Honors

Last night was the Reception for the Maryland State Arts Council 2012 Individual Artist Awards. I received notification last February that I had won one of these. This is the fourth time I have been honored with an award from the Arts Council. They always have a very nice reception and awards ceremony where the winners are introduced to the crowd and we have a group picture taken. The food is excellent and the musical entertainment is very nice also.

It wasn't until after I had my plate of food  and had sat down to eat it that I noticed the front cover of the program. One of the pieces I had submitted for jurying is on the cover. Top row, third from the left. Out of the 100 award winners, it was really nice to find my work on display.

Here's a link to the pdf version of the program. 

Only three days until I leave for class at QSDS. I think I ought to start packing. 

I got a new camera

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

Keeping Busy

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.

High Noon ©2005

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).

Vote for me please!

This is a blatant plea for votes:


The Baker Artists Awards celebrate Baltimore's artists on the Web with an ongoing exhibition of its diverse artistic practice, and the Mary Sawyer Baker Prize will establish Baltimore’s reputation as a creatively rich and vital place to live with a civic commitment to value its individual artists.
Please take a minute to visit my work on the Baker Artist Awards web site. As a Baltimore artist, I am eligible to win the significant Mary Sawyers Baker Prize or maybe bragging rights as Baltimore’s Choice. Either way, please follow the link and vote for me... and, if you live in Baltimore, you could also Nominate your own work! Now GO sign-up and vote www.bakerartistawards.org

Visit my nomination, register, and cast your vote!

Thanks!

After posting my list of achievements for 2008 I remembered one more, duh. A solo show at the Glenview Mansion Art Gallery in Rockville, MD. It was only last October, you would think that I could have remembered something that only happened two months ago....

And look at what has finally returned home - my journal quilt that has been traveling with "A Page from My Book", the Journal Quilt Project book. I never got the email checking my address and so the Quilts, Inc. people never sent it back. It wasn't until I emailed them to ask where it was that they asked me to verify my address and it showed up a few days later. I'm adding it to the Art For Sale page.

And good news, another purchase order from Artful Home from the Studio Sale.

In Review

Remembering what when on in 2008 is difficult. I can pull up official things like shows and suchlike but other less obvious things sort of fall by the wayside. Probably ought to write this stuff down.

So, the major stuff:
Juried Shows:
Amazing Art Quilts, Staunton, VA
Central Penn Festival of the Arts, Penn State U, State College, PA
Maryland Art Place Critics' Residency, Baltimore, MD
Materials Hard and Soft, Denton, TX
Quilts=Art=Quilts, Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center, Auburn, NY
SAQA Transformations 08
Threadlines, Missouri State Univeristy, Springfield, MO

Group Shows:
New Image: Marymount Hardware, Alexandria, VA
New Image: Rehoboth Art League, Rehoboth, DE
Fiber Artists of Baltimore: Columbia Art Center, Columbia, MD
Acceptance into Quilt National 2009 (I'm going to milk this one for quite a while)

Sales:
2 sales and 1 commission, all through ArtFul Home, maybe I ought to consider putting an ad into one of their publications

Donations:
QSDS Scholarship Auction (sold for $300, thanks, Teri!)
SAQA One Foot Square Auction (sold for $250, thanks, Gerrie!)

Teaching
2 teaching stints and 1 lecture

Award:
Amazing Art Quilts, Juror's choice

Publications:
Critics' Residency Catalog
SAQA Transformations 08 Catalog
SAQA PAM Portfolio

Going over the books for the past year, I figure that it cost approximately $70 per show that I was juried into, this includes entry fees and shipping. Does not include the time spent on photography and preparing entries. I have drastically reduced the number of shows that I enter for several reasons - it's expensive, it doesn't seem to work very well as a venue for sales, and I'm not sure it's worth the effort. If my goal is to sell my work, the money spent might be better spent in some other style, perhaps advertising. And I can explore other methods of getting my work in front of the buying public.

Which leads me right into the reminder to visit my Art for Sale blog. I've put up two different series of works:

	A selection of quilts from the Journal series, which I started as part of the Journal Quilt Project. I've only included a few of the pieces as some of them are better off stored in the closet.
	The Ventanas Series is the starting point for the series I'm currently revisiting. These are the first 5 pieces I did and some became the image sources for thermofax screens.

Happy New Year!

Interview

One of my readers, Violette Severin, asked me to participate in an artist interview. She sent me a list of questions and I answered them as best I could. To read this interview, visit Violette's Blog Handquilting. Here is the link to the interview.

Yesterday I spent the day in Philadelphia at the Buyers' Market of American Craft. This is a wholesale market only open to gallery owners, shop owners, and people like that. I was recruited to help staff a booth sponsored by the Rosen Group, the group that runs the Buyers' Market. The idea is to promote Fiber as the Hot New Collectible. Fiber was very poorly represented among the exhibitors at the Market and this booth was to help buyers to get more familiar with fiber as something they would want to have in their stores. I (and the volunteers I recruited)represent SAQA. There were representatives from SDA (Surface Design Association) and SPIN (Silk Painters International). Two other groups were invited - handweavers and needleworkers - but there was nobody from either of those groups. We had a very nice display area with hard walls where we were able to exhibit some work, but since the handweavers and needleworkers didn't send anything to display, there was a lot of empty space. I could have easily gotten more art work from my volunteers. If they ask us again next year, I think we will be better prepared. I'm not sure we were very successful, at least not yesterday, but maybe there will be a better response today and tomorrow.