Hi all! Posting from Houston…will share a few photos and brief comments from the first few days.  Flew from Maine to Houston on Sunday, got in early enough to visit Quilt Market and do some business.  Monday and Tuesday (today) taught Fine Finishes first, then Birch Pond Seasons today.  Fun having folks not only from all over the US, but Brazil, Spain, England and South Africa in class!  Enjoy the photos…. I’ve been on the run since 6 a.m. this morning, it’s now 10 pm, and my next class (teaching) begins at 8 a.m. tomorrow, so going to make this brief!

Sunrise from our 9-seater small commuter plane / flight to Boston. It was about 7 a.m. when I took this shot…STUNNING!

The Tula Pink booth at Quilt Market (a to-the-trade show, not open to the general public). Great fabrics, stunning “quilt modern” quilts with great quilting!

The Rowan Westminster booth was huge and fabulous!

LOVE these ribbons that are now available!

A happy student from my Fine Finishes class…she’s showing the couched-yarn edge finish.

Another happy student! She wanted to learn prairie points, which worked perfectly because I had just taught facings, which are what you need on the back side of the prairie points!

Had a large group of ladies from Brazil in Monday’s class. The one standing next to me had quite good English and was able to translate my instructions for her friends whose English couldn’t always keep up with the speed at which I speak LOL! They did great and seemed to really enjoy the class…FUN for me, too!

Hoooray! Got to the *original* Ninfas (on Navigation) for wonderful Mexican food. Wonder if I can make back at least once more if not twice…. YUM… I’ll diet next week….

With my friend Susan Brubaker Knapp (center) and her friend Kelly Jackson of IHaveANotion.com at Ninfa’s. I’m on the phone calling the hotel shuttle, and no…we had not been having margaritas…we were just having FUN! And eating…..

From today’s Birch Pond Seasons class… a work in progress! I love watching how students re-interpret my pattern and make it their own!

And my first student to ever try a winter version…LOVE it! Inspires me to get mine a bit further done!

Now…time to read a bit, relax and sleep before the alarm goes off in 7 hours….As the saying goes here in Houston, you can sleep next week!

Edelbert (detail). Full photo below. (c) SarahAnnSmith.com

What a concept… I actually made a small quilt!  And of course prepped more new samples for demos in my classes, starting with Quilt Festival in Houston this fall, so thought I’d share with you.  I’m in a small online fabric postcard swap group, Postmark’d Art.  One of the themes I signed up to do this round was Birds.  Of course I was stumped…way too many choices!  At first I was going to do birds from the trip to Florida.  Then our local wild turkeys.  Then I hit on it:  the saw-whet owl!  There was this adorable ad in the Nature Conservancy magazine with an owl in a little straw hat.  Presto!

Owls ready to wing their way to their new homes with members of Postmark’d Art.  (c) SarahAnnSmith.com

Then I wanted to donate one of these cards to Pokey Bolton’s fundraising effort to benefit the Houston area animal shelters… she’s only lived in Houton since the start of this year and has already rescued three critters (permanently adopting one of them).  She had a great idea to sell fabric postcards at Festival for $20 each, all proceeds to go to the local shelters.  So of course I wanted to help… she’s even (what a thrill!) included both of my cards on her blogposts including here.  Read more about it and see some of the fun cards that have arrived here.  I hope I’m not so buy in class that I miss the chance to swing by the postcard zone when Festival opens!  But my cards were too close to the ad, so I wanted to change it up a bit.  Since I live in Maine, what else would do but an Elmer Fudd hat??? Here are my two donations:

Donated to the Pet Postcard / Animal Shelter Fundraiser…visit Pokey Bolton’s blog for more information!

HE was so cute, I had to make a small quilt.  My local quilt chapter, the Coastal Quilters, is part of Maine’s Pine Tree Quilt Guild.  As part of our 2013 challenge, we are making somewhere between one and nine 13×13 inch square quilts using one of nine themes announced between fall of 2011 and April 2013.  We’ll display our challenge quilts at the 2013 Maine Quilts Show.  Well, I am SERIOUSLY behind.  I did the first one, then got sidetracked by life.  So, here is my “Eyes” challenge quilt, because after all what are owls all about if n ot their eyes?

Edelbert in a bit of a snowy wind

I LOVE this guy!  His name is Edelbert.  You can call him Eddie or Bert, but I think we prefer Bert.  Clearly he has a sense of humor and is a fun soul to have around.  I’ll share the class samples once I’ve debuted them in Houston…stay tuned!  Think white eggs on white background!

Copper tendrils hold the watch face onto my sketchbook cover.

Oh what FUN!  For a number of years now I have been inspired by New Zealander Claire Prebble’s wirework in her art-to-wear costumes (her website is here), and have wanted to mess around with wire.  Then last summer I took the first of three online classes with Jane LaFazio.  In one of them, I “met” Janice Berkebile and several other wonderful women.  After the second of the classes with Jane, we decided to set up our own sketching group online (we are globally dispersed from the San Francisco Bay area to northern California to near Seattle, Ontario Canada, Vermont and Maine and in the UK).  One day, Janice quietly said “Oh… my first book is just published.”  SAY WHAT?!!!!!!!   Here it is, and it is wonderful:

Available at Amazon.com

If you’d like to see Janice, click here and for the home page to their website, click here.

Well, I’m nowhere near starting on anything as awesomely intricate as Claire Prebble’s work, or even one of the simpler projects in the book, but I sure had a grand start today.  See several years ago, my Frayed Edges art quilt mini-group friends and I decided to do a journal-cover swap.   I got the lovely one made by Kate Cutko (queen of recycled and all things “green”…her blog is here) which has discharged and also rust-dyed fabric.  When she gave it to me, she told me she had wanted to find a watch face to sew to the cover.  Well, that year at Quilt Festival/Houston I found just the one!

After several years of use, the monofilament thread which I had used to attach the watch face had  broken, so I wanted to re-apply the watch face to the journal more securely.  At first I was going to sew beads to set it the way you would use seed beads to couch a cabochon (big flat stone/bead) to something.  Ugh. Hard.  Then I had a brainstorm–WIRE!   So this morning I started to play.

My work table this morning with hammers, pliers, cutters, wire (copper), more wire, and Janice’s book open to the appropriate page.

At first I was thinking of making a network of wire underneath with curlicues that extended to the front and intertwined with a circle of copper (since I bought that because it isn’t as expensive as silver!) on the top.  Then I thought…why a second circle on top?  How about “prongs” that wrap to the front and have them hold it?   SO….I made it!

Janice and Tracy’s book is great because it tells you what tools you need, which are nice-but-optional (especially when starting the cost of tools can be a bit frightening!).  I bought a larger bench block than you recommended (only slightly) in the book because I want  to eventually work on some larger pieces that may well include shapes cut from sheet metal…. They give all sorts of hints and tips, and have TONS of step-by-step pictures so you can follow along on your own.

Journal, with watch face attached with way more fun and creativity this time!

The tendrils that wrap to the front grip the watch face securely.  I sewed the copper “whatchamacallit” to the cover, then tucked the watch face into it, and pinched the tendrils down.

And then for fun I tried to make a spiral…while standing up and rushing.  Not the best, but at least it is a start!

Not quite round, but at least it is a tight spiral with a hanging loop!

So now I have their book back by my spot on the sofa and tonight will pore over it to see what I can adapt to use some beautiful beads made by ANOTHER internet friend that I got to meet in the real 4 years ago in Paducah (Caty are you out there?)!

I’m thrilled to share with you (again, but in more detail) Conversations I, which has been juried in to a World of Beauty, the competition exhibit at International Quilt Festival 2012 in Houston, Texas.  As usual, the jurors utterly mystified me with their selection:  I entered both my portrait of Joshua (which I personally think is the best piece I’ve ever made, seen here) and this quilt, and this is the one that got in!  I am thrilled to have a quilt in Houston which is–let’s be honest here–just about the biggest, most important show there is in the quilt world!

Conversations I, juried in to International Quilt Festival-Houston 2012

A couple Aprils ago, I had the great good fortune to be invited to teach by the Arizona Quilt Guild–it was a fabulous visit.  I discovered that it would cost the same to fly via Los Angeles (I’m in Maine, on the other side of the US for those reading from other countries) as to fly direct.  If I stopped en route in L.A., I could visit my beloved Sister-in-Law (sister of my heart!), so that’s what I did!  When she asked what I wanted to do, I promptly replied: go to the Getty!  I had seen photos of the Getty Museum before, including my friend Deborah Boschert’s trip there.  The lines, angles and shadows from the tables absolutely enchanted me, so I took a TON of photos.  You can see the FOUR (!!!) blogposts from that trip here-1, here-2, here-3 and here-4 if you really want an armchair visit!

I combined two of my photos of the tables and chairs to come up with this composite image…. I also really wanted that stark contrast between stone and sky, but since the chairs were in a courtyard surrounded by buildings, I took artistic license to put my table and chairs somewhere they weren’t in real life!

The shadows were one of my favorite things, but it took a few attempts to get them right.  For the quilt, I began with white fabric which I dyed to match the colors in my photos (Thank you, Carol Soderlund…. using my color swatches and formulas and learning from your class did EXACTLY what I wanted with the cloth!).  I had intended to use a sheer for the shadows, fused to the beige “stone” paving.  But it looked like I stuck something on….and one of the things I liked in the shadows was the seamless transition from beige to dark.  So I decided I would use ONLY thread, stitched very closely, to create the shadows, as seen in this photo:

I had thought I was done with this quilt when I took this photo, but decided there just wasn’t the stark contrast that I wanted in the shadows from the table and chairs–if you look at the photo at the top of this post and this photo, you can see the difference in the shadows.

So, on to Plan “C”!  Yes, I did test, but it was pretty nerve-wracking to take out the Derwent Inktense pencils and darken the shadows:

You can see what a difference there is in this photo. I darkened the shadows under the foreground chair first.  Notice that there are two pencils to the right of the chair, and just off the edge of the quilt a paintbrush.

VERY carefully, so that the pencil-ink didn’t bleed into the stripes of sunlight, I pencilled in with the Inktense pencils (see the pencils and sharpener) in the shadow stripes. Then VERY carefully I held a paintbrush wet with water in my right hand and my hair dryer (turned on) in my left. I would brush a small section of the penciled area, then zap it with the hair dryer to allow the paint to intensify by wetting, the dry before it spread into the sunlight stripes. I only had one small bleed!  This photo shows that about the top half of the shadows have been wet-then-dried, while the lower part of the table’s shadows are still just pencilled on–not yet wet-and-dried.  I sure was glad when that was done, because I could have wrecked the whole thing!

I also needed to think about how to create the shaded side of the wood slats on the chairs and table.  There is only so think one can cut strips of cloth to fuse.  And I didn’t really want to totally mash the quilt by darkening the sides of the slats with thread stitching (as I did in the shadows under the table and chairs).  So I used a brown (or was it red?)  Pigma pen and wrote words relating to the visit:

Detail, Conversations I

So that’s the story….the conversation between me and the cloth and thread and pencils and quilt, but it is just one of the conversations from that wonderful day.

SAQA-The Maine Event 2012 dinner at the Capt. A.V. Nickels Inn, Searsport, Maine

What a lovely place to have an art quilt meeting!   I must say that this regional SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Associates, main site here) was the first time I’ve been around this many really top notch art quilters outside of the ginormous International Quilt Festival in Houston!  Thank you to coordinators Beth Berman, Sarah Carpenter and Margaret Sheehan for bringing this together for a third consecutive year.  I’ve already got the third weekend in September reserved for next year!

During the break after the last workshop/demo and supper, I sat outside on a breezy (and increasingly nippy) deck enjoying the view and sketching.

Earlier in the day I had spotted a beautiful old spoon amongst the assorted styles near the coffee.  I picked it up and decided it was so lovely that a mere photograph wasn’t enough, so I sketched it!  I then added a quick watercolor of that view (I believe that is the far north side of Penobscot Bay in the distance) and journaled a tiny bit on the page:

My sketch page of the day. The tiny writing that scrolls around reads: As the sun goes in and out behind the couds the shadows shift and move dancing over the page (upper line) and In the late afternoon we had a break after the last session and before dinner, so I painted the view. The spoon needs to be a bit darker at the tip of the bowl, but otherwise I’m happy with it.

After dinner was the best part…seeing what others are doing! Alas, I do NOT know everyone’s name, so I apologize to artists and readers alike for not having attribution on many of these.  If you know who did what, please let me know so I may update the blogpost!

Sandra Betts (on left) shared this portrait of her mother, using Mary Pal’s technique using cheesecloth. Very effective…. when Sandra first held it up I thought it looked like her, but not quite. When she said it was her mother that explained it!

Isn’t this FABULOUS? Someone please tell me who made it!

Michelle Goldsmith (on left) told us about taking Lisa Call’s working in a series online workshop. This was one of many large pieces, wholecloth and painted. I loved the joyousness of the color in this one. Plus it was fun to see Michelle again–she was program chair for her guild and they hired me to come teach there in May 2011, and it was so much fun!  I blogged about that visit here and here.

Beth Berman, our lead coordinator for this event, has a thing for crows. Her art quilting skills have just blossomed since I first met her. This is one of her two pieces.

This Maine quilter (on right) loves color and dyes her own fabrics and creates her own embroideries (in this case the seagulls). I just want to dive headfirst into that color!

As you might gather, it was a WONDERFUL day!  Thanks Beth, Margaret, Sarah and everyone who traveled from near and far.