown into a sophisticated metropolis. The country’s top architects and craftsmen used the most sumptuous materials, such as rare imported marbles, polished brass, fine hardwoods, and mosaics of Favrile glass, mother-of-pearl and colored stone, to create an architectural showplace. Located on the south side of the building, the world’s largest stained glass Tiffany dome ― 38 feet in diameter with some 30,000 pieces of glass ― was restored to its original splendor in 2008. On the north side of the building is a 40-foot-diameter dome with some 50,000 pieces of glass in an intricate Renaissance pattern, designed by Healy & Millet."

The mosaics were incredible, some with pieces as tiny as 1/4" across. We could have stayed for many more hours, but SOFA was calling. It was a long walk to Navy Pier and by the time we got there we were all in need of food and drink. After a delicious lunch, we finally got into the show. I've been to the American Craft Council show in Baltimore many times, and sort of expected something similar. At the ACC show, individual artists show their wares in 10'x10' booths. At SOFA, the artwork is displayed by the galleries that represent the artists in "booths" that resemble a gallery setting. Much more sophisticated in presentation. And much higher prices, it seemed. The people in attendance seemed to be divided into two categories: gawkers like us and fashionably dressed people who obviously had lots of disposable income. And they were disposing of it as there were many red dots.

Saturday night was deep dish Chicago pizza (yum, my favorite!) from Lou Malnati's I have frequently ordered pizza from them - they will ship it overnight FedEx, packed in dry ice. But it's never quite as good as the real thing, hot from the oven.

Sunday morning half of our group headed home early, and the rest of us spent the time walking in Grant Park, hoping to see Buckingham Fountain in all its glory. Unfortunately, even the the temperature was a balmy 70 degrees, the fountain had already been turned off for the season. We strolled through the park, then came back up along the waterfront.

And then it was time to leave and come home. What a fantastic weekend! We're already talking about our next jaunt. Maybe back to Chicago, or maybe someplace else. And next time I will remember to bring my camera.

Doings

2009-10-20T08:01:00.002-04:00

Hmm, it has been a while since I last posted here, hasn't it. So I have several things to talk about today. Yesterday I went down to Washington, D.C. to spend the day with my friend Anita Kaplan. We went to the National Museum of the American Indian, the newest museum in the Smithsonian. The building itself is beautiful and the permanent exhibits have more information about American Indians than I had ever imagined existed. In this case "American" refers to the continental Americas, and not to the country.

But what was most interesting is the exhibit featuring the work of Brian Jungen, an Indian from British Columbia, Canada. To quote Paul Smith, the curator of the museum, "he begins with objects that are ordinary, useful, and comforting. When he's through, they are unique, expensive, and useless." Jungen takes objects such as plastic chairs, plastic garbage cans, golf bags, baseball mitts, suitcases, and Nike Air Jordans, cuts them apart and reassembles them into whale skeletons, turtle carapaces, totem poles, statues, and ceremonial masks. You can read more about the exhibit here and also see some of the sculptures.

Being a fiber artist, the piece entitled People's Flag really captured my attention. There isn't a picture of it on the NMAI web page, but if you follow the link to flickr you can see images that others have taken of the exhibit. The People's Flag is red, very, very red and is constructed of red items of mostly clothing. We could see sweaters, dresses, jackets, towels, blankets, bags, whatever. If it was red, made of fabric, and could be flattened into 2 dimensions, it was sewn onto this piece. Sizewise, it it immense. I think maybe 30 feet by 20 feet, although I may be way off. On the flickr site, there is one image that has people in it so that you can see the scale.

This exhibit will be up until next August, so if a trip to D.C. is in your future, I think you will enjoy seeing this.

After we had lunch, we went to the National Museum of Art East Wing. There we saw some of Matisse's cutouts, another exhibit of huge proportions. Also, Jasper Johns, Sol Lewitt, Mark Rothko, and a host of others. Many of these works covered an entire wall, and are inspirations to making very big art. I need a bigger studio. There was much more to see but we were tired and I was going to be going home in rush hour traffic, never a pleasant experience. So much to see, so little time.

When I got home a nice surprise awaited me. A copy of Quilts Japan arrived in the mail with a picture of Family Reunion, my Quilt National piece in it. Also pictured from Quilt National were Kathy Loomis' piece, which won the Quilts Japan Prize, and Anne Smith's piece, Best of Show winner. They only showed these three quilts from the show, so I'm very pleased that I'm one of them. The magazine leans more towards traditional quilting and other sewing crafts, with patterns and such, but since it's in Japanese, I don't get much from the text. There are some nice patterns for totes and purses, and I always like those. I might even make one, if it meets my stringent requirements for a purse. That is, it has to have pockets in the right places for my stuff.

And last but not least, here is a picture of my new kitten Rosie. In August my old cat Chuck finally succumbed to kidney failure and had to be put down. He was 16 years old and a wonderful pet. I knew I was going to be getting another cat but wanted to wait until after I had gotten all our planned vacations out of the way. Three weeks ago I went to the local SPCA and found this kitten. She was 10 weeks old at the time. And they were having a special - animals were free for seniors during September. "Seniors" was defined as anyone over the age of 60, and I was not ashamed to admit it. Otherwise she would have cost $100. Of course, when I took her in to my vet for more shots, it was $140, so in the long haul, that first hundred dollars is going to be a pittance.

Chuck was pretty old and slow, in addition to being ill, so I had completely forgotten how much energy a new kitten has. She dashes from room to room like a kamikaze pilot, crashing into walls and furniture as she slides across the wood floor. Any little item she finds on the floor becomes a new toy to be batted around until it disappears under the sofa or the refrigerator. I'm working on getting her to use the scratching post instead of my furniture and she sort of gets the idea. It's going to take a while I'm afraid.

Quilting Arts Magazine

2009-09-30T09:25:00.004-04:00

I'm very excited. This month's issue of Quilting Arts Magazine not only has a picture of one of my quilts on the cover, I am also the Featured Artist. Quite an honor and it's wonderful to see my work in print.

Last weekend I spent 2 days with friends at our semi-annual fiber retreat. The location is in the mountains of Pennsylvania (although it's not really very mountainous, just very pretty). This weekend was devoted mainly to surface design. We brought t-shirts to decorate, we used rubber fish to make fish prints, I made a gelatin plate to show everybody how to make prints, several used Sunlight dish detergent to discharge, and of course some stamping. And some stitching went on also. What made this weekend so wonderful is that we all had 2 large tables of our own and there was still plenty of space in the room to walk around. At our previous retreat weekend, we were limited to 1 small table each and you had to turn sideways to negotiate the aisles. So this new spot is heaven. Can't wait until the next one in March! I forgot my camera so I don't have any pictures to share.

Bragging

2009-09-16T10:23:00.004-04:00

Not about myself, for once. This is about my sister, Mary Ann Shaw. She is the Chairman of the Upstate Golisano Children's Hospital Capital Campaign. She led the effort to raise $21.5 million to build a new children's hospital in Syracuse, New York. The hospital is named for its major donor, Tom Golisano, who contributed $6 million. The hospital is unique in its design. It's part of the Upstate Medical University and perches like a treehouse overlooking downtown Syracuse. There are 71 private rooms and the rooms are large enough for family members to spend the night. There are performance centers for visiting arts groups, a cafe, chapel, solarium, and outdoor porch. There is an art gallery for showcasing rotating shows from local artists, a family resource center, playhouses for toddlers and older children.

This is a short video that was prepared for the 8,000 donors who supported this effort. I hope you take the time to watch this, as it is truly inspiring. I am so very proud to say that Mary Ann is my sister.

Fun with an air pen

2009-09-06T07:36:00.004-04:00

Summer is pretty much over, so sad. How come summer goes by so more quickly than winter???? I'm working on a new piece for a New Image group show. It's about 60"L x 48" W. The background piece is composed of gelatin plate prints with black-eyed susan leaves spaced more or less in a grid. I inked up the plate, put the leaf on top with the vein side up, then rolled the leaf with more ink. The fabric took up the ink on the plate but from the leaf only the veins made an impressions and the surrounding areas were left white. When the piece of fabric was completed covered with the monoprints, I decided there was way too much white for this to be a background fabric, and went over the white areas with pale washes of blue or purple or green. Much better, everything settled down. Then a little yellow for interest. The picture here is of the practice piece. I also have another piece of fabric that has the second imprints off the gelatin plate after I took the leaf off. The background color was mostly gone but under the leaf there was still enough paint for a good print. So I have companion fabrics that could easily become another piece.

My idea for the foreground was a large drawing of a fading coneflower. I used a picture I took several years ago and used one of the filters in Photoshop Elements to get the outlines. Since I wanted the drawing to be big, about 36" long, it wouldn't work to make a thermofax screen. The air pen seemed to be the (more or less) logical solution. I could print the drawing out onto several sheets of paper, tape them together, and then trace them onto fabric with the air pen. My last experience with the air pen was an exercise in frustration. I was using it to write out words and wasn't happy with the little blots and stuff I was getting when starting and stopping. And the scraping of the metallic point on the fabric was like fingernails on a chalkboard. This time I used one of the plastic points, which is a bit larger in diameter, but doesn't scrape along the fabric. And the little blots didn't detract from the drawing enough to bother me. So this experience was a whole lot more positive than the previous one.

Now I have these two pieces of fabric and am mulling over how I'm going to put them together. Right now the coneflower piece is rectangular, sort of, but I think it would be more interesting if I cut it to follow the shape of the flower and then sew it onto the background. After quilting I may rub some paint or paintsticks onto areas of the flower to emphasize them, but that's a ways off. I can think about it as I'm quilting and then decide if it needs it or not.

Yesterday I went to the opening of the National Juried Quilt Show at the Delaplaine Visual Arts Center in Frederick, Maryland. This is a very nice art center in a very nice town about 40 miles west of Baltimore, right off Interstate 70. The show has 32 quilts in it and was juried by Karen Bresenhan, of Quilts, Inc. Many of the artists in the show, including me, have 2 or 3 pieces hanging, which is really nice because you can get a better idea of the artist's work when there are several pieces. There were prizes awards - best traditional quilt, best art quilt, best of show. There was really only one traditional quilt in the show, which of course won the prize, but this quilt would have won a prize even if there had been competition. Before the prizes were awarded, I picked the art quilts I thought might win (I mean besides mine), and picked out two. Obviously, the prize committee disagreed because they selected different pieces. The art quilt they selected is the one pictured on the link to the show.

The Miracle of Modern Medicine or...

2009-08-09T20:43:00.003-04:00

did I beam onto the USS Enterprise in Star Trek? Last night I had emergency surgery for appendicitis. Less than 24 hours later I am home. It was diagnosed early enough (did I say my husband is a physician?) and so it was relatively quick and uncomplicated. I have three holes and a sore belly, but I can move around and eat fairly normally. No driving for a bit, which puts a crimp in my life right now. And I won't be able to use my boogie board when we go to the ocean next week.

Sorry, no pictures....

Happy Birthday, Mom

2009-08-06T15:36:00.004-04:00

Today is my Mom's birthday. She is 97 years old. I hope that I inherited those longevity genes. I know I inherited a lot of other things from her, for which I am very happy.

She lives in Chicago, a long way from me but we have webcams and can talk to each other with pictures and it's great. I wish I could be there today to celebrate. I used this picture to make a screen and printed us out onto fabric. She lives in a one room apartment in assisted living, so she doesn't have lots of room for more stuff, so I made this into a pillow. She can move it around and it won't take up much room, but every time she looks at it, she will think of me. How great is that?

So, Happy Birthday, Mom, and may you have many more!
Love,
Cathy

Chemistry Exercise Part 2

2009-08-02T20:20:00.004-04:00

As promised, the second part of the dyeing exercise, using what Elin Noble calls "Jewel Tones". I used Fuchsia, Turquoise, and Sun Yellow (ProChem 108). The greens, oranges, and purples produced were clear and bright. These used only 2 dyes in combination. When using all three dyes, the results were less bright and moved into browns, some nice and some less so.

As I examined the results of the combinations of all three colors, I wondered how Elin came up the proportions of yellow, blue, and red that she chose. It certainly wasn't an arithmetic progress, like 10%, 20%, 30%, etc. And it didn't seem to be geometric, like 1/2, 1/4, 1/8. I'm certain that it has much to do with the relative strengths of the dyes and that the numbers she came up reflect that. I'm just curious.

Part 3 of the exercise combines the earth tones and the jewel tones to see how they differ from the straight combinations done so far. I could really get carried away here but I'm going to just be content with what I have. And maybe someday I will take Carol Soderland's class.

Chemistry Exercise Part 1

2009-07-30T06:39:00.004-04:00

I love the excitement of dyeing fabric and watching the wonderful colors emerge but I've never been very precise or scientific about the process. I have Ann Johnston's Color by Accident: Low-Water Immersion Dyeing
book and refer to it constantly, particularly for the dye concentrate formulas and occasionally to get a particular color. It's always been hit or miss, with the emphasis on the "accident" part. When aiming for a particular color, sometimes I'm successful, sometimes not.

I also have Elin Noble's book Dyes & Paints: A Hands-On Guide to Coloring Fabric, which is also a great resource. I refer to her color pyramid with the percentages of yellow, blue, and red needed when I'm trying to get a particular color. She talks about "earth tones" and "jewel tones" and herein lies the basis of my chemistry exercise.

(I know I could take Carol Soderland's color class and end up with a marvelous resource of color recipes, but I know I will never be that precise when dyeing fabric. I'm just looking for generalities here and to see how the various primaries affect the final color.)

Part 1 - the plan is to use the "earth tones", which are somewhat subdued from the "jewel tones". I used the three dyes she recommends, or at least something close: Golden Yellow (Dharma 3, which is nearly orange), Light Red (Dharma 12), and Intense Blue (ProChem 406). The orange tendency of the Golden Yellow has a big influence on the final color.

I took her percentages and translated them into milliliters of dye concentrate, which I made using Ann's formula of 2T dye powder in 240ml of water (talk about mixing measuring systems, but I only have measuring spoons in teaspoons and tablespoons, and it's easier to use milliliters when calculating percentages.) I used fat eighths of fabric and labeled each piece according to the color it was going to get. I knew I had to get everything arranged ahead of time in order to not get mixed up. I used little syringes marked in milliliters to measure the dye concentrates, if not exactly, at least pretty close. Here is the color pyramid from earth tones:

This is not a very accurate color presentation, but you can certainly see how the yellow tends toward orange. The outside edges of the triangle are combinations of 2 colors only: red and yellow, yellow and blue, blue and red, with the points being the pure color. I find the colors on the inside of the pyramid much more interesting - these use all three dyes in varying amounts. It's equivalent to adding the complement of the color to the color to mute it somewhat. If I mix yellow and blue, I get green. Red is the complement. Or mix yellow and red to get orange, then add blue. Or mix red and blue to get purple, then add yellow. It was really interesting to see how little or how much of a color was needed to make a change. The color in the middle of the third row from the bottom is the brown that results from equal intensities of the 3 dyes. But not equal amounts, since red is about twice as strong as blue or yellow.

Part 2 of the exercise is to use the "jewel tones", which I mixed up last night. Those colors are Sun Yellow, Fuchsia, and Turquoise. I haven't rinsed those out yet, but I can see that there is a huge difference in the results. The colors are definitely more brilliant, like jewels. I have to be a little more patient before rinsing these colors out because turquoise takes longer to fix.

Part 3 of the exercise is going to be smaller in scope, because I could drive myself crazy here with all the combinations and permutations. But I am going to combine earth tones and jewel tones to get the secondaries (green, orange, purple) and the middle brown.

Then I will put all the information in a notebook along with color swatches and have a marvelous reference!

Cover Girl

2009-07-25T11:05:00.004-04:00

This month's issue of Professional Quilter is using my Quilt National piece Family Reunion as its cover.

Other good news - two possible sales, one through Artful Home and the other to the DC Commission on Arts and Humanities. Both are still on an approval basis, so I can't spend the money just yet. Keeping my fingers crossed.

It's July?

2009-07-18T20:07:00.004-04:00

I could tell you this fantastic story about my adventures since my last post, how I've been to the Antarctic and dog sledded to the South Pole, or maybe how I've made the ascent to Mt. Everest, but I'm pretty sure nobody would believe it. So what have I done lately? Been to QSDS, came home, unpacked, got back into the routine of ordinary life. What did I bring home from QSDS - my class wasn't a stroke of lightning where I discovered some amazing new artistic direction to pursue. But I did bring home a tool of sorts: we made little 4"x6" compositions, some in black and white, some with color. These served as exercises and some were put up on the board to illustrate principles of good and not so good composition. Elizabeth Busch, our mentor, selected some from the group and arranged them on the board with the good compositions at the top and moving down towards the not-so-good ones at the bottom. We discussed what made these work and why the less successful ones didn't work. It's difficult for me to verbalize what is a good composition, but I know it when I see it. I think. Anyhow, whenever my little cards showed up on the wall, they were in the top row, in the company of the "good" compositions. Doesn't mean all the cards I did were good, of course, but at least some made the grade.

This is a greyscale version of one of my cards. While at QSDS I attempted to make this piece on a larger scale and did put something together. It didn't quite have the same impact as the card, mostly because the proportions were not the same. I needed to find some method of enlarging the image to the size I wanted. Elizabeth suggested an opaque projector. Others suggested scaling up using a grid. Both of these had to wait until I got home. I was able to borrow an opaque projector from someone but I wouldn't get my hands on it for a few days, so I did the gridding technique. Oh my, how tedious can you get? Trying to keep track of which little box I was working on, and figuring out the fractional parts of lines nearly drove me to distraction, but I did finally make a full size cartoon of this piece at about 40"x60", and then made patterns for the various pieces. It's finished now and I'm please with the results. I haven't photographed it yet so I can't share it at this point.

Now I'm ready to begin working on the second card that I did. (We actually did about a dozen in class, but as I said, not all are worthy of prime time.) While still at QSDS I pulled out some fabrics trying to pull this one together, but what I couldn't quite get were the subtle shape and line variations that make this work so well visually. Using blocks of fabrics with straight edges made the design clunky and much less interesting. I need to have a "pattern" to follow.

This is the card in the actual colors I used, little swatches of fabric that were right at hand. By now I have the opaque projector and wanted to try it to scale this up. The projector came with no instructions but it's supposedly simple enough that directions aren't really needed. Which means I spent some time figuring out how to get it to work and get the image in focus. It was not a successful venture and I will be returning the projector to my friend. What I did instead was scan the postcard and bring it into Photoshop Elements where I could enlarge it to the desired size. Usually, enlarging images is not recommended because the image quality degrades severely, but in this case, image quality is not an issue. Then I printed it out onto about 35 sheets of paper, one 8"x10" section per sheet. After trimming the margins down to the edge of the image, I could tape the papers together, and voila! my full size cartoon. So much easier than trying to draw it or grid it up.

I have some of the fabrics selected and will be working on this for the next few weeks. I'm excited about this new (to me) tool of little card compositions and have been making a few here and there as practice. One is already selected to be the next piece.

I have a new book in my library - Ann Johnston has re-issued her book The Quilter's Book of Design. I have the first edition and really thought it was well done and this one adds a lot more information and examples. It doesn't seem that there are many design theory books that are geared towards quilters, many of whom do not have art backgrounds (like me). Ann's book relates the theory to a medium that is familiar and that makes it very much more understandable. If you're well acquainted with the principles of design, this book is a good review with lots of illustrative pictures. If it's all new to you, this is a great introduction.

Packing in Earnest

2009-06-20T08:03:00.004-04:00

All week long I've been putting stuff in boxes, getting ready for the Quilt Surface Design Symposium. We're leaving tomorrow and I'm taking a 7 day class with Elizabeth Busch. Today it's time to really get serious, finalize my packing, move stuff up out of the studio and into the car. This class I'm taking is called a "Master Class". It's more of a mentored studio where we have the benefit of input from both the instructor and all our classmates. We bring our own projects and pretty much do work of our own choosing. There are usually group critiques and one-on-one critiques plus other art-inspiring activities. We're also going to be doing some painting on cotton duck, something I don't usually do.

I been thinking about my years of attendance at QSDS. My first class was in 1993, when it was still run at the Josephinium Seminary, a college for priests in Columbus. The facilities were primitive, to put it mildly. Our rooms were the cells in the dormitory, no air conditioning, big enough for a single bed and a dresser. The showers were down the hall, and two rooms shared a toilet and a sink. One quickly became acquainted with one's "sink-mate". The class I took was titled "A Problem-Solving Approach to Design" and it was a series of small projects that taught us how to boost creativity. The best lesson I took away from that class was to not be afraid to experiment and to not let the work become so dear that you're afraid to try something for fear of wrecking it.

It was my first exposure to Quilt National and I was gobsmacked. These "quilts" were like nothing I had ever seen and I wasn't even sure I liked them. At that point, I wasn't even ready to call myself an artist. If someone had told me that my work would one day be hanging in Quilt National I would have laughed and laughed. Now I feel very comfortable calling myself an artist.

I didn't attend QSDS again until 1997, but I have been there every year since. For a long time I took different technique classes: low water dyeing, stamping, machine quilting, screen printing - lots of surface design techniques to add to my repertoire. After a while I realized that I also needed education in design principles and how to think like an artist. Luckily, QSDS began their Master Classes, just what I was looking for. At some point you have to really start doing your own work - take all those different techniques and make them work for you.

To digress a bit... I don't remember what quilts were the first ones I entered into Quilt National but I'm sure they were deserving of rejection considering the competition. Here is one of my entries from QN 2001. It's titled Rx: Chocolate. It's a self-portrait of sorts. I stamped words that come into one's vocabulary as one reaches a "certain age": menopause, bone density, mammogram, yadda, yadda. Quilted into the background is my own prescription for these facts of life: chocolate. Doesn't solve the problems, but it makes them more bearable.

51" x 40"

Here is a detail view, and I just noticed that the "g" is upside down in "mammogram". Must be some hidden meaning there, I think.

I've always thought this would be a great piece of art for an OB/GYN's office, but so far there haven't been any takers.

Resting

2009-06-12T21:37:00.006-04:00

I'm sure all my fans are wondering where I've been these past two weeks. Or maybe it's longer, shame on me. I've been resting on my laurels, basking in my Quilt National achievements, but now it's time to get back to business. One QN success is terrific, but it sure doesn't last forever.

I've been working on a few things, partly to get back into the swing of things and partly to prepare for QSDS, which is actually starting this weekend, but I won't be going until next weekend. Sessions IV and V with Elizabeth Busch is what I'm taking. It's a "master class" meaning it's pretty much self-driven with lots of input from the teacher. We're going to be doing painting in the class and she wanted us to get cotton duck. We also have to print up color 8.5x11 pictures of the last 5 to 10 pieces we've done and they will become part of the class discussion/critique. Should be interesting. I'm looking forward to it. I've been going through my paints and throwing out the old dried up ones and trying to decide which ones to bring. It's tough to limit myself but there is only so much space. I also have to decide how much thread to bring. Last year I think I brought my entire collection and it's alot. But I hardly used any of it. If I decide to only bring a small selection, I will probably wish I had more.

Part of the QSDS conference is an auction of small works that benefits the scholarship fund. It took me a few years to actually contribute work to this auction because I was fearful that nobody would bid on my work. Last year there was a bidding war on the little piece that I contributed and it was a huge morale booster. This year I'm donating two pieces (they have two different auctions, each at the Friday Banquet). They're very similar: background from the same piece of fabric, the foreground is a positive image on one and the negative image on the other. Would make a nice diptych, I think. They're both 10" tall by 9" wide.

There will be an online gallery of pieces up for auction at the QSDS web site, probably starting next week. If you're not there to bid in person, you can contact them and place bids by phone or by setting a top limit. The entire proceeds go to the scholarship fund.

News from Athens

2009-05-23T06:37:00.008-04:00

The opening to Quilt National '09 was last night. It was quite the event. First the artists had a preview of the show with no one else there. We could see everything without the crowds and it was wonderful. We had our books and pens in hand so that we could compare the actual pieces to what was in the book and also get the artists to sign their pages. About three fourths of the artists were present and that included many from other countries including Australia and Japan. That's impressive that so many made the trip.

My piece is actually one of the smaller pieces in the show, at least that's my impression so far. So much for my theory that a piece needs to be big to be accepted! But the really cool thing is that I won a prize: "Persistence Pays" - a prize awarded to the artist who has entered QN the most times before getting accepted. I shared it with Glenys Mann from Australia. It surprised me that she also won it because I was sure she had been in QN before. I've seen her work over the years and it certainly looked to be of QN caliber. So anyhow, we share the award. If you look here you can see the list of winners and images of their quilts, which don't do them the least bit of justice.

The catalog is pretty good and certainly worth purchasing, but catalogs never give you the real picture, so to speak. Everything is so much more wonderful than the book image. Colors might be a little bit off, metallics don't sparkle, transparent pieces don't show their transparency, and most of all, the textures just don't show up. You need to really see the show in person to appreciate how wonderful it is. I heard quite a few people say that it was a really great show, which of course I think also!

And this is really cool -- I knew this from way last October but could not say anything. Marvin Fletcher purchased my quilt. Marvin is the widower of Hilary Fletcher, who was the director of Quilt National for many, many years. She died several years ago. The Persistence Pays award was established in her honor because she always encouraged people to keep trying. I met Marvin last night and he told me how when he saw my piece, he just had to have it. And then the fact that it won the award made it even more precious.

The only down side is that they didn't publish that award information in the catalog. Perhaps if they republish it they will fix that. But I still get the prize money.

And the QN people are being quite diligent in enforcing the prohibition on prior publication. One of the jurors told me that after they had made their final selections three pieces were eliminated because they had been published. QN hires researchers to search the web and print publications. Publishing on your own web site is allowed but no where else. If they found an image on another web site and it was there with the artist's permission, it was eliminated. I'm glad they're enforcing the rule because I know people have gotten by with it in the past.

Today is another event, the artists' and collectors' breakfast. Then more SAQA stuff, including a talk by the three QN jurors, Sue Benner, Ned Wert, and Katie Pasquini Masopust. I'm looking forward to that. It's always interesting to hear the back stories.

And as I walked around the room I was in awe that my work was hanging in this most famous location with all these wonderful pieces!

It's time!

2009-05-19T20:40:00.005-04:00

I can't believe it's finally here: the Quilt National opening, with my quilt in the show. We're driving out tomorrow to attend the SAQA Convention which starts on Thursday. There is a private reception open only to the QN artists on Friday, then the official opening, and then the banquet. The events of the SAQA convention and QN are sort of intermingled and I'm going to be missing some SAQA stuff. But this may be my only QN opening and I can always go to SAQA!

So now that the show is upon us, I'm posting my piece. It's titled Family Reunion and measures approximately 32" x 40". The design is another in my windows series, but they're getting a lot more abstract and less like windows, which is okay. This piece has quite a variety of surface design techniques: in addition to dyeing, there is painting, screen printing and deconstructed screen printing, batik, monoprinting, paint splatter, and probably a few more things that I don't remember right now. The piece is heavily quilted with grid quilting and also parallel line quilting, which is a little more obvious in the detail shot.

Gotta get back to packing! By the way, the catalog is already available on Amazon and I saw a copy last week. I think the color is a little off, but I'm thrilled to be in there.

Thoughts

2009-05-08T08:40:00.004-04:00

I go to the gym three times a week. It's a really nice gym with all kinds of weight training equipment, a huge selection of cardio machines, 4 swimming pools (including a whirlpool). It's always clean and since I go in the early afternoon, seldom crowded. It's also pretty expensive and I really wish that all I had to do was pay the money and I would automatically reap all the benefits. Apparently it doesn't work that way. Anyhow, two of my workouts include resistance training with weights and all three have an hour's time on the elliptical trainer. The elliptical trainers at my gym have built in tv sets so I can watch a program while exercising. I plan my sessions so that I can watch Law and Order in its various incarnations or Without a Trace. It makes the time pass by more quickly. Except I wish that TNT and USA would get some new episodes, since I've pretty much seen all that they have. I don't really look forward to doing these workouts but it's become a really strong habit and at this point I would have a difficult time giving it up.

I used to be a marathon runner and an aerobics instructor but I ruined my knees with all the pounding. I've run 6 marathons in my life, including the Boston Marathon. For those who aren't familiar with the marathon distance, it's 26.2 miles. In order to qualify to run in the Boston Marathon, I had to complete the distance in less than 3 1/2 hours, which I did. I did all this in my 20's and 30's and it's now been more than 25 years since I had to stop running. Sometimes I still miss it. I always watch the Olympic marathon and it gives me chills when the lead runner enters the stadium.

So why am I blathering on about this stuff, probably more than you really wanted to know? Because I often wonder why I do this. It certainly isn't giving me the body of a fashion model. In fact, judging from the other bodies at the gym, I'm lucky I've got the body I have. Gravity and the aging process are merciless tyrants and all we can do is hold them off a little. I always think of the quote from the Red Queen in Lewis Carrolls's Through the Looking Glass. She says to Alice: "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!" That's how I feel - that I am running as fast as I can just to stay in the same place - watch the diet, take the medications, exercise regularly, wear a seat belt, yada yada yada. My doctor says I'm doing very well (although she leaves unsaid "for someone your age.")

Longevity is in my genes - my grandmother lived to nearly 100 and my mother is fast approaching 97. So I had better take good care of this body because I know I won't be getting another one. And I want to be able to watch my grandchildren grow up and have my great-grandchildren. And still be doing art.

Here is your reward for reading through all this - the azaleas in my back yard are nearly in full bloom.

Finishing off the dyes

2009-04-29T10:04:00.004-04:00

I still had some dye pastes left but I was done mentally with doing screen printing. I hate wasting dyes so I thought that I would just add water and do some low water dyeing and that would use up what was left.

These first two pieces are some green that I had mixed up and some gold/yellow/brown that I combined. The green looked pretty awful when wet but got much better when it was dry. Usually I like the colors better when they're wet, so this was a surprise.

The one on the right is fuchsia (no surprise); the one on the left is scarlet. I love red.

This was the surprise. The dye color is Deep Cherry and in the dye pot it looked nearly black. The wet fabric looked very very dark purpley-red and rich. The dry result is less so and is destined to be the base for something else. I don't much care for this color. The light grey piece was dyed in the same container but added after about 15 minutes had passed (like Ann Johnston's parfait method). It looked lilac when wet, but all of the red washed out and the fabric is a lovely grey. (Eat your heart out, Linda in Belgium!) This was a reminder that red always fixes very quickly and isn't be available in subsequent layers of parfait dyeing.

I had 4 different blues left over: navy, intense blue, turquoise, and I don't remember the name of the 4th one. I always have lots of blue left over because it's the color I use least when dyeing. So why do I mix up so much? Can't resist having a selection. And blue is necessary for green and gold and purple; I just have to remember that I need relatively less blue than I need red and yellow.

These last two pieces were done with screen printing, using 3 different screens. I cut stencils from newsprint. The first one was the outline of the connecting squares. The other two were the squares that were slightly offset from the outlines and also sized and positioned so that they didn't quite fit inside the boxes. I like how these turned out, but I did them on white fabric and there was too much white. I put each of them in a very dilute yellow solution just to take the edge off the white.

I'm thinking that I will make some thermofax screens of these boxes and outlines. This kind of stuff is quicker to do with paints because there isn't the batching time that's needed with dyes. Also, doing these designs with dyes meant I had to wait to let the dye paste dry enough that it wouldn't blur when more layers were added, a step that isn't necessary with paints because they dry so fast.

The real surprise was in one of my dye containers. I have a collection of 1/2 gallon sized plastic milk containers with the tops cut off that are terrific for the layered dye method. They're stored in the closet, which is next to the crawl space, home to various and sundry uninvited wildlife. Imagine my delight when I found a mummified mouse in the bottom of one of the containers. Must have fallen in and couldn't get out. At least it wasn't a snake. Yuck.

What the turquoise did

2009-04-20T11:27:00.002-04:00

Thanks for the great comments! Sometimes it takes me a while to appreciate what I've done and I know that each of these fabrics will be perfect somewhere sometime.

Linda asked what the turquoise on the blotter fabric went into. This is the piece. It's turquoise and also another deep blue, either Intense Blue or Navy Blue. With some pale yellow to soften the white. It's very difficult for me to leave white areas. Even a little bit of color is better than pure white.

This morning I took all the dye pastes that were mixed and used on soda soaked fabric and slopped them onto a piece of fabric. It looked very very dark. It's batching right now and it will be interesting to see just how much color was left in those pastes. Stay tuned.