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?

Some time ago (that great whooooshing and sucking sound is time roaring past us), I blogged about having my Naiads quilt critiqued at QuiltCritique.com.  A joint venture with Lisa Chipetine and Sandra Sider (who also happen to be the current president and vice President of SAQA–Studio Art Quilt Associates), this is an online process where you send in your jpegs to Sandra two weeks before an appointed date.  She ponders and comes up with suggestions to improve your quilt.  She has that great skill of asking questions that make you think, that are open-ended and help you learn as you talk about something.

(I promise…there are pictures below!)

Well, the process was SO educational–I think listening to the critiques of the others on that evening’s session were maybe even more informative because I wasn’t invested in the outcome, but an observer–that I really wanted to have Sandra look at this piece.  So I SLAMMED to get it done in time to have her review it and still have enough time to make changes (if needed) to the top and then get the quilting done by the deadline.    It was worth every penny of the modest fee and MORE!  Best of all, Sandra had only three relatively minor suggestions:

1.  Add details to the face; I told her the entire face would be added in the stitching… I left the face just as a single piece of cloth at the top stage.  Problem solved.

2.  There was a tiny bit of dark wall showing between Joshua’s hand and the neck of the guitar–it really bugged Sandra and pulled her eye, distracting her.  This was not a good thing, so even though it was true to life, it needed editing.  So I moved his hand a bit to be more closely curved around the guitar neck.  Problem solved.

3.  The initial lines at the bottom of the dresser and the wood on the bed came together at accurate but odd-looking angles.  So I added a bedskirt and more bedding to change the lines and better lead the eye up to the focal point.  Problem solved.   Here’s the before, as I was testing out floor and chair base:

Then, with more in place (note, the purple vertical is the bedpost):

and after:

In the next post about this quilt, I’ll finish up the process with the quilting, sharing some of the background quilting and showing you the array of threads used in the entire piece.  See you soon!

Once the torso was complete, PHEW!, it was time to tackle the guitar.  With the shirt and pants a medium-light value in cool colors, I wanted the guitar to be a medium-light warm, especially since both of Joshua’s guitars are red (he has this cool idea that he will keep all his guitars and have a gallery of them, and hopefully all red!).  I didn’t have quite the right colors–I tested out a couple of options.  Here you can see me “color-blocking” early on:

I found a couple fabrics that were close, but not quite.  A hand-dyed-look batik fabric was too pale, and a batik was too contrasty.  Solution?  Pull out the textile paints and fix them!

The fabric in the upper left corner is the “before”, the piece on the upper right is the “after” that became the main body of the guitar.  The contrasty swirly lovely batik on the bottom became the lower edge of the guitar.

The neck of the guitar proved to be one of the coolest moments of the construction process.  Initially I pulled some stripey batiks, thinking to use the stripes to simulate the frets on the guitar, but I just didn’t like how they looked.   Then I found this awesome batik (another one that I wish I had yards of…), a lime green with weedy flowers (or flowery weeds) in coral and pink.   I was a bit nervous about the color choices, but the neck was SO COOL in this fabric with a single stem running up the center!

The night I got the guitar fused, I showed Joshua the progress, more than a bit nervously.  His reaction: “that is SO COOL… if I could find a guitar like that I’d BUY it!”  WOW!   It doesn’t get any better than that!  And if I win the lottery (better buy a ticket, eh?), maybe I’ll just get him one custom made.

You can also see the wall in progress.  In real life the walls are a lovely celery green, but I needed a deep dark, so I raided my stash of blues and purples.  Although the walls are shiplap siding (wood, painted), I decided to be a bit more freeform and cut wavy-edged strips.  I like the sense of motion it gives to the entire piece…like the room is rockin’ with him!

Here is the quilted guitar, with the sounding board (or whatever that stuff is on the bottom) fused on, but the strings weren’t stitched until the very last.

And of course, I have to share the back side with you.  I think the guitar is the most densely quilted part of the entire piece… about 1/16″ apart over the entire surface!  In the photo above, again you can see the colors of thread used for quilting.

Hope you’re enjoying the journey as much as I enjoyed making this piece,

Cheers, Sarah

The feature that gets the most comments on this quilt is the hair.  Would you believe it is made from batik fabrics that are trees, shrubs, thickets, flowers and whatnot! Astonishingly, I actually remembered to take in progress photos, including of the fabrics (before I used them up)!  Here is some/most of the cloth:

And here is a bit more:

Then I started creating the base of the hair.  I slipped a pattern under an applique press cloth as a guide.  I cut larger chunks to begin:

Then I cut slivers, collaging them on to the surface–notice on some how I feathered the ends:

I kept adding:

And adding, until it was Joshua’s hair, and I fused the hair to the face:

I use one of those itty-bitty 18mm rotary cutters.  For years I delayed buying one…after all, why did I need another?  I had my trusty 45mm!  OH BOY do I love the little ones.  The jumbo that some folks use, the 60mm, is like a school bus:  large, does a lot, but cumbersome.  The 45 mm I use most of the time is the all-purpose mini-van.  The 18mm is the Mazda Miata, that nifty little sports car that corners and twists and turns in tiny spaces.  It pivots on a dime… it is great for freeform cutting (not so great with a ruler though).  So I set out a chunk of pre-fused (with MistyFuse of course) fabric, and slice up curves and slivers.  Even with the layering, this hair stayed pliable–not stiff at all!

Finally, I quilted it.  The 16 threads on the surface are the ones used in his face, arms, foot (not seen in this shot) andhair:

In the first attempt picture, Joshua has a dark patch under his right eye and a too-pale bulb on his temple.  Those stitches got picked out and re-done alternating two colors of thread since of course, even with hundreds of spools and probably two dozen browns I still didn’t have enough of a smooth color range! But as you can tell, it turned out right in the end.

I always love the back side of my quilts, so I have to share this picture, also in progress:

And a bit more of the back:

I’ll have more soon…the guitar,the background, the furniture…..stay tuned!