This Book Class Was A Kick!

Trying to get caught up on all the stuff I've been doing lately. Last month I took a book class with Albie Smith in her beautiful Jacksonville, Oregon studio. We made this...what she calls 'Sculpture or Book'. I think it's a little of both!


Each page has a small pocket on the left hand side for a tag, photo, whatever you want to put in there. And I love the fact that when you set it down on a smooth surface it naturally wants to spiral into a circle. I've handled this book a lot in the last few days and it never ceases to me make me smile. Definitely need to make more of these.


We used Stonehenge papers and paste paint made with Daniel Smith colored gessos and fluid acrylics. First we painted the pages' backgrounds. These photos don't do justice to the shimmer from the gold gesso we used. Once the pages were dry we added stamping and stenciling with the fluid acrylics. Final assembly was with archival double sided tape.

Last Piece from Complex Cloth Round Robin

Last week I finally sent off the final piece from the Complex Cloth Round Robin started last year. I ended up holding this piece for an extra two weeks as I had no idea of what to do with it. It was very monochromatic and had lots of things going on in the background, no clear ideas about color came to me. I figured the only way to go forward was to be BOLD. The photo above shows the fabric as it came to me...

I jumped right in and began by cutting stencils and using DeColorant discharge paste to get rid of some of the muddy color in the center of the piece. After washing I went back into the discharged spots with SetaSilk paint mixed with Pebeo's special thickener. One thing I should mention, the thickener has a jell-like consistency and tended to evaporate very quickly making a yucky clumpy mess in my mixing cup. I wonder if it is just sanitary hand cleaner jell in a jar, because it behaves quite the same, as I've used that with SetaSilk in the past to thicken it. After the SetaSilk I moved onto several colors of Jacquard Lumiere Metallics in Citrine, Russet, Burnt Orange, Copper, Gold, Bronze, etc.

After several trips to the design wall, adding more here and there, I decided it needed a shadow focal point, so I cut more stencils of seeds and pods and then stenciled them sparingly with Red and Gold Lumiere.


By this time we were nearing the end of the month, and I was feeling the uncertainly of whether to keep going with it or call it finished -- I am the last person to add to the cloth before it goes to its owner.


I decided that instead of going too far, I would stop and send it on to Jill and let her decide if it needed more. I heard from her last week and she is delighted with the fabric. I am so glad! Now I'm waiting to see what she ends up doing with it!

With A Little Help From My Friend...

I put this quilt top together several winters ago. It was the first in my 'winter color' phase and the pattern and fabrics are by Kaffe Fassett. The pattern is called New Orleans Star. I have not really been able to capture the beautiful colors here...sludgy greens and mauves. I had been holding onto this top waiting to quilt it. Recently I decided that in order to move ahead with my own ideas, I needed to get help with finishing some of these tops.


So I gave this one to my good friend, Veronica Nurmi, machine quilter extraordinare. She did a fantastic job with it, designing her own quilting patterns and then working with a beautiful green thread on her Juki. (She is the one who talked me into buying my Juki and I have to say I have NOT been disappointed.) So now this quilt will go into the house to be used and enjoyed. It's nice to see it again. Hopefully more of my stack of tops will get finished now that I have a little help from my friend!

Last Night's View

Dealing with Denial

The last day or so I've been doing a lot of ripping. Ripping out seams in a project from long ago. It began when I was thinking about starting a new project. I thought I might want to recycle or reuse something as a base to start it. I remembered this quilt top I had finished several years ago that didn't turn out right. That out of frustration I'd thrown into a bag with other tops to be quilted "when I had extra time".


It's a complicated pattern. Lots of paper piecing and curved seams. Beautiful colors. When I first put it together all was well until I got to the corners, that's where denial set in. I was on fire with this project. Everything was going well, I could visualize the finished piece with quilting and all. I'd already bought the thread and had the quilting pattern worked out in my mind. But I wasn't present, my mind running on ahead and it blinded me to the fact that on that first corner things were not working. But I pushed on, confident that I could 'fix' it if things got out of hand. And boy, they did. Once the finished top was laid out it was so distorted that I later nicknamed it 'The Parachute'. I realized that I couldn't fix it and I moved on to something else. I chalked it up as a learning experience.


So yesterday I pulled this top out of the bag and laid it out and ironed it. I thought "I can fix it...put a few pleats in here, cut some fabric out there". But I realized that once again...I was in denial. I had to buckle down to the hard work of ripping apart what had taken days to sew and to reconstruct each corner. As I spent time with my seam ripper, I thought about how denial keeps us from seeing things clearly. In quilting and in life. It makes us do things we wouldn't ordinarily do if we were thinking straight. It keeps us avoiding the hard work. Looks like I have some hard work ahead, but enjoyable now. I feel like I'm putting things right. I wish most situations in life were just a matter of ripping out a few threads and straightening a seam.

Persian Star Revisited

You may remember seeing this quilt a year ago on this blog. If not, check here. Well I guess January is the time I go through my UFO box and see if there's anything in there that still has my interest, and I came across this. I decided that I really did need to figure out what the heck was wrong with this thing and get it finished so I could quilt it. After spending time looking at it, looking at the pattern, I discovered that the two side borders were each missing a block at the bottom. Hmmm...that's why I had two extra blocks...go figure. So I sewed those on, voila! One vertical border fit perfectly. The other didn't, it was too short. Then I fitted the top and bottom borders, same deal. One fit, one was too short. By about an inch in both cases. No, I was not going to go on a 'rip and resew' fest. So I decided my only option was to add more fabric at each end, center the border between it, and applique the border on. Of course I could not find the two fabrics I needed in my nightmare of a stash, so I went to my last ditch, go to place--my scrap box. After scrounging up enough scraps, piecing them together and finally sewing everything together, it was 4 hours later and finished. Now on to the layering and pinning...*sigh*...maybe another day...

Third Round of 2010/11 Complex Cloth

I have to admit that I haven't gotten much done in the studio the last few weeks. We've had a glorious break in the weather with daytime temps in the upper 50s and 60s and lots of sunshine. The nights are still quite cool, getting down to the teens and twenties with lots of frost. So I've been trying to spend as much time outside as possible before the 'big storm' that's supposed to hit on Monday and break this pattern of weather nirvana. *sigh*


I did spend some time in the studio working on this cloth for the next round in the Complex Cloth Round Robin I'm participating in. Another beautiful piece of dying by Jacque and Gisela. The previous layer was accomplished with snow dying and black dye, so I guess I had snow on the brain when I opened this package. Much of the patterning on the cloth reminded me of snowflakes and I just couldn't get that image out of my mind, so I decided to define it with more 'literal' snowflake images. I used a screen from Lyric Kinard's design collection and screened with Jacquard's Lumiere Metallic Silver.


I'm really happy with the outcome of this...was thinking this would make a lovely curtain or room divider if it was a little bigger...


Here's some playing around with different colors trying to decide which one(s) to use. Hmmm...in the end going with a simple color seemed best for this technicolor cloth. It's now off to the next person and I'm waiting to see what's passed to me next. So far I am loving the challenge of working on these diverse and beautiful pieces of cloth...