Quilting lines

I picked one of the 5 backgrounds that I have prepared and now I'm quilting it, covering the entire surface with background stitching. When that's finished, I'll start adding focus interest and stuff. I like using this grid pattern and worked out a method to get straight lines with the free motion foot and a ruler held along the side of the foot that guides it. Worked pretty well as long as I didn't try to make any grids larger than about 6" x 6". I varied the grid spacing: 1 inch and 1/2 inch, and used different weights of thread. After doing about a dozen of these grids, it just looked too rigid. With all the lines nearly perfectly straight, it just seemed that there was no soul to the stitching. So I went back to free motion stitching and letting the line wander a bit. I'm using different thread weights and different sized grids, with different sized spacing in the grids.


Shortly after I started this I decided that my thread box needed a greater variety of one particular type thread: Superior Threads King Tut machine quilting thread. They describe it as a Low-lint #40/3 extra-long staple Egyptian cotton. It's heavier than the 40wt rayon thread I often use, so the line is a little more obvious. Anyhow, I'm waiting for the approximately 20 spools that I ordered last week. It's getting to the point where I'm going to need more thread drawers.

Goals: Been keeping track of the hours spent on art time. For the past 4 weeks I've spent a total of 32, 25, 40, and 39 hours each week. The amount of art (vs business) has been 21, 10.5, 25, and 23, so 54% of my time has been on art. That's discouraging that business is taking up so much time. Thinking back, what I've done that I've counted as business includes several meetings, hanging a show, giving a lecture, drive to deliver art, prepare show entries, visit a venue, photograph work, and bookkeeping. There don't seem to be many days that are devoted solely to art work. And I didn't spend much time on surface design, only about 4.5 hours total. Gotta work on that.

Hand work

I've been spending a lot of time this past week doing handwork on my current piece. Which means I've been watching a bunch of movies and tv and listening to alot of books because I can't just sit without something occupying my brain. I just can't imagine doing handwork all the time; it certainly cuts down on the amount of creative time I can do on a piece. And I'm using thick thread and taking big stitches.


The stitching is holding down these two (and 3 others) rectangles of gossamer (a very thin interfacing type material) that I have painted. The rectangles are about 5" x 6" in size. Below is a little bit closer view and you can sort of see the big stitches. It seems to be shinier in the picture than in reality, although there is some metallic gold paint on here.


While I've been doing this hand stitching, I've also been making more backgrounds to continue this series. I now have 5: red, blue/purple; yellow; green; and brownish. The last two are done with fabrics that have stamping and screening in addition to the dyed color. They are going to be more difficult to work with, I think, but one never progresses without a challenge.

We have a winter storm warning in effect for tonight and tomorrow - an inch or two of snow along with icing conditions. This will be the first snow of the season and odds are everything will be closed tomorrow. Baltimore goes into panic mode at the mention of snow and it's fueled to an even higher pitch by the tv weatherman who can't wait to tell us about how awful it's going to be. I'll bet the grocery stores are getting their pre-snow run on milk, bread, and toilet paper. I can sort of understand milk and bread, but for heavens sake, don't most people have more than one spare roll of toilet paper in their closet?

Opening

The opening of the FABrications show last Sunday was well attended. A steady stream of viewers attended, included the former County Executive. Everybody was properly appreciative of the art and we're hoping the show continues with lots more viewers, and maybe even a purchaser or two. I meant to take pictures but I forgot my camera. However, Martha remembered hers and took pictures so you can still see what the place looked like.

I'm trying a new approach to this current series that starts with a paint splattered background. I am usually a one-track kind of person - I work on one piece start to finish. I don't like having unfinished work hanging around; if it hangs around, it means I don't like it much, and it tends to never get finished. Anyhow, I am doing some handwork on the current piece and I just can't do handwork all day long. So I've started on more backgrounds. I'll make several then do the paint splattering and continue from there. So far I have 2 backgrounds that I did yesterday. Since they're just big pieces of fabric stitched together it doesn't take long to compose. And if I don't like one, I didn't spend a lot of time on it, and so not much time was wasted. Of the two I did yesterday, one I like (it's red) and the other is sort of iffy. Maybe the paint splatters will improve it.

In a few minutes I'm off to give a lecture to a local guild on my journey from traditional quilter to art quilter. I've given this lecture maybe 10 times and it's interesting how it changes over the years. The beginning part is still pretty much the same, but the art quilt part has expanded and progressed. So, I'm off.

What's Happening

Not much, to tell the truth. Keeping track of art time - last week I logged 32 hours, of which 21 hours were actual studio time. Pretty good. So far this week it's 23 business hours and only 3 studio hours. I spent a lot of time on Tuesday hanging a show for one of my local groups Fiber Artists of Baltimore, and a lot of time on Wednesday going to a meeting of my other local art group New Image. The show opening is Sunday and I plan to take pictures. Of course, that means I have to remember to bring the camera.

I just finished taking down the rest of the Christmas decorations. Now somebody else can store the boxes away. The box with the tree is just too heavy for me to drag up 2 flights of stairs.

Next week I'm scheduled to give a talk at a local guild. I need to go through my slide tray and edit. Last time I gave the talk there were too many slides and so I talked way too much. In addition to the slides I always bring some quilts. But right now the ones I would want to bring are out at shows, one of which is not too far from the lecture site. Maybe we should do a field trip.

If you're in the area on Sunday, come to the show opening: Slayton House Gallery, Columbia, MD, 3-5pm.

Do you ever have stuff that Goodwill won't take but is too good to just throw out? Try FreeCycle. The website is sort of the umbrella for thousands of local groups. The way it works is you post that you have something to offer and then you get emails from people who want it. You choose the lucky recipient and arrange a pickup time and location. I gave away a computer monitor because I got a new flat panel for Christmas. Posted the notice at 7:30am and by noon the monitor was gone. Today I gave away a scroll saw that somebody gave us when he was downsizing. I know you want to see what a scroll saw looks like:


And that's the picture for today.

Goals for 2007

Ha! If you thought I was going to present you with an itemized list of goals like Lisa's, think again. I am thoroughly impressed (and cowed) by what Lisa has planned for the coming year. But I have been thinking about it (yeah, working on the procrastination thing, too) and here is what I have so far:

1. More time in the studio doing art. Keep track of the time spent on art. But wait - does sewing on a sleeve count as art time? Or is that business time? I've made a chart with 4 divisions: art, surface design, business, and other. Surface design is really a subset of art, but I want to keep track of that also. Business includes maintaining my database of artwork and show listings, preparing entries, meetings (and travel time if it's any distance), show openings, photography of artwork, processing images, etc., etc. It's more difficult to break the art activities down: design and stitch. But wait, I often take photographs as inspiration and play around with them on the computer - where do I put that? So now I can get bogged down in trying to categorize the amount of time I spend on an activity. Maybe I will just aim for a total number of hours right now, keep track of what I'm doing, and in 3 months revisit this task. So okay - my goal is 30 hours per week.

2. Use a sketchbook. I have lots of sketchbooks, all with some of the pages used. But it's not something I keep at hand and jot in frequently. Needs to be a more concerted effort.

3. Exposure - seek out more mixed media shows; seek out public art and percent for art calls; seek out solo show opportunities. I have already sent out one application for a solo show and I subscribed to artdeadlines.com. Previously I was getting Art Calendar but I'm dropping that. I've also been building a collection of postcards of my work. Every time I finish a piece, I get 100 postcards from VistaPrint. Once you get something from them they start sending email offers for free stuff, in particular 100 postcards for free. It's not totally free because you have to pay for shipping and uploading the design, so it's actually about $10.

So for today, I'm going to spend quite a while ripping out quilting on my current piece that I don't like. I guess that goes into the art category, although it's more like un-arting. Then I also have an appointments for a haircut, a mammogram, a Dexa scan, and then I will go to the gym. That pretty much takes me to dinner time.

Seasonal note: today is the latest sunrise of the year, at least here in Baltimore. From now on the sunrises get earlier and the sunsets get later and the lengthening of the days will become noticeable. If you're wondering why the earliest sunset and the latest sunrise are not both on the winter solstice, read about the Analemma. I'm not going to explain it here.

A New Iron

My old iron died. Didn't get hot. Well, it never actually got hot, but now it wasn't even getting warm. It was doing a fine imitation of a paper weight. As luck would have it, the January issue of Threads magazine ran an article on irons and it convinced me that I needed to pay some major bucks for an iron that would do more than touch up collars and wristbands. The article talks about "heavy soleplates, narrow shapes, superior temerature dials and thermostats, and almost limitless steam capacity."

Armed with a 20% off coupon from Bed Bath and Beyond, I headed to the store. I chose the Rowenta Advancer. It's pricier than any other iron I've ever had but after using it for only half an hour I was convinced that it's worth it. With my old iron I had to work and work to get the wrinkles out of fabric that had been stuffed into boxes. Even spraying it with water and using steam, the results were never very good. The wrinkles still showed.

But with one swipe of this quite heavy iron with bunches of steam, the wrinkles are gone. Excellent!

Isn't it impressive? It has LED lights to indicate that it's warming up, cooling down, turning itself off, and ready to iron. After reading the manual (I always read the manual) I had to find a more powerful extension cord. This iron would likely overheat the cheap extension cord I had. And under Important Safety Instructions I learned that I should not direct steam at people or animals. And most importantly, I should not iron clothes while they are being worn. I wonder what bozo tried that. Rowenta probably got sued because somebody tried it and then claimed that it never said not to.

Yipes

It's been a long time, nearly a month since I posted. Time has surely slipped away but everybody knows what December is like. Thank heavens Christmas is over and I can go back to my regularly scheduled life.

So in amongst the Christmas cards, the shopping, the traveling, the baking, the shopping, the wrapping, and the general all around chaos, I have also been doing art. This first piece is what went on top of the background with the flung paint (I think I posted it sometime back in November, or maybe October...) It's called Sun Dance and measures about 50x50.


I really liked the process of making the background on Sun Dance and so did it again with reds. But on this piece I tried quilting the entire background in a small grid before adding the foreground pieces. I didn't do that on the first one and it made the quilting a little tricky.


So on this one I quilted the grid then showed it to friends for input. They all thought it was finished at that point. I thought about that for a while and disagreed. So I painted silk organza, layered on top, then quilted it in a larger grid pattern, then cut out in between some of the grid. Then added some more yellow and orange silk squares for interest. Now it's finished. This is called Downtown and measures about 43x50.


Here are details of both pieces.



In other news I received my copy of the Journal Quilt Project edited by Karen Bresenhan. My journal July is on page 213. I was very excited to see that it was given a full page treatment. You can buy one for your very own from Amazon.

And my first New Year's Resolution: to not let so much time pass between postings.

Upcoming Exhibits

For the coming month and into January I have two exhibits, both invitational. The first is fairly local, at the Carroll County Arts Center, Westminster, Maryland. Entitled Not Quite Quilts, it is a survey of different styles of quilts from traditional to art quilts. There will be quilts by 8 different people. The show runs from December 7 through February 3 and the opening reception is Friday December 8 from 5-7pm. There is also a showing of the movie "How to Make an American Quilt".

These are the pieces on exhibit:

High Noon
25" x 15.5"

On the Edges
37" x 23"

The Ides of March
23" x 46"

The second show came about because the gallery owner was surfing the Internet and came up on my web page. (SCENE) Metrospace Gallery in East Lansing, Michigan, an alternative art gallery. Here is more information:

410 Abbott Road, East Lansing, MI

Opening Friday, December 8, 2006

through Sunday, January 7, 2007

Wednesday through Friday afternoons from 1-4p.m.

Friday evenings from 6-9 p.m., Saturdays from 6-9 p.m.,
and

Sundays from 1-4 p.m. during scheduled exhibits

Their web page is pretty sparce but their shows have been written up in the local news. I will have four pieces in this show.

Ventanas I

12 3/4" x 10"

Ventanas IV
13" x 10"

Ventanas V
12" x 9"

Ventanas: Reflections
52" x 18"

In other news I received 100 meters of bleached mercerized cotton broadcloth from Testfabrics yesterday. It's 60" wide and weighs a ton. Luckily it only comes from Pennsylvania so I'm not paying an arm and a leg for shipping. Just an arm. It's interesting that they measure the width in inches but the length in meters....

Book Reviews

I purchased two new surface design books and after reading them thought I would share some information. The first one is Holly Brackman's new book The Surface Designer's Handbook .
The subtitle of this book is Dyeing, Printing, Painting, and Creating Resists on Fabric. This is really an excellent book with tons of information. She covers fiber reactive dyes, vat dyes, disperse dyes, and acid dyes. There are chapters on discharging and devore. Other surface design techniques include screen printing, monoprinting, stamping, stenciling, resists, embellishments, and textile paints. This book is a primer for those just beginning who want to get a detailed overview of what's available and yet still has loads of information for those who are more experienced.


The second book is Carolyn Dahl's Transforming Fabric, another book on surface design. The subtitle here is 30 Creativae Ways to Paint, Dye, and Pattern Cloth and she delivers what she has promised. Some of the techniques are leaf printing, sponge and foam printing, resist dyeing, heat transfer dyes, hand cut stamps, wax resists, and silk painting. This book is less technical than Brackman's book, that is, her directions are not quite as specific and the reader has to be willing to try it out without worrying about the precise steps involved. Great for the adventurous and there is enough information for the beginner to get goin.


I can't recommend that one is better than the other but together there is enough information to keep the surface designer busy for a long time.

A Diversion

I've been remiss in posting here. Lots of stuff has happened and I've thought about posting it. Lots of good intentions but little action. I got two books from Amazon and they're both very good; more about them in a later post. The Patrons Preview Party went well and I sold a small piece. My quilts were spread out onto tables instead of being hung up on the wall and it was an invitation to everybody to lay their hands on them. Next year I will specify that my work must be hung, just like the paintings.

This past weekend I went on a retreat with my local guild. Two days of nothing but sewing. They serve us our (edible but plain) meals and the accommodations are about 2 levels above spartan, but it's lots of fun to be with friends and see what everybody is doing. I owed a baby quilt to my great niece who was born last spring and I was determined to get it done. I finished all but stitching the binding down and I would have managed that also except I didn't plan well and had to do it by hand.

I love these bright colors! It's all commercial fabrics and I just grabbed pieces from the fabric annex more or less randomly. Cut them into 1 1/2" strips and tried to have no duplicated fabrics in a block. I'm thinking about doing something along the same lines for own bed, but it would require 144 blocks instead of just 36. Hmmm...

A Beautiful Fall Day

It's mid November and it's warm enough to go outside without a jacket. These days are getting rarer so they have to be appreciated. We had a killing frost last week so I've pulled out all the icky impatiens remains and tossed them into the compost bin. They remind me of cold wet lettuce, another thing I hate to touch. The maple and the chinese elm in my backyard are in glorious color, but it won't last long. The sky is a perfect blue and it all just calls out for picture taking.

In a few days these trees will have lost all their leaves and the winter blues will be just around the corner.

On the up side I just got some bolts of silk, tjaps, an electric tjanting, and some dye from Dharma; I'm waiting for some books from Amazon; I'm going to order some PFD from Testfabrics; and I got a new laptop. Lots of new toys to keep me busy.

Seriously....

Frequently we talk about professionalism in the art quilt world. Many of us are hampered by our backgrounds. What I mean is that we have come to this place through the quilt world and not through the art world, and there is a distinct lack of knowledge about what the art world is and how it functions. The learning process is difficult and painful and not always very nice. We want things to be nice and ladylike and that's not going to be the case. If we stick to exhibiting in quilt shows, we haven't any right to complain that the greater art world isn't accepting fiber with open arms.

I read an article in yesterday's New York Times about the difficulty that foreign athletes have in obtaining visas to the US in order to compete here. Yesterday was the New York Marathon and since there are big money prizes, it attracts athletes from all over the world. But since 9/11, those who need visas are subjected to much more scrutiny, and the process has gone from taking only a few days to six months or longer. Quite a few have missed the opportunity to run because of not getting their applications in in a timely fashion. A quote from the from Mary Wittenberg, the race director: "If you’re a serious athlete, you’ve got a lot to take seriously." That applies to us directly: if we're going to be serious artists, then we have a lot to take seriously.

On Thursday I am delivering six pieces to an exhibit that benefits the Baltimore Choral Arts Society. This is going to be quite an extravagant event. There will be 500 pieces of art for sale. On the postcard is a list of the exhibiting artists and among those names I found Sol LeWitt, Henri Matisse, Robert Rauschenberg, and Joyce Scott. And moi. So it really runs the gamut, and I'm thrilled to be included in this event. The patrons' preview party and silent auction on Fridayis only open to those who are willing to pay $500/couple for the opportunity to attend. As a participating artist, I get a complimentary ticket to this event, and in my efforts to be a serious artist, I think that I should be there. I am not the least bit comfortable in a crowd where I don't know anybody and have to make small talk, but this is an opportunity that I shouldn't let pass me by.

And they used an image of one of my pieces (albeit lopped off on one edge) on their web site.

Art Quilt Reviews

Joanie San Chirico has posted a review of the Fiber Revolution show at the Georgian Court University in Lakewood, New Jersey. Instead of what we often get that passes as "reviews" of art quilt shows, Joanie has chosen to critique the work as art. She has written about what works and what doesn't work, and doesn't sugarcoat it.

Too often reviews are more like rah-rah sessions. It can be difficult to say anything critical because the reviewer may know the exhibitors personally. The problem is if we don't hear about what needs improvement, how can we improve it?

Anyhow, there is a lively discussion going on. Art Quilt Reviews and also on Lisa Call's blog.

Flinging paint

I've been working on a piece, as yet untitled. This is one of the problems of not naming things in series ie Whatever #1, Whatever #2, etc. I tried that once and after I got to #3 I couldn't keep them straight in my head anymore. Each piece is distinct and needs its own name, and so I will continue to struggle with names of pieces. But I digress.

This latest piece started with a background of blue and blue-green fabrics stitched together. I wanted to unify them even more and thought I would try something inspired by one of Robert Genn's Twice Weekly Essays entitled "Saving a Painting". All the tips related to painting, and I particularly like the one that says "Obscufate incompetence with a scumble." This just sounds funny to me since I don't know what 'scumble' is and am too lazy to look it up. Anyhow, I thought I would try "unify by glazing a mother color", more or less. I wanted to fling paint at the piece and first had to solve the problem of containing the paint that doesn't land on the fabric.

I finally hung an old shower curtain down in the basement and attached the background fabric on top of that so that there was something around the edges. Dipped my paintbrush in blue paint and just flung away, ala Jackson Pollock. Then did the same with green paint.


I like this very much, and the paint spatters that ended up on the floor and ceiling and overhead lights just add to the art studio ambience of my basement. I'm up to the quilting stage on this, and with the amount of intensive stitching that I'm doing, it's taking a fair amount of time. Audio books downloaded to my MP3 player help to occupy my brain.

Lately it seems that the bookkeeping part of art has occupied more of my time than the art part of art. I completed calls for two public art projects, and have two more awaiting my attention. It seems that everybody wants digital images these days, which is great, except that everybody want them in different sizes. There are also a couple of shows I want to enter but juggling what will be available is tough. I have three shows coming up, both with the possibility of sales (probably remote possibilities, but...) and I don't like entering something into a show when it just might get sold beforehand. I need to make more work.

The Fabric Annex

Several years ago, about four I think, I decided that I would use only fabrics that I had dyed, painted, or otherwise made marks on in my quilts. I would put aside my commercial fabrics. I boxed them up and stored them in a spare bedroom. I had about 15 file boxes worth of fabric. They came in useful as backs and for baby quilts and other non-art projects. After a few years of pulling fabric out they still took up too much room, so I went through each box and pulled out all the smaller sized scraps and gave them to Martha to give to her sister, who taught third grade. Except it seems that Martha culled some of them for herself first (but that's her story to tell)...

So now I'm down to about 10 boxes of fabric, not a very substantial reduction. And then we decided to turn that spare bedroom into a space for grandchildren to sleep over and the boxes had to go. Well, I couldn't just totally get rid of them, so I moved them up into the attic. However, our attic is 99% occupied by my husband's train layout. This is no ordinary train layout; it's the equivalent of a 40 room mansion compared with your basic 3 bedroom tract house. Anyhow, there wasn't much extra space up there - except there is this little cubby hole that's tucked in under the eaves and has enough space to store my boxes.

Getting to the space requires a flashlight and kneedpads because (a) there isn't a light and (b) I have to crawl under the desk and around the pipes.

Here's the view from the "door", which is less than 3 feet high. The reason I'm up here is that I need fabric for the back of my current quilt. The box with purple fabric is the easiest to access so I pull out some fat quarter sized pieces.

Jumbled up on the table, they need to be ironed and spread out.

I pin them up on the wall over top the quilt to make sure I have enough backing.

And then sew them together. Not particularly attractive, but it works for a back. I could use fabric that I've dyed, but it's a very dense broadcloth, and what with all the layers of fabric, it can get very heavy and a pain to sew through. Particularly if I want to do any hand stitching with big threads. It's hard enough with thick thread, big needles, and tightly woven fabric; don't need to make it more difficult by adding another layer of tough fabric.

Tomorrow I'm picking up the quilts from my show, Wednesday I'm giving a lecture to a guild in Bethesda, Thursday I'm flying to Chicago for the weekend. I think I'll take the pizza suitcase.

Oh well....

The notification emails for Quilt National went out last Sunday. I searched my Inbox, then I searched all my Junk and Spam mail folders, but I didn't get one. Sigh. So it's back to the regular old routine. Congratulations to all those who were accepted!

But the news isn't all bad: I have a second sale from my show, and the promise of a commission. This news cheers me up immensely and I'm pretty much over the QN disappointment. And since the piece I worked on practically up to the deadline doesn't need to be kept secret, here it is:

And a detail:


I've also uploaded it to my web page, along with the piece I did for Purdue University. Check it out here

I've been knitting also, but after doing blocks in both the colors, I think I should have dyed a 3rd skein in the blues and only 1 skein in the oranges. It's going to be an interesting sweater.

A Diversion

I've been sucked in by knitting. On Mrs. Mel's blog she showed some pictures of colorful mitered squares that she knitted. It's modular knitting with squares of different sizes. Given my current overlapping squares style of composition, this immediately caught my attention. But wow! the cost of yarn is amazing; even more so for hand dyed yarn. So why not dye my own? How hard can it be; I already know how to dye fabric and I've done pearl cotton threads. It's just bigger threads, right?

I ordered 4 skeins of cotton yard from Dharma. I've ordered so much from them lately that I had to tell them not to send me another catalog - I already have 3 of Fall/Winter 2006. It arrived yesterday and last night I prepared the dyebaths. I want variegated yarn, so 2 of the skeins are red/yellow/orange and 2 are blue/purple/green. Except I think one of my jars of blue dye has lost its oomph. That sort of olivey green was supposed to be teal. It sure looked like teal going onto the yarn, but it sure doesn't look like it now. I guess dye powder does have a shelf life; this blue is 6 years old. The part that does look teal is really green.


I discovered several differences between fabric dyeing and yarn dyeing. You have to be very careful not to tangle the skeins which means you can't rely on the washing machine to do the rinsing. A major inconvenience, for sure. And for the same reason, I can't throw them into the dryer to dry. The humidity here currently is 70% so this drying out could take a while. I'm going to have to put a fan on them or else they will mold before they dry.

I soaked the yarn in soda ash first and it was difficult to get it wet. It epelled the water and it took some persuasion. And since I wanted to dye each skein with 4 colors they had to be laid out so that the colors didn't migrate into each other. I spread the skeins out on a melamine board, surrounded the edge with towels, and commenced to squirt. I missed a few spots, either with the dye or with the soda ash, but I'm not going to redo it. It will just be a design decision.

Stay tuned for further progress reports on the sweater...

The die is cast

Last week I scurried around to complete my entry to Quilt National. I've entered QN at least 5 times and so far have not made the cut. In the past I've been much better prepared and didn't have to send my entry at the last minute. Not this time. I put the finishing touches on the 3rd entry last Monday and photographed it. QN seems to be a holdout in the digital world because it is only accepting slide entries. Took my slides to the local processing lab in downtown Baltimore to drop them off and discovered that they no longer have the 4 hour turnaround that they had in the past. The slides wouldn't be back until Friday.

Well, Friday still gave me enough time if I sent the entries FedEx 2 day delivery. The only problem was that on Friday I was leaving town for a weekend sewing retreat and didn't want to hang around until the end of the day. Luckily I was able to pick them up by 1pm. I had my entry all prepared: forms filled out, other slides labeled, check, return SASE, and the FedEx envelope and label prepared. I even had enough forethought to figure out where the nearest dropoff spot would be and it was less than 1 mile away from the lab.

And even though I designated 2 day delivery so that it would arrive today, the receive by deadline, it was delivered yesterday. And so I throw in my lot with the other 1800 or so entries. They said you could include an early notification postcard, which they send if you don't get in. In the past few years the news of who has been accepted has been out long before I ever received my postcard, so this year I didn't bother. The grapevine is alive and well, and working far better than the USPS.

And also, so as not to tempt the evil goddesses, I'm not posting a picture of any of what I entered.

My show

My show Seeing is Believing: Glass and Fiber opened last Sunday at VisArts in Gaithersburg, MD. The opening was well attended and many favorable comments were made. I had 13 pieces displayed and the 3 glass artists had about as many. The contrast between the two media made for a very interesting display: color vs neutral, soft vs hard. It was a very well put together show, imho.

I forgot my camera at the opening but went back yesterday and got some shots.







This next piece is the first one visible as you entered the room. It is nicely enhanced by a little red dot. The show continues through October 6. If you are in the Washington, DC area, drive on out to visit. VisArts is located at 9300 Gaither Rd, off the Shady Grove Exit of I-270.

Changing the World - European Edition

Changing the World - European Edition opens next week at the Val d'Argent Expo, Ste Marie aux Mines, Haut-Rhin, France. The show runs from September 14-17. Above is the cover to the catalog produced by Thelma Smith, the curator of Changing the World. It is available for $12 through this link Congratulations and thanks to Thelma for all her hard work in putting this exhibit together and taking it to France.

My quilt "Grid City" is a part of this exhibit.


This is a whole cloth quilt that was dye painted and stamped. Small squares of colored organza were overlaid for the transparency effect. The size is 29" L x 19" W.