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Archive for the ‘Quilting Organizations’ Category

This and That

Monday, August 4th, 2008

Today, I attended my first Columbia Stitchery Guild Board meeting. I am now the president elect. I realized today that one of my big jobs this year is to cement some relationships with worker bees who will serve on the board when I am president. Reva and I drove together; she will be doing the newsletter, with another person. It is a very nice group of women. We had a nice lunch prepared by the old board.

I arrived home to find the new cabinets in the bathroom almost finished. They are so gorgeous. It was too dark to take a photo by the time our incredible cabinet maker left for the day. In the tall cabinet in the bathroom, there is a large door, two small drawers and another large door on the bottom. He cut these from the rift sawn white oak so that the grain matches just perfectly as you scan down the piece. It is really a work of art.

One of my Coupeville classmates sent this photo of the class, today. We had the maintenance guy take the photo. I think it is a great photo of all of us.

From the left, Judy, Nita (our fabulous class assistant) Teresa, Moi, Akemi, Patricia and Elaine. I can’t believe Judy was wearing a plain white t-shirt because most days, she wore one of her fabulous Complexitees.

My rusting experiment of the indigo scarf is really looking good. I am not sure how long I need to leave it. It is so hot and dry that I have to keep pouring water over it. My rusting source said not to put plastic on it because you want to have oxygen available to create rust.

Tomorrow, I have to clean up my studio, again!! I have started working on a design for my 3-D fabric teapot for a High Fiber Diet Challenge. I do not work in 3D very often so this will be a real challenge for me.

Fini!

Wednesday, March 12th, 2008

I have finished my final project for Lizzie’s class. Now, I have to write my own critique based on the design principles that we learned. I used red linen for the red lines and the binding. This is such a happy quilt. I love it. For these complex collages, I like to do a simple grid quilting. Here it is. If the binding looks a little wonky, it is because it is not hand stitched on the back – only pinned.

kimonocollagefinal.jpg

Here is a close-up. You can see how I did the quilting. I had some thread that was variegated red, orange and blue. It was perfect.

kimonocollagefinaldetail.jpg

I didn’t make it to WW’s today because I had the Columbia Stitchery Guild meeting. I don’t think I lost weight, anyway.

Jean Cacicedo was very entertaining. She talked about good design with some props and a slide show. She is a one-of-a-kind clothing designer. Her coats made from felted wool are to die for!!

Tomorrow I must get organized to leave home for a few days. The STASH group is going on their annual retreat to the Oregon Coast. Whoopee!!

B is For Binding

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

I don’t usually put bindings on my quilts. Abstract paintings don’t have bindings and since that is the look I am going for, I usually do an envelope finish, a facing, or a satin stitched edge. The current quilt was going to be compromised if I took too much off the edge to do a facing so I have decided to do a fused binding, using matching fabric for each section. After all the bindings are fused I will do some stitching to make them look more a part of the design.

constructionbinding.jpg

When I was looking at photos of the quilt tonight, I decided that I need to trim away some of the edges. I had too much of the magenta in the upper left hand side of the quilt so I will cut away some and shorten the lime green. I always find that looking at a quilt on the computer screen helps me to see how I need to work on the scale of elements.

Tonight, Terry and I went to our High Fiber Diet meeting. We received the sad news that we will not have our annual show at the Japanese Garden this year. This was the major activity for this group so it will be interesting to see where we go from here.

Thanks to Karoda, I found the Fiber Artists for Obama group. If you are interested, go to the Obama for President site and click on Join a Group. If you put fiber artists in the search box, you will find the group. There are currently 37 members. Come and be an Obama Mama with me.

Evolution of the Art Quilt

Sunday, October 21st, 2007

This was the theme of the Contemporary QuiltArt Symposium. I thought I would share some of my thoughts on the delightful day.

Our first speaker was Robert Shaw who wrote “The Art Quilt” and the recently published Art Quilts: A Celebration.” He started by telling us that he doesn’t like the term Art Quilter or Art Quilt. When asked later, what we should call ourselves, he recommended calling ourselves artists who use fabric/textiles/quilts as our medium. I have started doing this because I find it unwieldy to try to get unknowing folks off the idea of a bed quilt that their grandmother once made them.

I digress! Robert gave us a very interesting slide show of the evolution of “art quilting.” He gave us examples of artists like Rauchenberg, Warhol and Cristo who worked with fabric. Here is the Rauchenberg piece. He reportedly ran out of materials and took the quilt and the sheets off his bed and created this piece.

He also gave examples of work by Albers, Ellsworth Kelly and Rothko which used a grid or geometric design, reminiscent of traditional quilts.

He mentioned some of the early quilters who were pushing the envelope: Joan Lintault, Therese May and Molly Upton. Of course, Nancy Crow was mentioned and he said that he had just seen her show of new work and that she is “moving voraciously forward like a shark!” Loved that comment.

Where are we going in the future? Digital, baby, digital! He specifically mentioned the new work of Michael James and the collaborative team of Gayle Fraas and Duncan Slade.

Next, we heard from Barbara Lee Smith who made the transition from city girl in Chicago to the island coast of Washington where she has learned to love and embrace “water filled air.” I was not familiar with her work. She paints lutradur which she then cuts and fuses into beautiful landscapes. She was influenced by a class that she took with Constance Howard. She does not consider herself to be a quilter. She uses no batting. She stitches her pieces from the back, using an industrial Juki. My favorite quote from her was a comment by Helen Frankenthaler, who said (in a strong NY accent) “Don’t make it gorgeous, make it good!”

After lunch, we heard from Cynthia Corbin, whose work I love. It was so much fun to see her slide show and watch how her work changed and morphed over the years. Cynthia showed us how she took the bad work and made it work — sometimes cutting it up and reassembling and sometimes, just painting or using oil sticks to change the surface. Like Ann Johnston, she now uses a long arm quilting machine. She does meticulous and heavy quilting as she found that her body could not take shoving a large quilt through a small machine.

Last on the program for Mary and I was the panel discussion with Erika Carter, Jeannette DeNicolis Meyer and Jill Nordfors Clark. They each gave a 10 minute synopsis of the evolution in their work. Again, it was fascinating to see their slides and to hear these women describe how and why their artistic endeavors changed over time. The most interesting part of the panel discussion was learning or understanding how they worked through the fallow times or of how they made leaps and changes in their work. Erika started with commercial fabrics and saw no need to use hand-dyes when others started down that path. She eventually went the route of discharging and painting fabric.

One theme of the artists who spoke to us was that at some point they stopped taking workshops and even attending shows of quilted art as they did not want to be influenced by the work of others. Finding your authentic voice as an artist requires getting in to the studio and doing the work.

Contemporary Quiltart Symposium

Friday, October 19th, 2007

I am in Tacoma, WA for the 2oth anniversary celebration of the Washington Contemporary Quiltart Association. They are putting on a symposium with some pretty great speakers, tomorrow. Tonight there was a delicious banquet and a retrospective of their evolution as an art quilt organization, given by 4 former president. It was very interesting and comforting to hear that they have been fraught with many of the same problems that other organizations come up against. I am impressed at how far they have evolved and the shows they have mounted.

We arrived in a driving rain storm around lunch time. The we being Mary Maxwell, my companion and roommate for the trip. Mary belongs to Columbia Stitchery Guild and is a new friend. We have discovered that we have a lot in common. Here she is posing with this guy we found standing out in the rain.

We saw one of the traveling Gee’s Bend Quilt exhibits at the Tacoma Art Museum. I was underwhelmed and quite disappointed. Many of these were made in just the last few years and seem to me to be made in an attempt to jump on the band wagon. I was not alone in this feeling. I would have loved to see the original show that started all of the brouhaha. There were maybe two or three quilts that I would call “art.” Otherwise, they were very wonky utilitarian quilts.

The CQA has a show titled Evolution of the Art Quilt which is quite stunning. Each quilt is accompanied by a statement from the quilter with a small photo of an earlier quilt. In most cases, it is quite interesting to see how the artist has evolved.

Here are a couple of bad photos of the scene there tonight.

Our first speaker, tomorrow, is Robert Shaw who wrote the first compendium of art quilts. I think it is called “The Art Quilt.” Then we hear from Barbara Lee Smith, Cynthia Corbin and a panel discussion on Intelligent Design with Erika Carter, Jeannette DeNicolis Meyer and Jill Nordfors Clark. The final speaker is Michael Monroe, the executive director of the Bellevue Art Museum.

I have met some heroines, like Janet Steadman, and run in to friends I have before only known on the internet, like Lorraine Edmonds and Andree Fredette. I am making new friends and solidifying friendships with others who have made the trip from Portland. I’m so happy to be here. Ciao!