Canopy Dance

I love photographing bird life. When I visited my parents in Florida earlier this year I ended up with dozens of shots of a reddish egret doing his "canopy dance". This is just how they move when they are feeding. It is graceful and beautiful and a wonder to behold.

As usual, I am trying to kill two birds (not literally!) with one stone. I am giving a presentation on using soy wax in your work to my art quilt group this month and I wanted to create a piece for the challenge using that method.

This piece is not yet quilted but I wanted to offer it up for viewing before the next challenge arrived so here it is. Besides, I am thinking seriously about mounting it unquilted. I am starting to collect a number of bird paintings on fabric that have been finished that way.

Thanks, Linda, for a great challenge!

Blue Jean Hang-Up

While realism and shading are important characteristics of trompe l'oeil, just as critical - IMHO - is the element of scale. After all, if the artist truly wants to fool the viewer into thinking they are seeing something three dimensional, the portrayed object needs to be close to life size. "Blue Jean Hang-Up" is 14" wide x 21" high, determined by the actual size of the door paneling I used as my model. There is quite a bit of quilting already completed although it is not really obvious because it follows the lines of the image. I want to do more freehand quilting, particularly on the door panels, but it won't happen until I can get to town next week and get some properly colored thread. Thanks for a really fun challenge! Comments are welcome, as always.

Blobs

I probably spent more time on this challenge than any other FFFC to date; not because I had a great idea I had to try but because I thought the concept could be executed in 15 minute bites. So between cooking, baking, cleaning, entertaining and all the other duties that accompany a major U.S. holiday, I stole minutes here and there to create the blob designs on my computer using Adobe Illustrator. I then printed it out in black and white on an 11" x 17" piece of fabric and spent many more 15 minute stints coloring in each oval with Inktense pencils. The first border is a piece of my shibori that I quilted in ovals to continue the shapes. The outer border is a piece of commercial fabric that actually has subtle tone-on-tone ovals in the design. The finished piece is 17" x 23".

Harvest Moon

Waning harvest moon

Pale with certain foreboding

Of summer's demise

Harvest Moon

11" wide x 22" high

Batik sky, hand dyed fabrics

Machine quilted, hand embroidered.

Comments welcome.

Thank you everyone for a great challenge!

Elk

When this challenge was announced I was attending meetings in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. My husband and I then took the long way home so we could make our annual outing to Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone during the time of elk mating. While this might sound kinky to some, I assure you it is a rare chance to witness wild animal behaviour at its most dramatic. The big bull elk are ferocious in defense of their harems; bugling and fighting non-stop. As a visitor it is your responsibility to respect the space needed by the animals by staying a safe distance away, both for their safety and yours. I have a new camera with a good telephoto lens and I was able to take a photo of the alpha bull as he stood in the sunlight during a rare moment of calm.

When I got home I drew the image as I saw it on paper and then proceeded to turn it into a fabric composition. It is not quilted and I am not sure it ever will be. I really enjoyed this process and I feel I learned a lot from this exercise but I am not particularly happy with the final result. I think the antlers were successful but then I perhaps got too detailed with the bottom half of the animal. I do like my original drawing and I may work on it further, including enlarging it a little more, to make an entirely new piece in the future. This piece is 16" high and 13" wide.

Tree

I was a little late getting started on this one and a little late finishing. It was really fun to do as I tried a technique I have been wanting to try for a long time. The image was created by using dyes on cotton prepared with soy wax resist. I was pleasantly surprised at how much easier it was to work with the soy instead of paraffin and very happy with the lack of odor from melting the wax. It was also much easier to remove. On the other hand, I found the dyes seeped under in a few places. I may have to apply two coats to make sure I have total coverage in the future.

The piece is about the negative effects some of our human actions have on trees. The holes signify loss of trees and the writing around the outside says such things as "over population", "climate change", etc. It measures 15" x 15".

Woodland Sleep-Over

For the last couple months, it seems I have gone from one looming deadline to the next. This month is no different but I decided I was going to participate in the challenge come h--- or high water. The problem was I could only do so if I finished it by noon today as I am traveling the rest of the week and I had to make it fit at least one other purpose in order to justify the time spent. So I created "Woodland Sleep-Over" as a sample for a class I will be teaching in a couple weeks. The fungus is a shelf fungus which often grows on decaying trees and the colors are reddish brown/blue green and yellow green. It is still unquilted but I hope to rectify that next week. It is a painted wholecloth that started out as a piece of white PFD cotton. It is approximately 18" wide x 24 " high.

Magpie

I was pretty certain I was not going to participate this month, especially since I was traveling out of the country when the challenge was announced. Then I saw the description and I really wanted to play - in part because of the subject matter and in part because of the chance to try the fracturing technique, something I have always admired but never attempted. So I started sketching a magpie on the way home on the airplane on Tuesday. Wednesday I created the design and figured out my piecing strategy and Thursday and today were sewing days. I am really glad I participated even though there are definitely things I would change if I had more time. It is a technique I will try again for sure. He is unquilted at this point but I will tackle that job tomorrow. My colors are blue, green and red with ecru added for the background. The bird fabrics are all my hand dyes and the background fabrics are commercial cottons. He is 25" x 16".

Prayer Plant

What fun I had with this challenge! I don't have a microscope and didn't really want to use an image off the web so instead decided to attach my macro lens to the camera and go searching through my house for something that had an obvious pattern when viewed close up.

I took several photos which I liked but decided to go with one of the more graphic in the leaf of a prayer plant. The actual size ratio is 10:1 with the finished quilt being 20" high by 13" wide.
The photo on the left is the one I started with. The piece is actually a painted wholecloth with a background of cheap ($2 a yard) muslin from Dharma.

I think I may go back in with some paint to add highlights on the right side of the quilt. I like the way it accentuates the curve of the leaf in the photo.

As always, comments are welcome!

Just Passing Through

My entry to challenge 38 is titled "Just Passing Through". Some quilts insist on being made - this was one of those for me. For those who don't have the time or inclination for the "why", the details are these: 22" wide x 18" high; trapunto-ed bear totem (creating reverse trapunto for the somewhat subtle bear footprints on the right); reverse applique in the arrow. Things I would do differently - I would limit the Seminole border to one pattern instead of four and I would be more careful about keeping the pieces symmetrical.
For those who want to know the story behind the quilt...
My husband and I jog every morning. Since I run twice as far as he does, we start out together and then go our separate ways. For me, that hour each morning is my most valuable design time and I have created at least 90% of my quilts to the rhythm of the run. Last Friday my thoughts were on the FFFC posted that morning by Cynthia. I kept considering possible designs and rejecting them - nothing seemed to be speaking to me. About three miles into my run I looked up and saw my husband headed my way and I knew something must be going on. When he reached me he started lecturing me about daydreaming and not paying attention to my surroundings. Indignantly I demanded to know why he thought that was the case. Instead of answering he pointed to the ground by my feet. There in the sand, as clear as could be, were two perfect, fresh sets of grizzly bear prints heading back in the direction from which I had come. It was obviously a mama and near grown cub and they had gone through Thursday night sometime. We followed the prints back about a half mile to our barbed wire fence and there we could see where they had gone through. There were big clumps of grizzly fur caught in the barbs. Following the tracks back the opposite direction we found that the two had passed pretty close to our house during the night but thankfully, unlike last year, this time they had not hurt any of our animals. I decided I was meant to do a bear totem quilt. I talked to the folks at Game and Fish to see if I could add a few strands of grizzly bear fur to the piece but, as I suspected, since they have recently been re-listed as an endangered species, even picking the fur off the fence would be illegal!

Snail Steps

I have been so busy this summer that I just knew I wouldn't have time to participate in the challenges for a few months. Then this challenge was posted and the very first night I dreamt about the quilt I wanted to make. I love traditional quilt blocks and "Snail's Trail" has always been one of my favorites. I decided to take the old classic and give it some modern curves with the result above which I am calling "Snail Steps". I enjoyed making this piece so much and love the way the colors flow. I really think I will have to spend some time in the studio working on my hand dyes so I can do a bed sized quilt using this pattern. The finished piece is 16" x 16".

Memories of Paris

I have several nature scenes I want to tackle using the neutral color concept but I opted to go a different route for this challenge for two reasons:

1) I have to leave early tomorrow morning to judge a quilt show in the southern part of the state and I won't be home again until Saturday. I needed something I could accomplish quickly!
2) I am teaching a class on fabric painting using Dye-na-flo paints at Quilt Wyoming in July and I really need a couple more samples to show my students.

This, therefore, is a small (12" x 14") painted wholecloth with an added border. I set up a still life in my dining room and made a sketch which I then transferred to fabric. I tried to keep all the colors neutral but I have a limited palette of Dye-na-flo paints and despite my best efforts, the green of the bottle came out greener than I wanted and the burgundy of the wine showed up as more red than planned. While both are certainly greyed versions of the pure hue, they are not what I consider neutrals.
I think I did better on the depth part of the challenge. I used primarily placement of objects to indicate space. Both size and color (shadows) are also used to a lesser degree.
At this point the piece is very minimally quilted with just enough stitching to stabilize it as I want to wait until I am home next week so I can concentrate on doing a good job.

Grasses

As so often seems to happen, this piece started with what I thought was a simple, quick idea. Ha! If I had known how many hours it would take to accomplish, I would have changed the plan from the beginning.

Almost every quilt I have ever made has been designed on my morning run. This is a rare exception as I woke up the morning after the challenge was posted with the design in my head. I made the monoprint of grasses several years ago and had no idea what I was going to do with it until now. The first problem was that it was on a small piece of white fabric so I overdyed it chartreuse and at the same time dyed another piece of fabric the same color so I could applique the print to the background and have it look like it was one. Then, my plan to use commercial fabrics for the squares just wasn't working so I dyed several more pieces of fabric to get my analogous blues and greens as well as a magenta complement.

Once I had my print appliqued to the background I created a grid using 1/8" pieces of tape that I cut from a 1" roll of blue tape. I fused the 1" squares to the background and then quilted the whole thing.

Of course I didn't even think about the binding when I started and now I have no fabric left so I am dying yet another piece chartreuse so I can match the binding to the border/background. The finished piece is 14" x 21".

Sign of Spring

As soon as I heard this challenge announced, I knew just what I wanted to do. Even though it meant going in a whole new direction for me and even though I had to wait until I could drive the hour to town to buy some daffodils at the local grocery. Then, in this part of the world that receives an average of 350 days of sunshine a year, we had three days in a row of overcast skies. So I eventually broke down and created my own shadow with a table lamp. This 12" x 17" piece is a painted wholecloth. It is finished other than the binding which I am anticipating being a blue like the "cloth" on the table.

My saturated colors are the vase and the daffodil. The tones are in the table cloth and the shadows. The planes are in the folds of the cloth and the shape of the flower.

I really enjoyed this process and expect to do more along the same lines.

Lava Lamp

Once again the timing of this challenge was perfect! I actually had the design idea for this small piece (15" x 15") rattling around inside my brain since I purchased the patterned bluish fabric while visiting my parents in Florida last month. As soon as I saw the fabric it made me think of the lava lamp an aunt had that used to fascinate me as a child. To be honest I was picturing the work as being created from an analogous color scheme - blue green, green and yellow-green - but this month's challenge made me consider replacing the green with red and I think it works much better than it would have. It is pretty much done and all quilted but now I think it may be crying out for a few beads and a touch of embroidery.

Pine Grosbeaks

Still not finished but much further along. For some reason the photo that looked crisp on my computer now looks slightly out of focus here. Sorry about that! Pine Grosbeaks now measures 24" x 30" and I think I am ready to quilt it. As someone who has been a hand quilter most of my life, I am still totally intimidated when it comes time to sit at the machine and take those first quilting stitches. Any suggestions for quilting patterns would be gratefully considered. More than any other quilt I have done with this group, this one has been influenced by the comments and critiques of those who wrote. Thank you!

I really didn't think I would participate in the challenge this month. The main problem was that my husband and I were headed into Yellowstone over the holidays and would be gone for most of the week in which the challenge was to be done. But when I returned and found out the theme was "zingers", I knew I had to make a quilt portraying some of the pine grosbeaks we had seen on the trees while cross country skiing near Old Faithful. They are the perfect example of nature's zingers as they create bright spots of color on the otherwise monochromatic green of the pine trees. I am showing the center part of the quilt here. It currently measures 17" x 22" but I think I will add a zinger red piping and a wonky log cabin border in greens so it will get quite a bit bigger before I quilt it. The emotion evoked for me is one of peacefulness since it brings back a specific memory of a place and time.

Cut Loose

My goal for this year of FFFC's was to simplify and to use everyday objects - preferably found in my sewing room. I have done both of those things in this piece but I don't think it is in the same series as my September piece.

This work was created by holding a pair of scissors in front of me and taking a photo. I then went into photoshop and simplified the picture, turned it into a B&W and dropped out the background, including my hand. I then added back a little color in gray-purple tones. I printed the photo on silk organza and overlayed that on a piece of cotton I had colored using shibori techniques with fabric paint. I quilted it to emphasize the design of the background fabric and then added a row of beads (which don't show in the photo) with lots of loose threads hanging off the bottom. The finished piece, not including the danglies, is 11 1/2" wide and 10" high.

Zipper

The theme for my series is "Simplify". I am trying to do this on so many levels. One thing I found over the last year of challenges was that my ideas were often too complicated to achieve a finished project in a week. So for this series I decided to depict everyday objects in an abstracted or simplified manner. I am trying to get back to basics and concentrate on shape, movement, techniques, machine quilting and, of course, color. This piece is called "zipper" and it is a diagonal emphasis in a yellow-green: purple-red color scheme. It was a lot of fun to make. My original intention was to use an actual zipper in the center but I didn't have one in my stash that would work. Just driving to the store to get something is not an option in the remote area where I live so I looked for alternative solutions. I found a piece of painted aluminum chain that reminded me of a metal zipper so I used that. The two sides of the quilt were each constructed, quilted and finished separately and then connected by hand sewing the chain in the middle.
The purplish zipper is needle turn applique and the background is pieced.

Leaning toward Abstract

The idea of making anything abstract scares the dickens out of me (what is a "dickens" anyway?) As I went back through my photos of vegetation, I decided to take a liberal interpretation of the garden concept and opted to work with a photo I took a few months ago of three cottonwood trees sculpted by beavers.

I worked in Photo Shop to posterize, intensify, saturate and otherwise manipulate the image that I then printed out on cotton. The tree photo has batting under it and that is then quilted onto an upholstery fabric sample as background. The extra "leaves" to the sides of the photo are scraps of green fabric under tulle. The extended tree trunks are crumpled black fabric that has been dry brushed with blue Lumiere paint. The photo has an inner frame of couched yarns. The binding is an earth tone dupioni silk. I expected the end result to be less identifiable than it is. I am not sure I have really abstracted the image or if I have just manipulated it to a different form.

Altered Shoo Fly

This is my pieced but not yet quilted entry to this month's challenge. This is the type of quilt I love to make - a one of a kind piece that shows its strong traditional roots. The problem is that these types of quilts have a hard time fitting in anywhere - they are too unusual for traditional yet too traditional to be called an art quilt.
I took special care to make the points sharp and the corners meet on this top and they behaved pretty well for me. So well, in fact, that I want to take my time quilting it so it can be entered into a show or two. I started with a very basic Shoo Fly block (called by at least a dozen other names, depending on where you're from). I drew it out in Adobe Illustrator and then reduced the components of the opposite corners by 50%. I then extended some of the lines to fill in the resulting empty spaces and then added extra squares here and there to balance. I made four identical 12" blocks which I sewed together and then added two rather tricky pieced borders to the resulting 24" square.
I would like to hear some feedback on any quilting ideas viewers might have - either hand or machine, and I would like to hear your opinion on whether you think this piece should hang square or on point.
Thanks for your help!