Woooohoooo!   It’s official:  the Coastal Quilters Chapter Banner has been juried in to the AQS show in Knoxville, TN.  Each of the three AQS shows (the others are the famous Paducah show and the new Des Moines show) have different categories and size requirements.  The Knoxville show is the only one for which a group quilt of this size is eligible…and we got in!

I am SO PROUD of the 18 women who did even better than their best on their contributions to this quilt!  For the full run-down, visit here (gallery page on my website) for details.  Now, to go get it packed up and see if Louisa can drop the package off when I’m away.  WOOHOOO!

Here is a detail photo, too….

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!

The first time I went to International Quilt Festival in Houston, Texas, was the first year for the Journal Quilt Project.  Two series in particular grabbed me and wouldn’t let me forget them:  Maria Elkins’ feathers and Suzanne Riggio’s rooftops.  You can see Maria’s here, and Suzanne’s here (hers are the second row down in the first “bank” of journal quilts on that page).  To see more of that first year’s journals, click here.  I didn’t know at the time how many glorious quilts Suzanne had already made, and clearly with more to come.

Recently when I posted to the QuiltArt list about my drawing, Suzanne saw my post and must have remembered my San Domenico quilt (here and here plus additional blogposts in late June 2006) and sent me this jpeg of her quilt for St. Mary’s school.  Since she doesn’t have a blog, online album or website, I asked permission to share it with all of you and the quiltart list by posting it here:

What is astonishing is that during the eleven years this quilt was in the making, Suzanne had severe back problems, surgery, is now in a wheelchair, and STILL the art will come out, and come out stupendously well!  I just get goosebumps thinking about the quilt, her affection for her school, her art…the whole kit and kaboodle!

Suzanne wrote to me that the quilt “will live is a two-sided glass case with oak surround in the new atrium at St. Mary’s School.  (The names of the graduates and the history of the school are on the back.)”   The new wing will be dedicated on May 31, with archbishops and all.  I expect there will be MANY looks of awe and dew-y eyes!

Addendum:  some new information from Suzanne:
FYI, St. Mary’s is not my school.  We came to St. Mary’s Church in 1996 from West Virginia (36 years).  I had a solo quilt show at St. Mary’s in 1998, and that was the inspiration for the commission to do a sesquicentennial quilt for their school, due in 2009.  I knew nothing about the school at the time and had to do lots of research.

It was a school started by the School Sisters of Notre Dame who got their start in Bavaria in 1833.  Milwaukee was mostly settled by Germans, especially Bavarians, and was a good place for a “mission.” The sisters continued to sponsor the school until 1913 when the parish took over.  But the sisters continued to teach and administer.  The last SSND principal was Sister Betty–the quilt is dedicated to her.

In the course of my work, I applied for and received a couple of grants from the Wisconsin Arts Board to make this work of art.

The work contains historic stained glass (prismatic foil), maps, buildings then and now, lots of text giving the history, a quartet of kids representing 1859 and 2009, the sacraments kids receive, monstronses, gardens and orchards, sunrises, the names of graduates on the back, and a lot more.

Thanks Suzanne for letting me share this incredible work!  The photo is (theoretically) click-able to view slightly larger.

About five or six years ago, having taken a phenomenal workshop with Hollis Chatelain in 2002 at Kalispell (Montana)’s Quilt Gallery (for which I saved up for two years and drove a thousand miles each way!), and while at another well-done workshop with Jane Sassaman, I came to the conclusion that what I needed was not so much quilting workshops, but ART lessons.  I needed to learn to SEE. I learned other good stuff from Jane, but that was the prize realization!

In a nutshell, I wasn’t getting things to look like they really look OR the way I wanted them to look…I needed to learn how to translate what was in front of me into cloth and in some way other than photos and tracing… I wanted to be able to DRAW so that I could make the quilts in my head.

However, I then lived on San Juan Island, Wash. state, which is 2 hours by ferry from the mainland; while there were assorted painting classes available on the island (population year round about 7,000), there were no basic DRAWING classes, and I needed that first.  So I purchased The New Drawing on The Right Hand Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards (click on title to go to amazon listing) and, to make myself do it, the companion workbook which really makes it such a no-brainer to do that you have no excuse for NOT doing the exercises.

I told some of my quilty friends, and two, Lunnette and Linda, both asked if they could do it with me.  That was the best thing that could have happened… because of our committment to one another, we really worked hard to get the “homework” done.  Lunnette’s sons were mostly grown and gone, but Linda (working full time as a teacher no less) and I had wee  ones at home and work, so the two of us were ALWAYS doing things at the last minute.

When we began, I was skeptical that it would really work, but we decided to give it a go.  As part of the process, you are asked to do several pre-instruction drawings, then not look at them until you complete the training.  The three of us did our self-portraits, and while none were stupendous, you could tell who was who, and a stranger looking at them could have done so, too!  Here is my pre-instruction portrait from Fall 2003:

It took us nearly a year to complete the “course” and we rushed toward the end, as we ended up moving in June 2004 and we all really wanted to finish it together.  Here is my end-of-course portrait:

Quite a bit better, eh?  My notes say “eyes not quite correct.”  Very true.

Now, nearly six years later, (well OK, a year ago, five years or so later I bought the stuff, but it has taken until now to get the time to do this) I decided that I might benefit from doing the workbook and exercises again.  My “seeing” skills are better, but I need more practice.  So, following the instructions more or less (they said use a 2B pencil, and I used a 4B) I did this drawing.

Once it was done, I pulled out the old workbook for comparison.  I’m happy to say I have not gotten worse!  Here are the two side-by-side:

In the new portrait, the face is a bit too narrow, but otherwise it is pretty good.  The eyes are better (and new glasses), and I think the hair is actually better, but the nose in the one from 5 years ago is much better.  The current one also needs more shading, but (in a feeble self defense) that is hard to do with a single pencil… you need the soft ones and smudging….  Anyway, I had forgotten, however, that part of the education is learning to create a ground–to shade the paper to a mid-tone, then work darker AND lighter (the eraser as a drawing tool…was that ever a lightbulb moment!)

To give you an idea of what I was looking at when I did this self-portrait, I managed to take this photo… and you can see my packed studio (and more packed design wall) in the background.  I propped the mirror on the flip-up stitch display on my Janome 6600 (note:  I took the photo in the afternoon, and the sun had shifted so the lighting on my face is different):

And after looking at the “after” portrait from 2004, I went back and darkened up the background and added a bit of shading.  Better.  Face is still too narrow, but looks better. I also appear younger than I actually am… I think that is because there isn’t enough shading, but I need to learn how to convey (sigh) sagging skin and other vagaries of age.

I’ll be curious to see what I can learn by the time I get to the “after” this time around.  Since it took a year last time, and since I don’t have two friends to keep me on track this time, don’t hold your breaths, but I will share…when I’m done.