western Washington quilt shop hop on for June in 2021

 Well, I just booked the last half of June for my post-vaccination activities by adding this year's shop hop.  I haven't done this in several years due to medical issues and now that I'm recovered enough from chronic fatigue to go do things, I am looking forward to fondling lots of fabric.  See all the details here.

For those who haven't done this before, each shop gives out a free pattern and has a kit for purchase with the theme fabric to make the block of the free pattern.  The quilt above is what you can do if you get all the patterns.  It's a lot of fun and a particularly nice way to restart some socializing if you have quilter friends who are also vaccinated so you can all carpool.  I'm going to start organizing my car full right away.  Here's the map of the participating shops and of course the home page gives the list and more details.  

Changing design in mid quilt

Thirty years ago, my husband, Jeff, went to a conference about using Tex and MetaFont to design fonts.  (This was back before DOS, even.)  As part of the conference, there was a competition to design dingbats.  Those little things that separate chunks of text in a book.  He did a nice set of 10 of them and 15 years later when I bought a thermofax machine and started doing silkscreening as part of my fiber art, I realized I could do a quilt based around his dingbats.  Synchronistically, a bolt of fabric that looked like hand made paper came into the quilt store where I worked and the fabric collecting was on.  Since his dingbats were abstracted from traditional Japanese crests, I also started collecting fabric with kanji printing in addition to text fabrics.  And so we come to the last few years when I felt I had enough fabric and started sewing.

I started with a non-traditional takeoff of the Log Cabin block which turned out to look really choppy once I got 6 blocks done and laid them all out together (see below).  Since this quilt is intended for our bedroom and I like to keep the bedroom serene and relaxing, this didn't seem like the way to go.  Unfortunately, I had already sliced up all of several of my fabrics so I put the blocks away for a while and forgot about it.

In preparation for an annual sewing retreat, I got the project out again and gave it a hard look.  I'm going to start over and do the traditional Log Cabin blocks but with the larger rectangles as the start.  Next step was to pull fabric from my stash and separate it into dark & light piles.  I went with fabrics that had a japanese influence and tried to stick with a narrow color selection.  Unfortunately, this set of fabrics has lost the whole text idea.  That's when I realized I needed to go even further with the personal aspect of the design and add text to the lighter fabrics.  I brainstormed some ideas of what type of text and again, brought the personal relevance idea to bear.  What 20 quotes from influential books would we each like to add to the fabrics?  So that's where we are.  Making lists of books that have had a big influence on us and then picking out the text we want to represent that book.

I'm expecting these ideas to evolve further as I progress in making the 42 blocks that will be needed for the queen size quilt.  And I'll post about what I do and how it goes as I babystep my way to the final quilt.  So far, my book list includes The Hobbit (read to my 4th grade class by the teacher in 15 minute chunks and the book that started me reading science fiction), Leaves of Grass, a gift from a friend who said the part about the charge of the soul reminded him of me, Citizen of the Galaxy by Heinlein,  and Lord of the Rings.  That takes me up through the end of High School.  I suspect The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightment will be there too as well as Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching.

I mention the details of the book list because this is the kind of fun that book people enjoy:  What would be your 20 books?

Quick bolster cover with novelty sushi cats fabric

Yes, indeed, I said sushi cats fabric.  I've been ruminating about my direction as an artist while reorganizing my home studio.  So, I 've been finishing up some easy projects while letting my brain work on what to do next.

Hence, this quick bolster cover using the novelty fabric.  (Yes, I like novelty fabric.  Some of you will remember the Betty Boop motorcycle quilt I posted about here. )  The pillow is supposed to be 9" in diameter and 20" long.  I think they measured after it was wrapped and compressed a bit.

I am particularly amused by the goldfish being held in the chopsticks here in the closeup shot.

After I took the pillow out of the wrapper, I measured its circumference as 31. The piece of cat fabric I had was 20 inches wide and 40 some long so I cut it to 32 inches long on a pattern break so the ends matched up.  Then I cut a 9.5" circle out of the trim fabric for the closed end and a 12" wide strip for the open end.  I sewed the strip on the end and trimmed to it was the same length as the cat fabric.   Next, I sewed it into a tube and hemmed the trim end.  Then I put the circle in the other end, using lots of pins to spread the gathers evenly.  And made a tie out of the scrap cat fabric.  Total time, about an hour and a half.  If I were to do it again, I would make the trim on the open end a couple of inches wider so the tied part wasn't so scrunched and the circle would be 10" in diameter.  This lovely bolster now sits on our brown leather couch and brings me a bit of joy every time I sit next to it.

Shows - entry tracking system

I'm being swamped with all the details of selling my house, and moving us to a new place, so my plans to blog about my perfect studio which will have to be dismantled are being chopped into smaller bits. Today, I'm going to talk about how I track shows I want to enter and make sure I don't miss the deadlines. My daughter, who has worked as a business manager/accountant for some artists in the Bellingham area, helped me set up the system and I have to say, it is working wonderfully for me. This year, one of my goals is to apply to at least one show a month, and with this system, I am doing well at organizing the show info, the dates and tracking how I'm doing with them.


Here's my little box, next to my computer, surrounded by the clutter on my desk. I have a three bin wall holder that I will put up in the new place, but this works for now. So, what's the magic? I use erasable labels on the file folders, that's the first step. When I hear about a show I'm interested in, I print out the prospectus, write the name of the show and the date I have to do something by on the label. Note: if the deadline is a receive by date, the date I write down is a week earlier so I'm taking action in time for it to get there. Then I put it in the box in chronological order. Usually, I'll write a little note on the first page of the prospectus saying which pieces I'm thinking of submitting. If I'm going to do a piece just for the show, I put a to-do item in my studio grasscatcher notebook (visible in the foreground on the desk). Then, once a week or so, I look at the next couple of weeks to see what deadlines are coming up, and I mentally plan out what I'm submitting. Once I hear back from the show, assuming I've been accepted, I erase the date on the file folder and put the ship date on it, then refile it in the box in the right place for the new date.

I'm not yet entered in so many things that I need a system to track which pieces are going where, but that's the next step. Right now, I use my inventory sheet, the long printed pages sticking up from the file folder box. It's a word document with a table, done as 8.5 x 14 size paper in landscape mode, with columns for Title, Date finished, ID#, Type of work, medium (I'm doing both paper and fabric nowadays), Height, Width, Price, Shows, Date photographed, and date posted to my webpage. For now, scanning down the Shows column is sufficient to make sure I don't double enter something. I pencil in a name on my hard copy when I submit it and do it in ink when a piece is accepted.

This seems so simple now that I'm explaining it, but it's such a delight to feel completely on top of all of this. And it takes only a couple of minutes of my time to add a show to my entry list. I share this because it's made such a difference for me and I hope it can help some others get on top of the whole show submission cycle.

Wine, women and quilting; Part II

Here are the promised pictures of some of the work I did while at the quilting retreat in Langley. I missed getting them up yesterday due to spending the day taking the cat to the vet. (Small digression: Cat seems better even though the vet can't figure out which mild stomach problem is causing his vomiting without several hundred dollars more in tests. I figure since he stops vomiting when we give him soft food, that's what we'll do. ) Mostly I got part way on several pieces. The only finished thing I did was a copy of my favorite shirt, and sorry, no photo of it for now.

The first piece (about 18 x 24") started as a class exercise in a class taught by Esterita Austin. I learned a lot about highlights and shadows, and using paint to make the appliqued pieces look more 3D. That would be the rocks and the tree. On retreat, I added the heron, and did some texturing using rubbing plates & stamps with the fabric dye crayons I like. I wanted to get more a visual difference between the water and sky parts of the piece. I'm going to add some more emphasis on the heron (not to mention legs), so the level of detail on the rocks isn't so different, and some further elements in the sky. Then, I'll decide on the quilting. I like how it's shaping up.




Next, I decided that I liked Gaia's Dancer so much that I wanted to work further with that fabric and theme. This piece is the result - I have more to do in adding foreground creatures. In one of my online groups, we're going to be doing an exhibit with a theme of The Spirit of Nature and I'm going to try out some ideas I have for that on this piece. This is also about 16 x 24 in size. For an idea of relative sizes, the earth globe is about 3.5 inches in diameter.



Then I did some smaller pieces - these are 6 x 9, or about that.

A couple of darker background Tiny Dancers, where I experimented with using stencils as rubbing plates. I think the dragon in the one pn the left worked well.


And 2 with a lighter background. I like the way the dancers are almost transparent, letting the pattern of the background fabric show through somewhat. I like the composition on the right more.




And then last, a piece using some leftover fused fabric from a purse that I made. I grew to love armadillos when I was living in Austin, so I had to buy the armadillo fabric when I saw it. I didn't want to let any of them languish in the dark, so here a few are in a small piece.



I'm heading off for a reunion weekend and the Indy 500 race, leaving tomorrow. I'll be working further with all of these after I get back. I hope you also have a good holiday weekend!

Backyard Bushtits #1 finally finished

I've obviously been trying to go faster than my body wants, as I'm struggling with a cold in addition to the surgery recovery so it's taken me quite some time to finish up Backyard Bushtits #1. BUT, it's done, finished, even ready to hang and it will be put on my etsy store sometime next week.

I learned a lot from doing this work in a series and I'll post later about the rest of the pieces as they finish up. Right now there are 4 of them. I've put the word "LESSON" in caps throughout my post for the things I've learned.

Here's the photo I started with. The bushtits travel in large flocks, up to a couple of dozen little birds, and they tumble across backyards here in western washington. (Probably elsewhere, but I'm not motivated enough right now to go look up their range map. I leave it as an exercise for the reader.) I really liked the way the four of them looked like a puppy pile so I snapped the photo through the greenhouse window in my kitchen and played with it in adobe until I had it cropped to a pleasing composition. LESSON #1: my technique of cutting up photos and doing a textile collage with them works better when I don't start with a good composition. It's much harder to create one that's different from the photo when I like the photo just fine to start with.




Here's the top without much done to it. I was not happy with it, and did a little in the way of paintstiks and stamps to try and rescue it with varying the colors and tones a bit. LESSON #2: remember the one rule (vary all intervals) from the beginning. The photo has more contrast and variation than the fabric printed version of the photo and I ended up having to add that back in. When it prints on the fabric and loses all the variation in color/tone that it had to start with, maybe it's time to switch to another photo or idea. It's not like I have a shortage of them, anyway....





Then I did more surface design work on it, and quilted it lightly, then put it on stretcher bars. I'm okay with how it looks, altho the composition is still more static than I like. LESSON #3: Get the composition right to begin with, improv work can go on top of a good composition but can't correct one I don't like to start with. LESSON #4: don't put the batting all the way out to the edge of the fabric for stretcher bars. I don't like the bulk on the sides and corners when I wrap the fabric around with the batting going all the way to the edges. We'll see if I can get this one better on #2 which is now in the quilting phase and should be finished before Monday.



I'll just point out that the yellow added to the birds shows up much stronger in the photo than it does in person. I'll have to play with the photography before I list this piece on my etsy store. I'm not entirely sure it's fixable as part of the problem is the reflective quality of the silk I printed the photo on. The other possibility is that the watercolor pencils I used reflect differently enough that they will always pop out visually in a photo. We'll have to see...

Gaia's Dance - first art of 2009

I finished a piece that's been in the works for over a year. Finally. And I'm really happy with the results. I'm submitting it to the Sacred Threads show but won't hear if it's been accepted or not until the end of March. Here's the full size photo of the piece.




And here's a detail shot of the quilting. I did a post earlier of the trial piece for the quilting so some of this should look familiar to anyone who saw that post.


For those who are interested in the technical details, the piece is 38" wide and 47" high. The little dancing people are cut from several different fabrics and were individually hand cut (hence the long elapsed time as after cutting them all out, I needed to take a break). The globe and the lotus blossoms were printed on silk using my epson cx3810 printer.

I'm really pretty happy with it and I'm looking forward to applying some of the things I learned to future pieces.

Winter Holiday 2008 & wool batting quilt

We are having a wonderful visit with our daughter Allie who is with us for Christmas. The snowfall just before Christmas was incredible, as seen in the photo below. Every branch of every tree had 2-3 inches of snow on it. If you click on the photo, you should be able to see amazing detail. Fortunately, the roads cleared by Christmas Eve so Allie could drive down from Bellingham after digging the car out of a snow bank.




For her present this year, I made a lap quilt with wool batting. This is the first time I've used a wool batting so of course, I asked on the quiltart list for advice on using it. I got the usual expert advice and proceeded to make what appears to be a quite cozy quilt. Allie is sensitive to the cold, and Bellingham gets colder winters than we do here in Bellevue, so I thought a nice wool lap quilt to cuddle up under would be just the thing. I also had bought the Betty Boop on motorcycles fabric intending to make something cute for her. I decided to pick up the black and white check motif from the Boops and used an asymetrical log cabin style block. I think the Boop side came out nice.





For the back, I had intended to run to the quilt store and buy some stylish retro black and chartreuse fabric as she loves those colors. The snow kept me from going shopping so I had to fall back on my stash. Looking at the black and white cat fabric (visible in the closeup photo),





I decided to use the Burch cats, and the green polka dot fabric that went with it. I wanted something quick as I was running out of time and didn't want a complicated quilt. The big strips of fabric (5.5" wide) worked well and gave me a good idea for some quick quilting.



I didn't quite get the quilting finished before she arrived, so I wrapped it up, put it under the tree, and included a note promising to finish Christmas Day while we did our traditional lounge around & watch videos marathon. I got it finished by dinner time and she slept with it last night. A great finish to a wonderful day.

Here's hoping your winter holiday was as satisfying!

Quilt Labels and clipart

I want to first off apologize for not blogging for so long. I have a good reason - I've been recovering from a kidney infection and haven't been up to much more than watching an excessive number of DVDs of television shows (Bones, StarGate, Nero Wolfe). I seem to be better now, so I'm back...

I'm almost a month late in shipping Quantum Lake off for its exhibit. The holdup was getting the label done and printed. I got the label(s) done today so I'm sharing my process as I've always gotten good comments about how nice my labels are. If you want to see a picture of Quantum Lake, I posted one on June 9 here on my blog.

I do my labels in Word using ClickArt from Broderbund to create the art around the label. Here's the 2 different labels I came up with for Quantum Lake so you can see what the end product is before I start talking about the details of the process. The backing fabric is various blue stars, so one version of the label is done on light blue fabric with stars around the text.





Quantum Lake itself has a combination of nature photos printed on fabric and a batik fabric that has spirals on it. So the second label echoes those design elements.



How did I create them? It's actually quite easy if you have some clipart borders available. The key thing to remember is that I create the text first in a Word document. Then I add the art that goes around it. I've never been able to edit the text once I add the art, so it's important to get the text done first. I often use a sans serif font because that's easier to read once it's been printed on fabric. I center the text, have the top line down about 2 inches from the top of the document so as to leave room for the surrounding border, and I generally size it at 18 or 20 for the font size. Once I've typed in the label text, I save the document so I can delete any art I add and get back to the basic text.

Next, I browse my clipart disk. Once I select a border or other art that I want to use, I insert the art by clicking on Insert on the top menu bar. I select Picture, and From File, then click on the image I want. (Side note: I got ClickArt 125,000 as a Christmas present years ago and have never felt the need to upgrade. There are several versions reviewed on Amazon and available for quite reasonable prices. ) Once I've inserted the art, I click on it and select Format, then select Picture. The options I always use are Behind Text, and Center because I center my text. Invariably, the art is the wrong size, so at this point I click on the lower right corner and drag it the right size. Then I reposition it if needed. If I like the result, I save the file and I'm done. Otherwise, I delete the added art and go look for something I like better.

This time, I did 2 versions and I'm still deciding which will actually go out on the quilt. Total time today to create the 2 label files, fuse the fabric to wonderunder and print, then blog about it: 2 hours 45 minutes.

Setting up the studio cutting table

Kim L. on the quiltart list asked for suggestions/recommendations for a cutting table. For quilters, this is a big deal. We need a space to cut the fabric into little pieces, and then a space to sew all the little pieces together again in a different way. Also a space to iron the resulting fabric. And of course, a place to store the fabric that we're going to cut up someday. I'm a fan of Alton Brown (on the foodnetwork, if you're not familiar with him) so I thought I'd share a picture of my new multitasking solution for these things.


I have 3 wire basket holders (17" wide, 22" deep and 7 runners high which is about 30", I think). This makes a nice size desk surface on which I've put The Big Board ironing board. It's meant to be put on a regular ironing board but I found that a tad unstable and awkward for my left handedness. Not to mention I had to have a separate bit of floor space for it. I had a flash of brilliance and realized it fit perfectly on top of the wire basket ensemble so I moved it there. Then I noticed that my big cutting board could go on top of the wire baskets too, if I didn't mind a bit of overhang at the back. Since I rarely cut the full width of fabric, I generally don't need the full cutting surface so that worked too. So my cutting board can slide under the Big Board and I pull it out when it's needed. Then I realized I was just one step away from having a giant flippable board with a cutting surface on one side, and an ironing surface on the other. I've always liked the smaller version of that and used it when taking classes so I've asked my son James to cut some plywood for me and we'll be fixing that up after we finish our sailing class this next week. I have this setup at right angles to my sewing table so I just pivot and depending on what I'm doing I can iron, cut, fuse or try various layouts, all on the same work surface. So far, it's also had the excellent side benefit of forcing me to keep the surface cleared off so I can get other work done. Since I have a problem with not putting things away when I'm in a creative flow, this has been a benefit.

Quantum Lake: newest completed fiber art

Having mentioned this piece, Quantum Lake, in another post, I now feel obligated to post about it. Even though I'm not thrilled with the photo I've got, I'm posting it because I've been busy with other stuff for the last month and haven't gotten to taking a new one. I took the photos I used in this piece and pushed some artistic limits for myself in improvisational cutting when it came time to put the pieces together. It's a new direction for me and I'm pretty happy with how it came out.



Part of the motivation for posting this piece is that I wanted to talk about another personal victory that I experienced on Saturday. During my morning walk at the greenbelt referred to by Quantum Lake, I met a nature photographer who does mostly birds. In order to continue in the new direction, I need more detailed shots of birds to use. So, I got my nerve up and asked him if he was interested in collaborating. I gave him my webpage address and went home to await his response. Not only did he agree to let me use his photos, but he was very complimentary about my work.

Practice piece for FM quilting

I have a couple of pieces in the works, one of which has already been accepted into a show and I'll post about that later. I'm still working on my larger piece, finishing the quilting with hopes of submitting it to Houston later this week. Last night, I did some practice stitching using spirals and 2 different types of thread. I wanted to use 3 different threads, but the Signature polyester, size 30, kept breaking even with the size 100 needle. The picture below shows the different background fabrics with the sulky variegated rayon on the left, and the Signature variegated cotton on the right. (The smaller spirals on the turquoise fabric on the top are different Signature cotton that I decided not to use because it was too red.)



I'll have to work on getting the spirals smaller which is not surprising. Due to my medical issues, I haven't done serious FM quilting in several years so there's lots of rust on these skills. But another couple of practice runs, and I'll be ready to step up the real piece. I'm still trying to decide which thread to go with when I start the quilting on the piece today. The rayon is prettier, but I don't want the background quilting to pop out too much as there's already some quilting elements on the quilt. And those elements are done using rayon so there's one part that says match the thread and the other side that says, use the less obtrusive thread to highlight the other figures. Decisions, decisions...