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.

Deborah Boschert, one of my Frayed Edges mini-group, is also part of a wonderful project called Twelve  x 12.  They have a blog here, and a website here, and even better…..well, not sure if I can tell you about it yet but there is something really cool coming in their future!   So hold on to that thought.  Anyway, Deborah now lives (sob we miss her) near Dallas, and the Dallas Quilt Guild is hosting a 12 x 12 challenge.  The rules:  anything goes as long as it is 12 by 12 inches.  Deborah invited us to participate and send quilts to hand in the show this March.  Well…..

I was totally, utterly blocked.  I had NOT A CLUE.  Not a whiff of an idea.  Inside of brain darker than a cave in a coalmine with no lights.  Nada.  Nicht.  Zip.  Zilch.  Then I had to walk the dog.  This dog (note…there are fifteen photos in this post, and all are clickable for a larger view):

Isn’t he CUTE?  Even from the hind view with curly little tail and dog butt, he is CUTE.  Well, the good news is that the quilt is NOT of his hind end.  I figured the cuteness of a dog’s butt is not necessarily appreciated by all, but how could ANYONE not love a pug mug?   So, I scoured through the umpteen thousand (literally) photos on my hard drive, found the one above, and cropped the photo:

Then I decided to use value as my plan of attack for fusing up this puppy.  At first I selected beige, tan, charcoal, and went YUCK.  I wanna play with color.  Back in the fused fabric stash they went.  Out came the colored fused stash.  I started with medium values…some lovely turquoises.  Then lights, deep darks, and some transitional values.  Not suprisingly, the light lights were yellows, the deep darks were navy and purple.

To get ready, I enlarged the photo to 12 inches on my computer, got out the large tracing paper, and traced his outlines.  This tracing was my pattern guide in cutting the pieces of fabric for his sweet face.  Here is the first bits:

Then a bit more work–you can see the tracing in the top left, the laptop with the cropped photo for reference, and the scattered bits of pre-fused fabrics tossed about (and note the yellow mug…I LOVE the fiesta ware!):

Here’s a close-up of the pug at this stage:

Then even more; I have added the background, but notice the face is kinda upright, not that cute cocked head, the quizzical look (note the green fiestaware mug):

Edges trimmed, but face is still upright…wrong!

So after uttering a few cuss words at having not noticed I was trimming him with his head in the wrong position, I sliced things off and fused up some more background–and yes, there is an “issue” with the shape of his head on the left, but I knew that would be cropped off so I ignored it:

This shows ‘Widgeon quilted (tho not the background…more on that in a sec):

and a close-up:

Here’s what it looks like from the back:

Next, I trimmed away the “middle-backing” and the wool batt I was using from under the turquoise background:

I then added cotton batting and the “real” backing and quilted the background, plus some of the major creases in his pug mug:

Finally, I had thought I would face the edges.  I used an old rust colored fabric on the back, and for the facings, and realized it looked MUCH better than the turned/faced edge.  So I found a better quality hand-dyed and made narrow bias bindings:

Last but not least…two close-ups.

Hope you liked the journey through the process. The quilt started out with a working title of “You want me to sit STILL?” (as in sit still so I can take a picture of you!), but that evolved into either “Walkies?  Puhleeze walkies!” or “Cookie???? PLEEEZE cookie!”  Eli (the dog is really his) and I both liked the Cookie version better, so that’s the title!

I absolutely ADORE this little 12 x 12 inch quilt… I think I did OK, because each time my sons see the quilt they start grinning, too!  Of course, we are biased and utterly in love with the little dog-beast!

OK…for the final installment of my Maine Quilts 2009 review, here are some quilts that I just thoroughly enjoyed.  I wish I had had enough time to snap a close-up of the labels to give proper credit to all the quilters!  Enjoy this last romp.  Next, I’ll give you some close-ups of the quilted version of Be Inspired…stay tuned!

Coastal Quilters (my local chapter) didn’t have as many quilts this year, but what we did have was wonderful…Mathea’s quilt of her husband and son was in an earlier post, and here is Louisa Enright’s glorious NY Beauty…she picked and chose from various patterns, drafted her own blocks, and designed the whole shebang…glorious!

The Coastal Quilters also had another fun, 10×10 inch Grab Bag challenge…you had to use EVERYthing (at least a little bit) of everything in your bag.  I suggested we also add a strip to show what we got so folks could understand where each of us began and where we ended up:

Another chapter, the Crazy Quilters, had a tea cozy challenge…think I can convince CQ to do that one year?

then, there are quilts I just plain liked.  One of the judges liked this one, too….and (oddly?) it had no regular ribbon, but DID receive (a well-deserved, I think) Judges’ Choice ribbon:

A Hawaiian style quilt that I loved:

And some fun other ones:

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!

Last year, my local quilting group, the Coastal Quilters, did their first ever challenge, inspired by the 5 Artists, 5 Ways project the Frayed Edges did (you can see it here and here).  Last year’s challenge, Ropes and Buoys, was so successful, we all decided to do it again.  Program chair Barb Melchiskey and co. decided on a Grab Bag challenge.

Here’s a teaser:

The rules:

• Put some stuff into a brown lunch bag.
• Turn in.
• Collect a different bag.
• Make something from it.
• Finished size 10 x 10 inches.
• Must use some of EVERYthing in the bag, with a recognizable bit of the largest item.

Initially, folks were then going to return the finished quilt to the person who donated the bag.  So, having done this and realizing that I get possessive, I opted out.   Then Leigh Smith (not a relative) asked if I would like to do a swap, as she had not been at the meeting.  Then Mathea wanted to join, so we did a 3-way swap.

In her defense, Mathea didn’t know the rules when she filled her clear baggie.  When she dropped it off at my house (I was the swapper person for  our on-the-side group), I took one look and KNEW I couldn’t do that to Leigh (a beginning quilter).  Here is what Mathea put in the bag:

SHRIEK!   At best, any 3 fabrics went together.   I cried.  I swore.  I said I wouldn’t do it.  Then I really started looking at it.  I tried to use the kimono fabric as the focus, but it wasn’t working.  So the next dominant piece was the red…. but parts were cut off, so I fussy cut down the long center.

I also happened to be having a rare DVD-fest, watching The Tudors (rented from the local video store…we don’t get Showtime…it’s gonna be a LONG year until it is available on DVD!).  Anyway, the influence is clear, especially when you get to the finished piece.  Here is fused stage:

Then after the quilting, including lots of sating stitching and blanket stitching:

This is what the back looked like… I painted the embroidery floss black, and pressed it dry using the white cloth.  Then used the white INSIDE the piece while I quilted.

After quilting I beaded, then added a false back.  The beading makes me think of the costumes in the Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn episodes I was watching, so I named it something like “Quilting with Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.”  Nothing like short and pithy.  Ahem.  Here’s the false back showing the assorted fabrics (and when I get them added, the various embellishing items),

and, drum roll, the front:

Finally, another detail shot of the center, where I “hid” all sorts of little difficult to use bits.  Hope you like it… I sure do!: