Excellence in Quilts Exhibit

Trigger warning, I’m going to brag on myself. Recently I was gobsmacked to have a work juried into the Fiber Art Network’s Excellence in Quilts show, now at the Virginia Quilt Museum in Harrisonburg, Virginia. “Shattered” is one of 22 works in the show, and it shares wall space with work by many premier art quilters.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Here are seven of the other quilts in the show. You can see all the quilts in FAN’s fall/winter magazine issue or at the museum. I took the pictures below from FAN’s Instagram feed.

Joan Schulze “Fata Morgana #4”

“Winter Shadows” Sara Sharp

Linda Colsh “A Thousand Cuts”

Fuzzy Mall “Aleef Mehdi”

Jean Howard “Monuments”

Mary Pal “A World of Difference”

Hyunjoo Cho “Winter”

My impression is the jurors (Judith Content and Alice Beasley) were aiming for a broad representation of styles and subject matter. If that is so, they succeeded.

Finally, in case you wondered what my work looks like,

“Shattered” 22 inches wide by 38.5 inches high

I’m linking to Off The Wall Fridays.

Fix It Or Forget It

As I’ve mentioned before, I am going through my oeuvre to decide what to keep and what to toss. Yes, I throw out quilts, especially small ones that have brought me no joy. Others I look at with an eye to fixing them up.

Here are some examples of tops that I had to decide whether to finish.

I kluged the above together from many surface design experiments, and found it just didn’t work. I was ready to toss it, but then I looked at the back side.

What painterly effects, and the raw seam edges add so much texture. So, it went into the repurposing pile. Maybe I’ll stencil over parts.

The center is a leftover from a modern quilting class. I added some borders. I might quilt it and add a hot pink binding. It’s in the maybe I’ll quilt it pile.

“Flag Day” was made from fabrics created during my month of lines. It hung quilted but not bound in my closet for close to a year. Then I realized that once you name a work you can’t throw it out, so I sewed on binding.

As yet unnamed, this work is the offspring of two earlier works. I had sewed together the leftovers from my staircase top. I decided to expand it with leftover fabric I created from a photo. The triangles are appliqued on. I’m not masochistic enough to piece them into an already created design. I plan to quilt this one, eventually.

Finally, I had thrown out the piece below, when I realized I could mess it up with gesso and paint, guilt free.

I made this at the height of my improv big stitch phase. I tried to give it focus with the circles, but there’s just too much going on. I just started painting over sections with gesso tinted with acrylic paint.

Initial paint over

Final. I could do more to it, but the gesso and paint are getting thick and I melded the sections together better than they were. Still don’t know if it’s a keeper.

I realize that when looking at my work, as Jamie Wyeth said in a 2014 interview, “All the inadequacies jump out at me. … I don’t really finish a picture but it gets to the point of diminishing returns, and I just say, enough.” However, sometimes saying enough means saying goodbye cruel world.

I’m linking to Off The Wall Fridays.

Calendar Girl

Because they are all about analogous color palettes I named my recent quartet of small log cabin quilts March, April, August, and October. I then realized I have a penchant for months and seasons of the year as my themes. I’ve called previous work Winter Blues, High Summer, Dark and Deep December, Hazy Shade of Winter, and Dreaming of Spring. Then, there’s a quartet of seasonal table runners, plus my salt marsh four season series.

Here are the four log cabins. All feature some sort of medallion center. “October” and “April” are quilted. The first three are roughly 25 inches square, while the fourth is about 35 inches square.

“October”

“April”

“August”

“March”

I began the log cabins after I saw modern fabric scrappy log cabins on Instagram, though I used a different style of fabrics (i.e., eclectic) and more or less squared off blocks. The analogous color palette certainly came from that maker.

My apologies to the maker. I can’t find this post again and I inadvertently omitted the maker’s name from my screenshot.

Here’s a review of other seasonal quilts I’ve made.

“Dreaming of Spring”

“Winter’s Closing In”

“Tidal Marsh in Spring”

“Winter Blues”

“High Summer”

“Dark and Deep December”

And there are many others, but I think the above pieces give you a sense of the various ways I’ve interpreted the changing seasons.

I’m linking to Off The Wall Fridays.

Meditative, Schmediative

For some years crafters and quilters have extolled the virtues of slow hand stitching. They say it’s a soothing meditative process that will relax you, make you appreciate the process, and be mentally restorative. The implication is it will make you a better person.

My latest attempt to reach such a zen-like state was sparked by a free online course called Stitch Camp taught by Gwen Hedley on textileartist.org. We began by making random marks on two pieces of white/off white cotton with two contrasting colors.

Initial painted fabrics

Gwen used twigs to apply paint. My first deviation was to skip the twigs as the ground was snow covered. We were to use diluted acrylic paint. My second deviation – I used textile paint that I watered down too much and it made blobs. We were to mark one piece of cotton heavily and the other one lightly, then cut up the cotton however we liked, rearrange the pieces in a way that connected the marks, and hand stitch the pieces together. My third deviation (do you see a pattern?) was to zigzag my pieces by machine and to make two rearranged pieces from them. They were still ugly.

Pieces cut up and arranged into one.

Two starting pieces with some bits left off

Then, we were to use hand stitches to emphasize the connections between the sewn together pieces. After I backed the pieces with fusible fleece, I began to do elementary stitching in red, navy and off white threads. After what seemed like days, I had stitched two long lines, done seed stitching, running and back stitches, and loose satin stitches. I added small bits of fused fabric. (Gwen did small hand sewn applique additions. Deviation four.) The awful looking piece still looked awful, and the only thing I was meditating on was a toss to the waste basket.

Appliqued and embroidered

I figured the piece would become less ugly only if I embroidered over every speck of the surface. That wasn’t going to happen. Every stitch I made annoyed me more as one of my fabrics had a very tight weave that was hard to pull the needle through. The process didn’t make me calmer as Gwen (who stressed this was about process not product) had confidently said I’d feel. I saw many ways the ugliness could be eased, but none involved thread.

Out came the paints and Posca markers. I painted two layers of paint over the piece I had embroidered to help the contrasting colors meld more. I got creative with markers on the unstitched piece and found that process calming.

Painted over and still ugly, but my eye doesn’t skitter everywhere as much

No hand stitching, all fused applique and Posca pens. I think my pen strokes reference many embroidery stitches.

It’s not that I don’t get the tactile pleasure of hand stitching. I enjoyed embroidering my felted wool squares because the colors were bright and wool felt so good to sew. Lots of small pieces to embroider are a better fit with my limited hand stitch attention span. I could finish one square in 15 minutes. However, when my starting point is ugly and stitching is a struggle I am not going to persevere with a project that seems endless. I don’t think my path to process nirvana is hand stitching. The fault is in me, not the instructor. In fact, I could happily fall asleep to Gwen’s soothing voice. I guess Stitch Camp did have some meditative qualities for me.

I’m linking to Off The Wall Friday.