Quilting on the Edge

Quilt Auction at County Fair Pioneer Land

Great news!  Last winter I made a single Irish Chain queen size quilt top to donate to the quilting ladies at Pioneer Land, which is a pioneer village on the site of the LaPorte County Fairgrounds.  The ladies quilted it and others over the winter, and held an auction for the quilts this past Saturday.  My donated top, now quilted beautifully,went for $1600!  That is just incredible, and wonderful, yes?      Chris

Quilts at Minnetrista

                                                                                                    

Today I visited the Quilt Show at Minnetrista in Muncie, in an earlier post I mentioned I had three pieces in the exhibit.  I'm posting pictures of the tags they made for each quilt exhibited.  The tag is a small piece of wood, on which is a photo of a small piece of the exhibited quilt, and each artist's statement about their quilts.  This method of labelling is very impressive, easy to read, and the slice of the quilt makes the labels very interesting.   The exhibit was hung in a lovely large room, and was a joy to view.   Great job!  Chris

Potato Creek Photos

Yesterday we went to Potato Creek State Park for a bike ride and picnic, about 15 miles away from out home.  Had fun with my digital camera, taking some shots that I hope will be inspirational for future quilts. Some of the photos are obvious, but others you may have to wonder about.

Bleach spray, black fabric

Today I didn't feel like sewing, so I decided to try bleach spray on black fabric.  In the first photo, I used thyme leaves as the resist, placed on black fabric, sprayed with 50/50 bleach and water solution.  The different colors were based on how long I left the bleach solution on before stopping the process.  The second photo used maple leaves as the resist, again different periods of time to allow the bleach solution to work, and different black fabrics.  I was using leftover pieces from my stash and they yielded different colors when the bleach was applied.  Now, what to do with the pieces?  Ideas anyone?  Chris

Escape

Escape is the art quilt I made for the month of May. The circles were leftover from another project, and after applying them to the background, I sewed more circles over the top with metallic gold thread.  It gives me the feeling of bubbles or molecules escaping from behind one barrier and subsequently passing over another similar  barrier.  Are we all escaping from something or someone?  Or first escaping, then conquering the very thing we were escaping.  Food for thought.  I'd welcome your thoughts on this piece. Chris

Summer Song

This is a small quilt, a little more than a foot square.  All of the fabrics in this piece were painted by me at various times in the past year.  The strips in the middle also were sunprinted with tissue paper triangles, creating the effect you see on the strips.  It reminded me of the colors of summer, and possibly even sailboats, so I chose the name Summer Song.  I see the great blue skies, sunset colors, and of course, the sun itself.

Mother Nature, Mother Earth

Nature always presents an endless source of inspiration for my art quilts.  This piece, 17 by 18 inches, began with the great background fabric, the small green triangles remind me of trees in a forest.  I printed words about mother nature onto fabric and stitched those words onto the background.

Purposely, I wanted the words to blend in and cause the viewer to look closer to really see them.  A large "thank you" in the center of the piece expresses my feelings toward the gifts of nature in our daily lives.

"Blink" and working intuitively

Finally reading "Blink", actually running through it quickly as I'm fascinated by the topic and already know how much that little slice of reaction affects my own life.  Wierdly, or not, last week I decided to make an art quilt using a favorite song as my inspiration.  Michael Buble singing "I'm Feeling Good".  I selected fabrics for my piece while listening to the song on my ipod.  Then repeatedly played the song as I cut and positioned pieces of the fabrics on my design wall for this creation. I couldn't stop my hands from working, it was going on quickly and it couldn't have been more than 6-8 minutes when I had the skeleton of my art piece laid out.  Amazing.  I didn't judge, I simply kept playing the song over and over while I began to actually sew the pieces together.   Next post:  the piece I created!

June Art Quilt

As a member of SAQA, I'm in a small group in which we each make an art quilt a month, about a foot square.  This was the piece I made for June, entitled Clearing the Decks.  It was a Friday afternoon, I was thinking about people getting ready to leave work and head home for the weekend, I imagined clearing the work off their desks and getting out of there!  This is the inspiration for this piece, just brushing all the stuff off the desk and leaving. Perhaps the one dark rectangle that isn't nearing the edge is what will be left for Monday morning.   Chris

Mothers and Sons

I'm in the middle of making a queen size bed quilt as a special favor for a friend.  Her son died about five years ago accidentally, and she brought me his shirts to make a quilt.

I'm making the Ohio Star block out of the shirts, alternating with muslin plain blocks.  This young man was a former good friend of one of my own sons in their young school days, so this incident hit me hard as well.  As I began working on it, I was compelled to create this small art quilt shown above, which I call Mothers and Sons.  The figures were photo transferred to fabric by the printer, then colored with colored pencils.  The rest of the quilt is pieced fabric.  I was able to deal with my emotions both of my friends' loss, and my own troubles with my sons through the years.  It's very special to me.   Chris