There is a wonderful post by Del Thomas up on her blog. Last year Del purchased my SAQA auction piece “Amidst The Fire” for her private collection. I was honored to be a part of the 2010 SAQA auction and quite excited when I found out who had purchased my donation contribution.

Del has been making quilts for a long time and started her quilt collection in the 70′s. This phenomenal group of quilts, The Thomas Contemporary Quilt Collection, is a remarkable collection of work and I am humbled that my artwork is included in it.

Earlier this week Del wrote a little bit about this piece I made and what attracted her to this particular auction item. You can check her post out here.

Donations for the 2011 SAQA auction are now being posted on the SAQA website. Check the website to download the form to contribute your donation and for those who would like to purchase a small piece of artwork, check back in September when the auction will go live.

Toodles all,

the piece i donated this year is “amidst the fire” (on page 1b).

here are a few other pieces for your perusal…

“Under Cover” – Diane Marie Chaudiere

“Chiapas III ” – Pam Lowe

“Elysium” – Deidre Adams
(one of my absolute favorite fiber artist…love her work!)

“Deconstructed Flower II “- Deborah Weir

“Voila” – Olga Norris

“Gray Study” – Norma Schlager

how to bid
all the funds raised during the auction support SAQA’s ongoing mission to create exciting exhibitions, full colour catalogs and to fund outreach programs.

take a moment now to peruse all the wonderful artwork on SAQA’s website.   here you’ll find beautiful photos of each piece, info on how the auction works and a bidding form.

bidding starts today at 2pm (eastern time) and ends October 9th.   check out all the pieces and note which ones you’d like to see hanging in your home then go to the bidding form and send it it.   soon you too will be looking at 1, 2 or even 3 pieces of beautiful fiber art gracing your walls.

toodles,

i heard the relentless taunting and, for the most part, chose to ignore it every time.  just couldn’t put my finger on what the sketch needed and why it wasn’t working.  but today i tamed the mish-mosh beast.

any thoughts?

what i think is that i was trying to include too many different designs in the one piece…ugg!…..simplify girl,  so i took it down…put it back on my light box to redraw the base, reworked the design and came away with 2 new drawings. nice! and of course they are circles…you can always find them in my work.

next step is to recolour both new drawings in PSE8 altho patience will not be with me as i try this.  i’m on a Mac now and have  a much older version of CorelDraw that i got for my old PC,  but didn’t want to purchase another copy of the software…funds are tight.

I asked around on one of the lists i belong to and someone suggested these incredibly inexpensive vector based programs, Intaglio and EasyDraw, both made for Macs. mmmh….(if anyone has used either of these, let me now how you like it).  sometimes a girl just wants to colour the point and click way.

before I got my mOjo back today (oh yeh) i forced myself to go into the studio, not to do anything mind you…just spend 10 or so minutes reacquainting myself with being there.  before long, i couldn’t help myself (she says with a giggle)…..i created….i started another grunge journal.  here’s the first one I made.

inside cover….stitched from front then painted in and grunged..the best part

love this new-for-me way of attaching the spine.  as always—-filled with lots of wonderful paper to write/draw on, some really cool bits and, of course inspirational thoughts & ideas throughout to get the muse juices flowing.

i’m calling her lillibird…..my first painted photgraph

i still have some more stuff” to add and will sew in the signatures and put the finishing touches on it tonight.  as soon it’s completed i will be making a video clip showcasing both journals so you can get an up close view my step into the grunge…dun…dun…dun!

Most of the time I work intuitively…..my abstract pieces are usually born through feeling and touch and intuition, picking up and auditioning fabrics and finding those that fit the piece.

Recently though, especially since the Orchid Show pieces (below), I been feeling the need to work in a representational manner. One of the tools I use to gather information and to have a starting off point for these pieces is to mind map words.

Part of the Orchids: Sensuality Stitched Show

I am not very good at drawing…..this is not a whine nor a complaint but a fact…..so instead of getting frustrated at not being able to draw images that I see in my minds eye, I mind map those images with words instead. These words turn into ideas for surface designs or stitching or the images themselves.

It still fascinates me what happens when you release control and just start writing without checking for content, grammatical errors, words that don’t fit or giving in to distracting thoughts. The flow, if allowed to continue, is almost cathartic. Images into words tumble out (most of the time that is).

Sometimes one of these words pops out at me and I take that one and run with it. Soon the page is filled with “images”. From this cacophony of words I pick out ones that resonate and start the quilt.

I haven’t finished this one I’m working on, still needs to be quilted, but I like where it’s going. Here’s a sneak peak.

What do you do to release control and let your work flow through you?

As I walked back in the house the phone was ringing so I put the box down on the counter. One thing led to another and I forgot about it.

About 3 hours later my son comes in from school, sees the box on the counter and shrieks gleefully. Poor kid…..he thought I bought something for him. Sorry bub, it’s addressed to me. A few seconds later he’s looking at me strangely as I shriek!

“Mother Love” is back!!!

This quilt has been traveling for the last year and a half and had finally made it home!

“Mother Love” won Judges’s Choice Award (thanks Jamie Fingal) in the “My World in Black and White Revisted” exhibition by Fiber Arts Connection of Southern California.

This quilt is about the relationship between a mother and her child in transformation. In the midst of the turmoil and chaos that can permeate a teenagers life, a mother’s love, like a continuous circle, is enduring, never ending in helping her child transition.

I had a hard time with my eldest but we’ve come through the other side intact and actually friends.

May you and your teenager’s experience be less chaotic and much more about the love.

A few people, however, felt  that burying threads is right there at the top for them. Yucky, yucky, yucky! Once upon a time, I would have said that too.

I noticed a long time ago that no matter what workshop I take there is always one thing I can take away to help me in my work or help to work more effectively. In a class with Robbie Joy Eklow last year she showed us this neat trick to burying thread tails. It was like a gigantic light bulb when off in my head.

Ever since then I’ve done it her way and it’s no longer a hated chore for me. I can start and stop where ever the heck I like. It was one of the reasons I tried to start and finish the quilting in one go…hence earlier pieces of mine were filled with lots and lots of meandering stitches. lol.

So I thought I’d do a video tutorial about it (with Robbie’s permission of course).

I’ll be adding this video to my Tutorial Page. You can also access it on Youtube along with my other videos.

ART BREAK:

Forgot to let you know about the other pieces I had hanging at Mint Hill Arts Annual Fiber Arts show last month. I chose 3 pieces, “Red Moon”, “At Odds” and “Stacked” to hang in their gallery.

I found out last week that each piece was also selected to be exhibited at the Gallery’s off site exhibition at Mint Hill Town Hall, the Chamber of Commerce and the local BB&T Bank after the MHA Fiber Arts show was finished. They were chosen to hang at BB

Funnily enough, in my former life, I was an employee of that same bank in uptown Charlotte, oh so long ago. Full circle moment here.

Defining Work

My quest this year is to push my work out there a bit more and find more places to have my work juried and exhibited. I am so pleased that I’ve started off on the right foot, 2 straight months where my work is hanging.

Back in December I got a tip from Robbie Joy Eklow (on the Quiltart list I subscribe to) about submitting our work.

She suggested that we set our calenders up at least 6 mths in advance, noting all the exhibitions we want to enter, the entry deadline, acceptance and ship dates and remembering to update our websites and art records to reflect this.

This way we are not caught short trying to fill out paperwork, finish artwork or play catch up when the show/exhibition rolls around.

Just trying to keep my Word for the Year, D I L I G E N C E in the forefront.

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Cindy Klemmer, Director of Education at Stowe, greeted us warmly, showed us the hanging space and helped us get started.
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First things first, we laid out\’a0 the pieces on the floor to we decide where they will hang.
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That’s my piece on the lower left, “Ode to Gene”. My first foray into whole cloth painting and I loved it!
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PJ Howard\’a0 “rose to the occasion” (I couldn’t help the pun) and was deemed our unofficial ladder climber. I did not volunteer for that job because the older I get the more I find that me and ladders just don’t get along.
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She came prepared with her own tool belt made out of fabric (what else for a fiber artist right?).
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The hanging system at the Stowe is the typical Walker System whereby long rods are hung from a picture rail running along the wall about 10″ down from the ceiling.
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Hanging clips are attached and the work is hung from these.
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Our one dilemma was how were were to hang fiber art that is usually hung using a rod/slat in a sleeve.
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For each of our pieces we each made a sleeve that would still hold a rod (so the pieces can still be exhibited in a quilt show) but made it long enough to cover the foam core we used.
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Wire was then twisted onto the foam core so that they could be hung gallery style.
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After having made 4 of these revised sleeves I will be creating a PDF tutorial that I’ll put in my sidebar for those that want to know how to make one.
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Let me just say there were few prototypes before I got to the one I eventually used for the backs of my artwork.
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Here’s Deb Langsam (left)\’a0 rehanging one of her pieces after adding the wire to the foam core earlier.
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Susan Knapp (right)\’a0 brought sewing supplies to finish adding a label to the back of one of her pieces.
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While we were hanging, staffers occasionally popped in to see what we were up to, admiring all the work we had done.
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The two ladies (below), on the way out of the Garden, walked in to have a gander.
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Most people are still a bit uninformed about art quilts or fiber art and curiosity got the better of them. They spent a few minutes asking questions.
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I love this part about exhibiting, answering questions about our work and the processes we employ and find it fascinating that people still marvel at the fact that these artworks are all made from fabric.
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Included in the larger works,\’a0 we each made one piece, 18 x 12, using the same photograph as inspiration.
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These pieces were hung in the Garden’s\’a0 atrium where we will also be doing our demonstrations (12-4pm) of some of the techniques we used in the artwork. Some of us will be available at different times to walk through the exhibition to answer questions.

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To find our more info about each artist check out our blog at www.fiberartoptions.blogspot.com.

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The Exhibition will run through March 14th and we’d love to have you view our show.

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Feb. 6 through March 14, 2010
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Daniel Stowe Botanical Garden
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Belmont, NC
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704.825.4490
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www.dsbg.org
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So in that vein, here’s another sneak peek at Orchid #3. Can you correctly guess what this orchid piece is about?
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Ha!

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Toodles,
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I stretch, after having sat there for so long, look over and see this red blob on my floor,
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and realize that there’s a barely perceptible whizzing noise coming from the blob as well.\’a0 Now what do you think this can be?
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Of course the first thing any sane person does in this type of situation is….grab\’a0 the camera, of course (duh!).
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First things first, earlier in the afternoon I was helping my son with his homework. We finished and he left the room to repack his book bag. I then began to wonder what little gift he set up for me.
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So with camera in hand I step closer to reveal my gift (can you see it yet??????).
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And what to her wondering eyes should appear (yeh I know, must still be in the mind for Christmas)…
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…but a little boy – fast asleep.\’a0 Awww shucks…isn’t that the best gift?
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BTW, the big round thing under the blanket is my exercise ball.
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Don’t ask.
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ART BREAK:

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In a few weeks, the art group I belong to (fiberartoptions.blogspot.com)\’a0 will have a fiber art orchid exhibition at the Daniel Stowe Botanical Garden in Belmont, NC. We are so excited. So for the past few weeks I have been hard at work finishing all my pieces. Here’s a sneak peak at another one of them.
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I’ve tried something totally new for me and have hand painted this one using acrylic paint on Pimatex cotton, with Gac 900 as the textile medium (yah me!)
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Using Golden Gac 900 with their line of fluid acrylics (instead of regular textile medium) gives the fabric a softer hand than even using Jacquard textile paint, which is what I started with.\’a0 The area at the bottom right (painted with Jacquard and medium) is much harder, almost like paper, than the rest of the piece.
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I think I’m in love…with Golden products that is.
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