What Am I Working On This Week

I love to sew...just about anything.
I love traditional quilts and fiber art.
It all make s me happy.

Generally, I work on two things at a time because for me, the most fun part is the design process. In the traditional quilt world, this often translates into color, value and cloth selection. In the fiber art world it is a ditto with the addition of original design, for me accomplished through sketch. When the design is completed, then the task of assembly takes place which is less than fun for me. Thus two things at a time: one in the assembly stage and one in the design stage.

I am assembling this quilt: Sintra Squares by Cynthia Young.

Sorry for the blurry picture. I will send a new one in an upright position when I get all the rows sewed together. This is made of some terrific batiks and best, I used up 5 entire pieces of fabulous fabric from my stash.

On the creative side, I am taking a class at Academy of Quilting from Elizabeth Barton. It's called Dyeing to Design. The first week we dyed a gradation of greys.

 

and then we were to design a simple quilt using them. We all know that color gets the credit but value does the work. Here is my start. I cheated a bit by introducing some grey with brown , rust and salmon tones. There is  reason. More to come...

What are you working on?

APWQ pt 3

Flicker by Sonia Grasvik

Sonia says "We feed the birds. Frequently a feather will be left behind for us to discover. A flicker left this one. It begged to be on a quilt."

Sonia has done a magnificent job with the detail of this feather. Look at the texture in the second image. I loved the narrow bands of cloth giving this a striped effect and the color choices were perfect. Simply stunning.

APWQ, pt 2

Diversity by Deborah Babin

This was a delightful quilt. The composition is so balanced. The colors so compelling  and the quilting exquisite. The quilting tells the story and includes people, houses and quotes. I found this to be one i could look at a very long time. It pulled me in.

Pacific West Quilt Show 2013

One of the first exhibits we visited was From Away, which is a maritime expression meaning "not from around here". The exhibit was put on by the Fiber Art Network, a western Canadian group. Each artist interpreted the theme in her own unique way. On of my favorites was this delightful piece by Valerie Wilson, named Reaching the Target. It was vibrant, artfully executed and just pure joy.

The La Conner Quilt Museum shared a selection of quilts from their permanent collection. I am always amazed at the skill and artistic sensibility of the women who, using what they had on hand, still gave keen awareness to the placement of cloth to enhance a design.

Another favorite of mine was in the category Art - Non Representational. Made by Mary Kay Price of Lake Oswego, OR, it's named Coloring Outside the Lines. I've included a close up so that you can see the detail.The colorways work so well together and she repeated the varied orientations of quilting lines in the tonal border. Much of the quilting was done by hand. It was stunning.

There was also a exhibit of past category and show winners. While they are all outstanding in their class, one I didn't recall seeing before made me look for a very long time. Made by Louise Harris and Sedroy Woolley, it was called Choices, Seeing My Way Through. Sorry for the blurry image. I left my camera in the car and my I-phone is less than stellar in low light conditions.

And a couple of closeups...

I love how the artist has moved the value from dark to light across the quilt. It is a nice use of stripes.

Come back in a few days and I will share some more.

On Target

A girl can only have so many quilts. But what to do when you love to make them? Over the years, I have made quilts for my sister and sister-in-laws. This one belongs to Chris. I like to choose the colors they like and this is all about Chris. She is fun and funny, has a great sense of humor, sees the light side, is generous with all. She's also a great puzzler and the geometric design of these blocks fits her Sudoku and other gamesmanship loves. This quilt pattern is named Bouillabaisse. I call it On Target.

It's scrappy which might lead one to believe that it should be simple, an anything goes type of quilt. Not so. Making the strip sets required thought and then forming the blocks required color wheel considerations. And finally combining the large blocks to spread the color required a sense of the overall quilt top. The layout was more tedious than it seems.

But that is the fun for me.

Friends with Benefits

A number of years ago, 10 women decided to make pin wheel quilts with polk-a-dot fabrics. The group gathered with everyone bringing their stash of dots. Ten unique dots were selected for each participant. We were to make 10 pinwheels from each fabric with the same ecru background. On sharing day, each gal handed off a packet of 10 pinwheels to the other gals in the group. We each then had 100 dotted pinwheels. Mine sat on the shelf for a few years until the time was right. That was 2013.

I played with the squares until I found something I liked. This is the result.

I rather like it and aptly named it Friends with Benefits.

Toys: Kuler by Adobe

Have you seen this? It's Adobe's color wheel. You can manipulate the rays in the circle to change the colors in the bars beneath. On the left you can choose between Analogous - Monochromatic - Triad - Complementary - Compound - Shades - or a Custom view. It is very addictive to just play with color.

Find it here and try for yourself.
https://kuler.adobe.com/create/color-wheel/

Imagine how you can use this in art for choosing colors. Here is one of my favs from this mornings go at it.

There is also an App you can download for your I-phone. It has a really cool feature in that it uses the phone camera and adjusts the colors in the bars based on what it seen through the lens. Oh technology...I gotta love you.