I’m thrilled to be able to share a wonderful new book about art quilting written by Deborah Boschert about our Frayed Edges Project called 5 Artists, 5 Views:

and yes, I’m in it / a part of the book. Some of you may remember that in August, The Frayed Edges (my mini-group) had an exhibit at the Camden Public Library (to see more, click here and here). For that show, I had an idea to create a group project: each of us would contribute one photo, then we would each make a small quiltlet based on those five photos. The project was SO successful that Deborah Boschert wanted to create a small book discussing the project and how others might do something similar.

Deborah has finished the book and blogged about it here, and best of all, the book is ready for sale in her Etsy shop for a modest $20 plus shipping; these books will make wonderful Christmas gifts (I’ve already ordered several!). I hope it will also be an inspiration for all art quilters, and would be art quilters who are looking for a way to start!

Deborah designed the book to be interactive. You open the lovely embellished vellum envelope (above) to find a book with interviews, hints, tips, ideas and inspiration, and a stack of photographs

including the five original inspiration photos (Kathy’s umbrella photo is on the bottom left) plus a photo of each of the 25 pieces in the 5 x 5 grid. When you read the book, you can sort through the photos to look at all five of the umbrella pieces, or stack all the ones by a given artist, or lay them out in the 5 x 5 grid we used to display them.

The booklet, half-page sized, is (I think) 30 pages. It includes:

• About the Project
• About the Photographs
• Artists
  • Hannah Beattie
  • Deborah Boschert
  • Kate Cutko
  • Kathy Daniels
  • Sarah Ann Smith
• Suggestions for Similar Collaborative Projects

I’m so thrilled Deborah has prepared this book, and that I am a part of it, and that we are all a part of The Frayed Edges! Wooohooo! I hope some of you will order and enjoy the book…and as always, ASK QUESTIONS!

As usual, it was another wonderful day! Despite the look of autumn all around us, like the photo above which is just a mile or so down the road from Hannah’s house (on the peninsula south of Brunswick / Harpswell), it was a mild and balmy day fit for t-shirts…a last gasp of warm summer air. We had fun sharing, food (of course!), gifts and projects before flying to the winds as kid-duties called us home in the afternoon.

Hannah’s b-day is late September and mine (something like 15-17 years earlier!) in early October both happened since we last met, so we had a double celebration. Deborah sent goodies from Texas, and we exchanged gifts and grins and thank you’s. It is so wonderful to have creative friends!!!! Here is Hannah enjoying some hand-dyed fabric from my recent workshop (I promise, those posts are coming!)… but I had to tell her to keep unrolling to find the socks in the center–she told me she had been lusting after my bright socks and was having a hard time keeping quiet, so it was perfect!

And here is my loot… from Deborah’s lovely sprigs and twigs (and LOVE the way it is mounted! off to find a frame!), to Kate’s damask table cloth (ready to dye, of course, from a small treasure trove of old linens she lucked into recently) and batik, to the Japanese desk Calendar (I LOVE and am so inpsired by Japanese woodblocks) from Kath to Hannah’s happy, crazy, jump-roping girl made from found beach glass (near her home) and beads she bought in China when adopting Nina. The crazy lime hair is perfect for my state of life these days!

I shared my hand-dyes, and Kathy treated us to an in progress visual FEAST. She is making a bed quilt as a commission for some friends, interpreting their vacation photos from over the years. I SO WANT THIS. Aw heck, I want to be Kathy! I want her creativity and vision and color sense and style. But since I can’t have them, I will be more than content to sit and look and learn and enjoy and be thankful she is my friend. She is constructing the quilt in panels and quilting them, then will join them together. Here is one panel:

And another:

And LOOK at this quilting on the back….she’s as nutso as I am about quilting!

SIGH. I also REALLY like the way Kathy combined low-contrast deep-dark batiks in squares for setting the “photos.” Will keep that in mind for the future…. plus it’s a great excuse to buy more batiks… grin!

For lunch, we had calzones made by Bart the wonderful (aka Hannah’s hubby), one tomato-y and sausage and veggies, the other spinach and riccotta (which I’m going to try to duplicate tonight), followed by a true Maine treat: Whoopie Pie. However, this may be the largest whoopie pie on the planet, found and brought by Kathy:

The “cookie” is a dense chocolate cake, the filling is more like frosting, and it is super rich. Oprah loves these, and her endorsement sent the maker from a mom making whoopie pies at home and then commercially for her friends from local to stratosphere / nationwide. Another Maine mom makes good! So we indulged. Here are the birthday girls with Kathy (Hannah on the left, Kathy plus Whoopie Pie, and me in a shirt I dyed at the workshop).

After our visit to the Botanical Gardens last month, we stopped at On Board Fabrics in Edgecomb and all purchased canvas to make floor cloths or something similar. In a nutshell, you buy heavy canvas, paint it, goop on (Mod-Podge, fusible, glue, whatever) fabric, then polyurethane the daylights out of it. Finally, hem the edges, put non-skid stuff on the back, and have a colorful floor. Well, I figured in my house that’s one more thing to collect or trap cat or dog hair, so mine will be washable placemats (a surprise for the family for Christmas, unless Joshua reads my blog while internet surfing at school when he is supposed to be studying….ahem, sport!). Kate was better prepared than the rest of us and got the most done. Here is a blank green-painted canvas to make a runner, plus that glorious mango color runner on top of it, with some Kaffe Fassett prints on top. Isn’t that enough to just make you smile when you look down at your floor?

Finally, on the way home, I actually got stopped for a train (!!!!) at the edge of the Wiscasset bridge and had the chance to snap this picture of the ready-for winter tree and the still-summery screaming blue sky:

The last three pieces hanging at Zoot are two “trees” pieces and the White Flower. This first piece was made for the “Changing Perspectives” challenge; the idea was to present something from a different perspective, or something that made you change your perspective. “Looking Inward” appears to be a night scene, perhaps with the aurora borealis. In fact, the two images are scans of my retinas; my eye doctor shared and gave permission for me to use the scans, which I manipulated in Photoshop Elements to change the colors (the red – green default for the examination equipment was a bit scary!) before printing onto fabric.

The quilt has hanging sleeves on both long edges (it is 14×24) so it can be hung as we would expect to see trees, or as the trees actually imprint on the retina: upside down. Here’s a detail:

Camden Sunset is another of several small quiltlets featuring a photo transfer of a beautiful winter sunset; I snapped this shot less than a quarter mile from our home.

Finally, White Flower is a piece I began for the Frayed Edges Grid challenge (see here for more). I liked this piece, but it just didn’t seem finished with just the white portion–it needed more. So I made another piece for the Grid challenge and mounted this white satin, painted, and heavily beaded piece. The green stamens are satin-stitched chenille stems which stand out from the surface. Overall size is 13×17, the white panel is 7×10 inches.

And here’s a detail of the center:

As with the other pieces at Zoot, these three are for sale. Looking Inward is $195, Camden Sunset is $165, and White Flower is $225.

The inspirational sculpture continued as we walked farther away from the visitor’s center, and then looped back around. Near the Zen / Meditating Garden, was this reflecting rockery. From a distance you’d think it might be a stone found there, with smaller stones around the perimeter, but you’d be wrong, as you can see when you get close and see the finely carved opening. I loved the reflection of the trees, and hope to go back and take pictures again on a sunny day, and yet again when just enough of a chill is in the air to start freezing the water into frostlines on the edges:

The path we took followed along the edge of the river where we saw the sun and moon, a carved wood piece with gold on one side and silver on the other. Here are Kathy and Kate walking ahead of me near the piece:

The light was low, so alas a couple other cool pieces I photographed didn’t turn out since I blurred them. But, tucked into the back woods was the Circle and Line “bowl” with the trough of moss:

On the Birch allee, which will be glorious when the array of different varieties of birch trees matures, are a number of pieces including the raven-woman in my previous post on the sculptures. This piece doesn’t photograph as well as it looks… I think it was called legs:

And saving the best for last, I loved loved LOVED this standing stone:

With my family’s roots in Ireland, I have a “thing” for old standing stones, along with a just-me “thing” for circles, and for sinuous lines (is it because my name begins with an “S”? What if I had been named Brigid, would I still love swoopy lines?). I can definitely see some of this imagery working its way into my pieces based on the gardens.

Last Monday (gosh…a week already? It has been, as usual, a crazy busy blur of a week) I met two of my fellow Frayed Edges at the opened-this-year Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay Harbor (north of Portland, south of Camden about an hour plus a bit). The gardens were incredibly inspiring, so I’ll just share a bunch of photos.

As you approach the entrance to the visitors center, this glorious stone wall (and Maine has many!) greets you, with a bit of garden sculpture in the mid-ground on the right. I’ll do another post on the sculptures around the grounds in a few days….

This is the “zen” or meditating area. Frankly, I never slow down enough to even THINK about meditating… my life seems to be on permanent fast-forward. But the steps and stonescape up the hillside are gorgeous:

Part of this Zen area is a path that to us looked like a strand of DNA:

At the bottom of the hill is the river / fingerling of the bay, with a typical Maine vista:

And on the path back was this glorious stump…how can you not love those colors and textures?

Then there is the tracery of tree roots

:

And the beauty of a stump atop cracked rocks: