Week 8

Well, I finished this one early so that I can focus on the February challenges I haven't finished and on the meeting house quilt. This is the view from my back porch in Maryland. I miss our old yard and I miss my students, but I don't miss the frenetic pace and the insanity of living so close to the beltway and a big city.

After burning the hole in my weekly quilt on Sunday, I'm glad that I'm through with organza. I did learn a lot about how it can create transparency, and it was fun to use a new material, but I don't like having to be fussy with the heat. It's a good new tool for my toolbox, but I'm not sure how often I'll use it.

In March, my 6x6 challenge is using fabrics with circles in New York Beauty type blocks. I've done paper piecing before, but nothing as fussy as the New York Beauty block. It will also give me a chance to strengthen my curve sewing technique. Oh, and it also gave me a chance to buy some new fabric. I've been picking up every circle fabric I find lately (in 1/4 and fat 1/4 cuts, of course).

It also fits in nicely with our Art Quilt Workbook study group work. In April the group will be working on the innovative piecing chapter.

Week 7--Ooops

Well, the no-do-over plan for my weekly quilts has finally forced a last minute adjustment. I was putting the binding on this quilt and my iron was hotter than I thought, so it burnt through the organza.

This week's inspiration was leaves under ice, but I guess now there is a partial thaw. I'm not thrilled with this one anyway, so I guess learning about burning organza and having to adjust midstream was a good lesson.

All the quilts so far have been mounted on 6x6 frames and hung on a wall near my studio. It's fun to see them all together; I'll post a photo later this week. I really like this technique for small quilts (stretching over a frame) and I may do this for my 8x10 and 12x12 quilts. The frames are easy to make with 1x2s, a miter saw, and an upholstery stapler.

Working on the small weekly and monthly quilts is rebuilding my confidence, so I finally started on the meeting house quilt. I'm planning on using some of the new techniques I've learned. I may make the first one for me and do another one for Barbara G. after I've perfected the pattern and the techniques.

February Journal Quilt

This quilt was inspired by a game of croquet. While I was cleaning up our equipment several years ago, I liked the criss-crossed wires that I made as I threw the stakes in a pile. When the Art Quilt Workbook asked us to work from a photo, I scanned my notebook and found the photograph and used it to create this small quilt. I'm still loving hand stitching, so I had to add some in the foreground.

The lines are bias tubes, but though I have a 1/4 bias tape maker, the fusible web I have doesn't fit, so I had to glue it down and it didn't work as well as I would have wanted it to.

I used fusible binding for this quilt, too. I love that technique. I do it a bit differently, using two pieces of 1/4 inch tape, one on the front and one on the back. I iron the front in place first, then fold the back over, remove the tape, and iron that down. I feel like that gives me more control than one larger piece of tape.

I also made my 6x6 frames out of 1x2s this weekend, and hung my weekly journal quilts. I'll post a photo of the quilts on the wall with this week's journal posting. I really like the technique, and I'm exploring some other alternatives to the sewn sleeve on the back. I'm not sure what to do with the monthly quilts, but I think I might use stretcher bars there, too. They're easy to make and they give a polished finish.

Week Six Journal

For my February journal quilts, I've take the theme of circles in nature. This quilt is inspired by dew drops on a spider's web. I didn't really plan to use organza in all my February quilts, but my design for next week uses organza as well. Since I've never really worked much with organza or with sheers, I'm learning to use new materials as well.

I also haven't really quilted with many small circles like this before. I really admire the small circle stippling that so many award winning art quilts use, but when I've tried to quilt in circles, they've never really kept quite true. Making so many tiny circles, I got better with each row. I'm not sure how that will translate into circle stippling, but we'll see.

January Journal

My January journal quilt was inspired by two sources. The first are the beautiful hay bales in my new home state, Ohio. I loved driving by the bales in the fall, and I thought they would make an interesting perspective study so took a lot of photographs of the bales in the first snow in November.

The second inspiration is the work of Wolf Kahn. I used one of his paintings as the source for the color scheme. I like how he hints at Fauvism with his color schemes, but you can still sense the reality behind the colors. I also like his use of light. In many of his paintings, the light source isn't behind the artist, but far in front of him, off in the distance, so that they highlights are further away from the viewer. It reminds me of watching the sun and shadows play across the hillsides as I drive through Western Maryland.

I like this quilt, and I think I'll continue to do some hay bale studies in a bit larger size. I've never taken a small quilt as inspiration for a larger quilt, but I guess the inspiration would actually be my photographs, so it won't be that different.

I pieced the background and fused the hay bales. I machine quilted the bales and some trees in the distance; then I hand quilted the hay that's in the foreground fields.

Week 5

This month, my weekly quilts are circles inspired by nature. My family said, the solar system, cells, an onion, but Connor guessed right, a water droplet hitting the water. Of course, this would have more verisimilitude if I could actually quilt a perfect circle.

I used black organza over hand dyed turquoise fabric.

Since I'm trying to use new techniques in my quilts, this one uses a double thread in the needle for quilting the circles. I used a tracing paper overlay to transfer my design to the quilt top.

I'm finishing up my January journal quilt. My journal quilts are circles from my own photographs--this one is of croquet balls and hoops. I'm also working on my February journal quilt (to make up for being late with all things January), haystacks, a circle/perspective exercise. These quilts are also the exercises for the Miami Valley Art Quilt Network Quilt Study Group, so I'm trying to have them finished by the meeting tomorrow night.

I'm so happy to be able to design and work, and my confidence is growing. I feel like I've made my way up from the bottom of dark lake, so my work is a little frantic right now, like gulping in air once you break the surface after being submerged for too long.

Once I finish those two quilts and the Virgin of Guadeloupe and Mary from the Kells, I'll finish up the Meeting House quilt that Barbara has been patiently waiting for since last years Silent Auction.

Unblocked: January Weekly Quilts

Week One 2009

This 6x6 inch quilt is the first of my weekly journal quilts for 2009. I'm finally unblocked, and I've been able to work on several new quilts that didn't have squares and rectangles. January's quilts came from drawings I did as I worked on the exercises in Davila and Waterson's Art Quilt Workbook. You'll note I'm using circles!! The fabrics are my hand dyed fabrics. This is a perspective exercise.


Week 2

This is my second week quilt. It came from a balance exercise, but you can see that I broke the rules a bit. I used circle templates for all these designs.


Week 3

This is another perspective exercise, and I really had fun making these worm like bouncing images. I'm trying different quilting techniques on these than I might normally use and I'm also exploring different ways to layer fabric. In the first and third weeks, I'm just pinning the fabric onto the quilt sandwich without using fusible. The first two quilts have traditional binding, but this quilt has silk cord attached with a zig-zag stitch.


Week 4

In addition to using a balance exercise for this last quilt of January, I'm trying the stitch technique that Laura Wasilowski talks about in the current issue of Quilting Arts. I love hand work, so this is an exciting new technique to adapt and think about. I'm using fusible binding here for the very first time.

Poe Challenge

Edgar Allen Poe's Birthday Post Card: The Voices in His Head

A challenge went out on the Quilt Art list to make a post card to celebrate Poe's Birthday in January. Poe's work is so fraught with his own mental struggles, I wanted to try and capture some sense of the Raven as Poe's dark familiar. I really had fun with Poe's face. I've never stitched faces in quilts before, so finding a technique to try to make it look like Poe was a challenge. In an adaptation of a technique I read about in Quilting Arts magazine a few month ago, I transferred my drawing to tracing paper and laid the tracing paper down and stitched the outlines of his facial features in black. I removed the paper with tweezers and then added detail. I like how this technique worked out. I'm not sure it will work for the other two quilts with faces that I'm working on, but at least it worked on this one. The letters were outlined and filled in with thread painting, and the background quilting is a line from the poem, "And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting."