A few days ago I shared part of The Frayed Edges May meeting, including the pages Kate and Kathy made for our “round robin book” exchange.  Today I thought I’d share the pages I made for Kate, Kathy and Deborah—Hannah’s is still on the drawing board (which means fully formed inside my mind, but not fully formed anywhere else!).

Kate’s theme changed from hands to hearts.  I am NOT much of a heart person, so I asked if we could sssttttrrreeettttccch (stretch) the concept…so the piece above is “The Heart(h) of the home,” since many say the hearth IS the heart of the home.  When we visit at Kate’s we eat in the kitchen/dining room, which has a good old fashioned wood stove and some comfy chairs.  The stove pictured here is Kate’s (or very close), the chair is the rocking chair and stool in my sewing room.   The fabric for the floor is one I made in my last Carol Soderlund workshop; I took some “dog” hand-dyed (some fabric I had previously dyed and was UGLY), overdyed and dye-sketched with the black.  It was perfect for a wood floor!

The reverse side of Kate’s page is a stretch for me… I don’t do much surface design (and for the most part am not wild about a lot of the “surface design” / “art cloth” pieces that I see, which often look like a mish-mosh).  But I wanted to see what I could do.  So I took a piece of nearly-solid leaf green fabric I had dyed some time ago ,sponged on some color/texture, and  created freezer paper stencils (and boy did they ever take time to cut…. I printed “I Heart Art” onto freezer paper… and it took at LEAST two HOURS to cut those letters out!) and stencilled I Heart Art onto the cloth.  I also cut stencils for hearts.  For some, I filled in the inside of the heart; for others I ironed the heart on and painted a halo/glow on the outside of the shape.

When Deborah last came to Maine last September we had a wonderful sleepover down near Kate’s house (blogpost here).  It was a GLORIOUS and rejuvenating getaway for us (and Kate’s mojitos were memorable!).  At that time, we exchanged journal covers; Kathy has been lusting after the one I made (Which Kate drew in our “grab it out of a pillowcase” method of exchange), so I made her a page with the seal in the kelp:

And one of my favorite sea creatures, the sea turtles–the background of this one, by the way, is one of my all time favorite batik prints, from Princess Mirah/Bali Fabrics:

When hubby and I were were young, well-employed and kidless (and pounds lighter in weight) we went to a resort on Saint John in the US Virgin Islands.  We would snorkel at least once a day, and I fell in love with the tropical fish, especially the parrotfish, and the turtles.  It was so soothing that when asked to visualize something calming for childbirth, I set myself snorkeling, imagining the gentle waves rocking me as I floated and paddled above the coral reefs.

Deborah’s pages were actually the first ones I did.  I was stumped for ideas, since the next pages in sequence were numbers 9 and 10.  So off to google!  Nine quickly brought up the nine planets (I refuse to de-planet-ify Pluto!), so I made the nine planets around the sun for page 9.

Deborah has done some wonderful work with illumination and published an article on her process in February/March 2009 issue of Quilting Arts this past year.  When Google reminded me that the Byzantine Empire was at its peak in the 10th century, I new I wanted to use the mosaics from the Byzantine churches.  A second google search yielded photos of Christ Imperator from Hagia Sofia.  Following instructions from Lesley Riley published in a Quilting Arts e-Newsletter (more info here), I applied fluid matte medium to Lutradur, which I then ran through the printer.

The coolest thing about using the lutradur instead of fabric was being able to made sharp fiddly “cuts” using the heat tool (I have a tool for cutting stencil plastic).  I placed the Lutradur on a piece of glass (an 8×10 piece from a frame, edges taped) and “cut” with the tool.  Initially, I wasn’t going to use the bits of wall and extra pieces, but when I went to move the areas surround Christ’s head and halo to the side, I loved the echo/shapes.  It reminded me of how parts of the mosaics have fallen away from the church domes leaving the plaster showing.

As with Kate’s piece, I cut stencils to “write” Byzantium, 10th c. AD on the 7×10 inch page.  Talk about FIDDLY!   I would gladly pay a small fortune to buy a thermofax so as not to have to cut stencils like this!  But…this may be one of my favorite pages that I have made.  I don’t know yet how I will incorporate

Here is a link to Deborah’s blogpost about my current pages for her book:  Deborah’s blogpost.

As you can tell, we have FUN!

A couple Mondays ago my mini-art-quilt-group got together, this time at Hannah’s house down the Harpswell peninsula.  It was a lovely quiet day, and a much needed respite from our insane daily lives….   When we first started our group in 2005 (OMG HOW has it been so long? ), we worked on various new techniques or projects in our meetings, and we decided to do a round robin of art books. Instead of doing a round robin quilt, we would instead make pages for each other.  We were each free to pick the size of the book and theme (or lack thereof).  Deborah chose numbers, Kate chose hands, Kathy chose the sea, and I chose Isabel’s fruits (Isabel Allende wrote a book called Aphrodite:  A Memoir of the Senses, which is about supposedly aphrodisiac foods….folks could pick anything from her book, or anything they considered aphrodisiac).  Here’s a link to an older blogpost about my book.

When Hannah joined us about the time Deborah was about to move to Texas (SOB, yet again) , we talked about doing another round on the books so we could get Hannah a book, too. Well, at long last we have begun to make and trade pages!  The photo above is of Kate continuing to work on one of Kathy’s pages.

For this round, we gave ourselves the option of changing themes.  Kathy, Deborah and I kept the same ones (the sea, numbers, and Isabel’s fruits), Kate changed from hands to hearts, and Hannah selected Mothering.

Here is Hannah, being a mom with her youngest daughter, sharing her first ever page for her Mothering book:

Kathy made these two pages.  The Peter Rabbit is, I believe, a transfer which Kathy free-motion stitched and decorated.

The second page is based on a painting by Gustav Klimt and is glorious:

Kate worked on Sea pages for Kath, including the jellyfish one in the photo above, and this one which is a quotation from Ann Morrow Lindbergh’s Gifts from the Sea:

Kathy made two GLORIOUS pages for mine; both Absinthe and Lavender are on Isabel’s lists….   The absinthe page is a transfer onto silk with decorative threadwork, and I adore it… I wish the luminescence of the silk showed in the photo:

And here is the lavender; my dear late father-in-law lived in Sequim which is home to many lavender farms, plus there was one on San Juan island where we used to live, and this is exactly how they look:

Aren’t I lucky to be amongst such talented and wonderful people?  In a post soon I’ll share the pages I made for Deborah, Kathy and Kate (still working on Hannah’s).

And no post would be truly complete without the meal:

YUMMM!

Well, I forgot my camera!  So despite the fact that we celebrated Kate’s birthday, I’m afraid I’ll be short on pictures.  We met at Kathy’s house; Hannah was a bit under the weather and couldn’t make it, but Kate, Kathy and I had a wonderful time celebrating nonetheless.  I do have pictures of the gift I made for Kate.  I’ve submitted a sibling project to a magazine for consideration, but I think it will be OK to blog about this variation on the theme:  an accordion book/frame/memory project. 

Kate likes hands so much she picked them for her first theme for our round robin book-pages swap, and hearts for the second round.  So I updated quilting’s traditional heart-in-hand motif for the end pages of this small keepsake book.  The hearts are actually pockets for photos…the opening is sized to fit the wallet sized school photos.  I’m guessing her two kids will be in here, and if they are, she can also use a fabric pen to write their names in the heart in the hand.

Here’s the back side of the book:

Each pocket contains a “memories” card.  I thought it would be fun for the kids to add who their friends are, favorite songs, colors, clothes, sports/activities, books, movies, things to do with the family….   and I gave them two each of the cards (when kids goof sometimes they get really upset, so they got one for practice, one for real!).  The heart tag is the cut-out from the window-frame on the other side.

If the magazine doesn’t want to publish this, I may just turn it into a little pattern for sale, with all sorts of ideas and variations on the theme:  different ways to join the pages, different page shapes, different frame styles, using the pages as door banners (think of a photo frame page on the top, then a page for each letter in a child’s name, linked vertically to hang on their bedroom door).  Could be fun!

Ya know, from these photos you’d never know we did more than talk or eat!   We actually DID talk art and sewing, shared projects (and I could have SWORN I took a photos of Kathy’s latest bird quilt…ruffed grouse and her crabapple tree!), but nope…..   So you’ll just have to enjoy our togetherness!
Hannah and her daughter came… it is so much fun to see Nina grow from being an infant to a toddler and soon a little girl….

Kate hosted us at her  house, which is always wonderful.  We got to go see their own personal maple syrup source…with new-fangled plastic tap and bucket.  For those who aren’t from maple-syrup-regions, it takes 40 gallons of sap (which is clear like water and faintly sweet) to make 1 gallon of syrup (which darkens as it cooks):

The tap on the tree

and the bucket:

The bucket with sap dripping into it (normally covered to prevent bugs etc)

Here was lunch..see Deborah…I was thinking of you and actually remembered to take pictures of the wonderful Italian Wedding Soup Kate made, with homemade chicken/turkey meatballs:

And on the way home, a flock of wild turkey crossed the road and headed into the still-snowy woods:

Well, two weeks have nearly evaporated since we last met, this time at Hannah’s house.  The drive down the snow peninsula toward Harpswell was beautiful… I love looking at the frozen salt water inlets, the ice heaved and shattered and piles like boulders…. We shared this and that, all of us seeming to relish a bit of a breather in our too-hectic lives.  Hannah been to a HUGE crafters and mixed media convention in California….. I think it is CHA or something like that, but check Hannah’s blog for pics… in the late January posts.

Kate has lately been seriously taken with rag rugs, including this beauty in my favorite colors….I have a feeling Kathy and Hannah are going to be following in her needlesteps…. (the needle by the way is a modified-by-kate-into-a-needle toothbrush…it has to be one of the old fashioned brushes with the hole at the end)

Kate's rag rug

Then Kathy shared what she has been doing…making mushrooms:

Kath's mushrooms and tin

and working on a project for our “round robin” of books.  When we first started meeting OMG four YEARS ago, we decided rather than do a round robin quilt, we’d do books, and make pages for each other.  Since Hannah joined us about two-plus years ago, we’ve kept talking about doing another round, and getting Hannah in on the act.  This is one of Kath’s pages in progress:

Hannah had made a ton of stuff for holiday craft sales…here she is with some of the very few items left:

Hannah and critter-friend

and how this panda excaped being bought is beyond me, he’s ADORABLE:

Hannah's Panda

I had a project (at long last!) to share, but alas can’t blog about it as I have submitted it to a magazine for possible publication. DRAT!  Stay tuned….sigh….

And of course there was food…thankfully, someone stood in for Deborah and reminded me to take pictures.  Deborah…we miss you!!!!!!!  Wish there were a job back here in Maine for hubby that could get you back from Texas!

Finally, here is Hannah’s new kitten, about 8-9 months (?) old…what a perfect cat-cat!

Kitten