A brief detour from the Arizona trip…..

I’ve been a  part of Postmark’d Art’s last two swaps.  This time, I used one of the exercises from my Lino-Cutting class (blogged about in January and February).   I rooted through about (no kidding) 20 years of old photos to find this one of a farm in southern England, which I snapped in about 1984.   It was funny, I thought I used to be a good photographer, taking good and artsy shots.  Hmmm.  Not so much.  Some were good, but most were….ummm…boring!   It appears I have trained my eye for composition somewhat in the intervening decades!   Anyway, this one was good, so I used it to cut a lino-block.

Here are the assorted prints drying on the floor:

Some blurred a bit, and will be cut up, tossed, or printed over.  Others turned out great!  I used three fabrics:  a pale baby blue fossil fern (the one that looks grayish), a commercial sky print (the bright one), and a blue fabric I painted and fiddled with (and used some for the mermaid I blogged about recently).  There are also two guardian Owls for a friend whose husband passed away recently.  Owl’s are a favorite of hers (I carved the block during the class with her in mind!), and decided that she and Lou needed a guardian Angel Owl.

One difficulty I have had with the class, is that the teacher–Dijanne–is from Europe and Australia, and not so familiar with US brands.  The Speedball water-based printing ink that I find makes the best prints is, shriek!, not wash-fast!!!!!   So I have begun doing some testing.  Here I took prints (heat set with the iron and not) of a sun, then treated each with various things like soft gel medium, a varnish for textiles, GAC 900 (a compound for using paints on textiles), and nothing. I also want to run another test where I treat the fabric FIRST, then apply the Speedball ink.   I don’t like how on a couple of these the color of the fabric changes so much (not to mention how stiff it got)!  I also have tried using Krylon Spray Fixative, an archivally safe spray fixative; it is often used on top of pastels so they don’t smudge.   Anyway…here’s a picture of the test, in progress.  I next need to soak these and see what happens.  Stay tuned!!

And here’s a shot of all the postcards in the swap:

This year my local quilt chapter, the Coastal Quilters (part of the state guild, the Pine Tree Quilt Guild) decided to change our annual challenge (now in its third year) from 10×10 inches to 12 inches wide by 9 inches tall.  The reason?  So that after the challenge participants can, if they wish, donate their quilt to Ami Simm’s Alzheimer fundraiser.  The donations are auctioned and the proceeds go to benefit Alzheimer’s research.

In past years we were challenged to interpret a photo (Here–scroll about halfway down to see the ropes and buoys quilts and here for my buoys quiltlet) or use a little bit of EVERYthing in a grab bag (Here and here).  This year, we each received a fat quarter of a black and white print:

Obviously, this is AFTER I got to it with the fabric paint and scissors….ahem.

Once the challenge debuts at Maine Quilts (in Augusta, Maine, last weekend in July), I’ll share the others’ pieces, but for now you can see how I painted the fabric (above) and  used it.  My quilt consists of white fabric (painted blues), the challenge fabric (painted blues, green, and blond-brown hair colors), beads and sequins (mermaid’s tail) and yarn (couched to the top to “frame” the piece).  Actually, this piece shows her swimming UP; when our guild president held up the quilts, she held the mermaid with her swimming down (second photo) and I think I actually prefer that way!  What do you think?

And swimming down:

And a close-up of the tail:

It was fun to do.  Although Mama doesn’t have Alzheimer’s (that we know of ), she does have deepening dementia.  She can’t remember how to work the remote for the TV, and sometimes when she can figure out the phone she’ll call and say “Sarah, this is your sister.”  I think I shall donate my mermaid to Ami’s fundraiser…I’ll let you know more when I get it sent off and donated.

As you might gather by my absence (provided anyone noticed it… I know jq did…but anyone else out there as insanely busy as I am?), I have been busy.   Sufficiently busy that the blog has been sadly neglected!  Among other things, this is what I have been doing:

Yes, that is 1172 new photocopies, added to about 300-400 leftover photocopies, all handouts for my classes in June and July, plus my “teacher’s binders.”  Many pieces of paper, many pounds, many dollars–and about 14 inches across from handle to handle!   I’ll be teaching at the National Quilt Association show in Columbus, Ohio (next week) and then at the AQS show in Knoxville, Tennessee (mid-July).  Enrollment in the latter is low…the economic recovery must not have taken hold as firmly down South as in other parts of the country…so DO come and sign up!

I’ve been busy with family stuff…yesterday was SO much fun!   It was the end of 6th Grade Spirit Week (also known as what to do with the kids the last week of school so everyone stays mostly sane), and the “Dance Through the Decades” program.  The brainchild of Mr. Morse, possibly one of the best social studies and 6th grade teachers EVER, and a colleague whose name alas I don’t recall (she was a substitute teacher 6 years ago when he came up with this one, and volunteered to help, and she has every year bless her!), the kids dress up, learn dances, and put on a show…all in a week.  It was a GAS!  This photo is the 50s, with my younger son in the front row, far left.  Way cool!

I have also, miracle of miracles, been able to do some quilting, after returning from teaching.  Here  is what my design wall looked like earlier this week…colorful!   Busy!  I’ll blog about these plus the fun time I had teaching in Arizona and later Massachusetts in April and early May.  I got seriously slowed down blogging because while in Arizona, my laptop DIED–utterly deceased–two days before the slide show lecture.  We limped through and did fine, but my what stress!  Then when I got home I had to restore everything (thank heavens I had good back-ups and Macs are easy!), then get back in the swing.  Anyway….here’s the wall…stay tuned for more!

Jamie Fingal and Leslie Tucker Jenison came up with the idea for the Beneath the Surface exhibit, got the sponsors, juried the show, and are now doing a totally cool thing on their blog!  My quilt is the portrait of my son, Joshua (recently blogged about at length, so only a small picture here):

Jamie and Leslie have sent each of the artists a list of questions, and it looks like we’ll hit 100 percent participation with the answers.  Day by day they are adding the responses of the various artists to these questions:

1.  How do you describe yourself?
2.  What is your creative process?  planning, drawing, notes, etc.
3.  What’s your style?  Abstract, pictorial, surface design, whole cloth, etc.
4.  How long have you been a quilt maker/fiber artist?
5.  Do you listen to music when you make art?  what kind?
6.  What do you do when you are blocked creatively?
7.  Do you teach?  What’s your favorite part about teaching?
8.  Are there artistic endeavors that you have yet to do?
9.  How do you balance your family life and art?
10. What is the best part about what you do?

If you’d like to see what I said, check out today’s post, here.

To see what all the others have said, go to the Dinner at 8 Artists blog and just keep going backwards through the posts!  It’s wonderful reading!

Thanks to Moore’s sewing centers of southern California and Brother Sewing Machines for sponsoring the debut of the exhibit at the International Quilt Association show in Long Beach and to MistyFuse / Attached Inc. (loyal readers KNOW  how much I love MistyFuse!) for sponsoring the continuation of the exhibit at International Quilt Festival in Houston this coming October/November.  I’m so glad it will travel to Houston, since that means I’ll get to see it in the cloth!

With this blogpost, we will end the series on how I made the quilt of my son playing guitar.  I had fun with the quilting, too.  Here’s the bucket and bag of threads I used for the quilting:

And here is the completed quilt; notice that the proportions have changed a little.  The finished size for the exhibit is 36 inches wide by 48 inches long, so I needed to remove some extra, especially in the length.  If the quilt hadn’t been in this exhibit, I might have let it go a little longer, but I think in terms of design and composition it is still fine the way it is.

While I was mulling over how to quilt the walls, there was yet another discussion on either QuiltArt or SAQA (or both?) about the line between traditional and art quilting.  As usual there were those who want nothing to do with traditional quilting.  I, however, am proud of our traditional roots and proud of this as an art form that began with women’s work.  As someone recently said to me, Quilt is NOT a four-letter word!

This discussion led me to the idea of using traditional feathered vines for the background quilting.  As you can see from this next photo, though I chose a thread I thought would show up on the background, it was too subtle.  I decided to echo-quilt around the feathered vines, then pencilled in the resulting space/channel to define the outlines of the vines with Prismacolor Pencil (which I later covered with a combination of a textile-friendly varnish and water to seal it to prevent it from rubbing off).

Here is a wider-angled shot of the wall area showing the feathered vines…I just love them!

This shows the quilted quilt with the threads distributed over the top where they were used:

Here are two close-ups of the quilting of Joshua’s face and torso:

I love the backs of my quilts, the line drawing look, so took this (alas blurry) photo–you can see the feathered vines clearly on this semi-solid background fabric, and that the entire quilt is stitched 1/4″ apart or close… a lot of thread!

And to end where we began, but arrayed nicely, all those beautiful threads ( all but one of them Superior Threads):

PS–I am reminded by the comments to add that Joshua –hallelujah!– actually likes the quilt!  Given how picky teenagers are, especially of pictures of themselves, I am so thrilled that he of all people likes it.  Hugs to my firstborn!  Now…. what will the years bring that I can do another quilt, this time of secondborn son?