Art Quilt Constructed in Units

How do you do that? is a question I'm often asked about my quilts.  When I look at the entire finished thing, I think, "yeah, how DID I do that?"  The truth is, I DON'T do that.  I mean, I don't make the whole thing at once.  That would make me crazy.  I just make a lot of little pieces that I call units, and if I like them, I keep them, start hooking them together, and after awhile, I end up with a whole big quilt top. I might make a single unit 5 or 6 times before I think, yeah, that's it.  (Or, to hell with this!)

The photo below is of the Deer Harbor Post Office.  I think the building is charming, and it is the core of the community that has been my home for more than 20 years, so I wanted to quilt it.  It's kind of a complicated scene, further complicated by a Christmas Tree next to the door, and the winter-dead bushes around it.  But it had all the elements I like--the windows, the madrona tree, the dentalia trim on the porch and the corbels under the eves.  So I decided this is my new project.  I am going to try to change the point of view somewhat so that eye-level will be about where the "1893" sign is, instead of right into that obnoxious bed of English ivy.  That will also allow me to eliminate the wall.  I'm also eliminating most of the the madrona trees (even though I love them).  I'm going to keep the one on the far right of the building and make it bigger to help frame the building. At least that's the plan.  As I work through these things, plans change, often due to my limited ability to put my plan into fruition, or because I get a new, though not necessarily better, idea.

 

The most important units to me were the signs on the side of the post office.  If I couldn't make those, then the whole piece would suffer.  I figured out the signs and moved to the windows next, because again, those are the highest priority--they make this building what it is.  If I couldn't make good windows, then the piece wouldn't please me and I'd like abandon it.  

Next I made the one tree I am keeping in the image, then the eves and sky above it.  As each unit is made, if it really goes with the rest of the piece, I start attaching them to each other with my fall back product:  Elmer's Washable School Glue.  I put a thin bead along the edges of the pieces and heat set the glue with a hot iron.  The glue holds the pieces together very well, but can still be pulled apart without damage to the edges of the pieces if I need to change something.

I usually let things sit around in the glued state a few days to make sure I REALLY like them before using invisible monopoly thread and a narrow blind hem stitch to connect things in a more permanent way.

In the images on the left, three units are connected--the signs on the wall, the bench, and the first window.  At this point, I pretty much decide if the piece is going to work, and if I like it.  If I do, then I plunge ahead.  In the photo on the right, the eves and sky above have been added along with the tree.  The second window was made, but not connected yet.

 

Here's the drain pipe under construction, which will finish that whole right side of the building.    Since there's only going to be ONE tree, I went all in on it--it took about a jillion pins to put it together.  Next I think I'll move to the eves and porch roof on the left side of the image.  Chunk by chunk, each element gets added to the whole. 

One of the many ways I can screw up is not deciding what goes in front or in back of which other piece.  For example, above I've left an opening for the second window.  The gap has about an extra inch of fabric all around so the second window will be layered on top of it.  If I misjudge how much fabric is needed for the overlap, I can end up with a hole.  Then I have to decide if I can patch it, or if I need to remake that piece.  I make those decisions after a bit of cussing of course.

The Post Office Quilt Part 2

About 4 weeks into this project and here I am.  I took the photo I'm working from in the winter, but I decided to change the season to early fall...mostly because I wanted some foliage to fill in above the roof line and break up some of that vacant sky.  Also, last year I noticed how the afternoon sun filtered through the trees and made a really beautiful variation of light and dark on the side of the building.  

Except for some foliage along the base of the building and tree, the west side of the building is done.  

Now I can turn my attention to the north-facing side and that cool dentalia trip over the porch.  Once again, I'm eliminating things from the image--the christmas tree by the door, the barren lilac bush that's obscuring most of the north-facing window, and the parking sign.  I've shifted the eye-level line up a bit, and hope I can carry that through on the north side.  I'm going to put the north side in a deeper shadow than shown in the photo so that the sunny side stands out as the focal point.  At least that's the plan right now.

I don't want to make the entire north-side of the building because I want the sunny west-side to be the focal point.  I get nervous at this point, because I've got a month or so invested in this piece, and I don't want to screw it up.  (However, I'm already thinking of plan B in case I do, such as putting a madrone tree where that barren lilac bush is and obscuring most of the north-side.  

Well, there's nothing left to do but dive in and see where I end up.

Working from Photos: Good Ole Boys at the Shady Rest--

My brother and his partner Barb are incredible photographers.  They post a lot of their photos online where I pour over them.  When I saw this image of trucks I wanted to try to recreate it in fabric. I emailed my brother and Barb to ask if I could use the image. They weren't sure which one of them took the photo, but they graciously agreed I could use the image.

Ordinarily I don't work from just one photo, especially one taken by someone else, because I'm not interested in just copying a photo.  I usually see something in a particular light or time of day and like the image, then take a bunch of photos, and often make sketches to work from.  In this case I just had one photo of a scene I'd never seen.  But for some reason, the image really grabbed me.  Maybe because it is a story of aging.  These trucks used to be the big bruisers of the highway--working trucks driven by working men, and now sidelined due to age and infirmity.

 

I changed a few things, like I moved the window, and added the brown truck and the old fashion promotional thermometer to the left of the brown truck, to try to balance the composition a bit. I also made the second truck all red because I wanted it to be clearly separate from the yellow truck.  But mostly I stayed pretty true to the original image.   I like to sketch old farm equipment and trucks because they are complex, but this was my first attempt to quilt machinery.

ipad sketch, on Sketchbook Pro 

Pen & ink plus watercolor sketch of Grand Canyon train.

As usual, I made each element separately. Since the yellow truck is so big, I broke that into smaller units--the grill and lights, the hood, the cab, and the big tire.  That way, if I screwed something up, I wouldn't ruin the entire piece.  

I loved that "school bus yellow" truck but couldn't find any at any of the the fabric stores in NW Washington.  Everything I found was either harvesty-goldish or Easter-egg pastel, so I ended up hand-dyeing the yellow fabric with Procion Cold Water dyes from Dharma. With low-water immersion dyeing I was able to get variations in the color that looked a bit like the deterioration of the metal on the truck. I'm not a master dyer, so I ended up dyeing about 4 yards of Kona cotton to get the quarter yard or so that I actually used.  

I wasn't sure about the background.  I didn't really like the metal walls in the original photo.  I wanted something brighter, but in the end, went with the warehouse look.  the window draws the eye back into the image, but I'm not happy about it.  I think I should have made the window panes more green-ish, but since the walls were blue-gray, I decided, wrongly, that blueish window panes would work. I might go back and try to alter the color with Derwent INKtense color blocks...but that's always risky business on a finished quilt, because if I screw that up, I'll be in a bad mood for about a week.

Here's a close up of the truck fender.  I glue all the little pieces in place with Elmer's Washable School Glue until I can get the section to the sewing machine and stitch things in place with clear monopoly thread.   The glue is great, but I don't trust it to hold things over the long-haul.  

I didn't build these pieces on a background fabric, each little piece is only attached to it's neighbor.  Initially I pin all the little bits in place, then I go back, glue down the edges, and then stitch it.  Yes.  It's redundant.  Yes, it takes longer.  BUT I like the process, and until the quilting begins, I have lots of chances to change my mind--which I do a lot.

 

When I'm happy with the look of things, I make my "quilt sandwich" (the top which is the image of course, the batting and a backing fabric, and then I spend about a month tightly quilting the dickens out of the piece.   The quilting not only nails everything in place, but by using varying colors of thread I can add shadow, highlights, or blend together areas that are a little choppy. 

 I was especially pleased with the Coke machine.  I wasn't sure how I could do that, but ended up drawing the logo on Golden Threads Quilting Paper,  then sewing around the outline of the lettering, tore the Golden Threads paper off, and filled in the outline with free-motion quilting.  It's a little wonky, but I'm OK with that.

As usual, once I finish constructing and quilting, I avoid the boring final steps--square it up, binding it, making a hanging sleeve and a label. Once the challenging parts are done, I'm pretty much finished...unless I HAVE to finish it up for a show.  I'm not one of those never-put-off-until-tomorrow kind of gals.  Procrastination is my middle name.

SAQA Benefit Auction Piece, 2017

Bread and Bike, 12"x12".  Donated to SAQA 2017 Benefit Auction.  Sold for $1000.

Every year The Studio Art Quilter's Association (SAQA) holds an online auction to help fund the organization.  They ask members to create a 12-inch by 12-inch quilt and donate it to the group.  Then, in the month of September every year, they hold an online auction.  The pieces start out on day one going for $1000.  Each day a quilt is not sold, it's price drops.  I hope my quilt sells before it hits the-bottom-of-the-barrel price.

For me, making the auction quilts are a good opportunity to try out a new technique or an work on an  image that I would like to make into a bigger piece.  Bread and Bike is one I hope to make into a larger piece this winter.  As my quilts go, with the exception of the bike, it's a fairly easy design--mostly straight edges.

A few years ago I donated the piece below, called Spring Wellies, to SAQA.  Since then I have made a larger version that looks very similar.  It's rather handy to work out all the design issues on a little piece first--small investment in both time and money, and then to make the larger piece.

 

Well, before I could post this entry, I got an email From SAQA with news about my Bread and Bike Quilt.  It sold right out of the gate for $1000.  I was stunned.  Pleased, but stunned!  Thank you Shirley Neary!  I could never make a $1000 donation to an organization like SAQA, so it's really nice to have my little quilt fetch a nice donation.

 

From A to Z on Howard's Portrait Quilt.

Sometimes, on the rare occasion that we have a bright sunny day in the middle of winter, the light is so harsh that color is washed away, and all that remains are highlights and shadows.  I love that kind of contrast.  I took a bunch of phone photos of my subject with the idea of using the photo to draw my pattern, but just couldn't get the proportions right.

The quilt top is pieced, but obviously not finished being quilted or bound

I ended up enlarging one of my photos with a free, online poster-maker website called Rasterbator.  It is easy, and produces a very sharp image on multiple sheets of paper, that are numbered, making reassembling the sheets into the poster-sized image easy.  Using a black Magic Marker I altered places where I wanted more contrast, and painted white areas with acrylic paint.  That gave me the road map I needed.

I experimented with a different technique for constructing this quilt.  Using silk organza as a base, I mounted the enlarged Rasterbator photo on a piece of foam insulation and layered silk organza over the photo so I could build the quilt pieces on the organza with bits of glue.  The organza is simi-transparent, so I could see the areas of light and dark through it as I added the fabric.
 
It was a mild success.   The glue soaked through the organza and stuck to the paper underneath, which made removing the piece from the board to quilt it a bit of a mess.  I guess I should have put a piece of clear plastic shower curtain between the organza and the paper to better protect the paper, but I didn't.

I don't really like to build my quilts on a backing, because it means there is one more layer of fabric that can shift around when I quilt everything.  I am manic about keeping everything FLAT.  The more layers, the more likely something will shift.  To help reduce the possibility of movement, I used spray basting to adhere the quilt top to the batting and then hand basted around the major image areas to keep things as flat as possible.  There are a few puckery spots on this one, but nothing that catches my eye, unless I go looking for them.

Black tulle laid over gray and black areas of the quilt.

With raw-edged applique there are always bits of loose threads, which normally I like, but on a portrait, can be distracting.  So as a final layer, I overlaid the entire piece with black tulle.  The glasses frames are layered on top, rather than as reverse-applique, which is what I usually do with skinny little pieces.  I was worried they might come loose or get too tattered, so tulle helped secure them. Unfortunately, the tulle dulled the whites too much, so I cut away the black tulle from the stark white of the beard, nose and hat.

Then, I densely quilted the piece.  I always anguish over quilting on portraits, because the quilting definitely can enhance or detract from the image.  I basically try to follow the contours of the face, but when deep shadows are involved, it creates a bit of consternation.

Once I get the quilting done, I just can barely face doing the squaring up, binding, hanging sleeve and label.  Wish I had the money to hire someone to do those fiddley bits for me!

SAQA's Call for Entries--Guns: A Loaded Conversation

Studio Art Quilter's Association, SAQA for short, has a new call for entries out.  The show is titled Guns:  A Loaded Conversation.  Apparently some SAQA members thought the topic was too controversial.  I am not one of those people.  Art has always played a role in social movements.  Gun safety and gun rights have been a hot top in our society for at least 30 years.  This is a timely topic worth exploring through Art.  SAQA has 3500 members in 37 countries, so I imagine this show will draw entries from multiple countries and represent multiple perspectives.

SAQA is encouraging artists to blog about the process of creating their piece for this show.  I often intend to document my process, but rarely do.  You'd think I'd remember how I did something, but I don't.  With most of my pieces, I'm inventing as I go, and a few quilts down the road, I can't recall how I held a million little pieces in place before I stitched them, or what, if anything I used for a base fabric.  Perhaps this time, with SAQA's encouragement, I actually will document my steps!

So, here's the beginning. This is the way most of my quilts begin--a hastily scratched out on a piece of scrap paper that makes no sense to anyone but me.  Honestly, sometimes, if the sketch lays around long enough, it doesn't make any sense to me either.

 Though this may not look like much now, I am picturing a light, bright center with many buildings--schools, movie theaters, shopping malls, government buildings, churches, mosques, synagogues, restaurants, and bars appliqued in an overlapping manner in the center of the quilt.  Surrounding the center I picture silhouettes of all kinds of guns--rifles, automatic and semi-automatic assault weapons, and hand guns appliqued on a dark background, and all pointing toward the buildings that represent our society.  My working title for this piece is A Clear and Present Danger.

The show is opened to any SAQA members.  Deadline for entry is October 31.  All the details are here:  SAQA,  GUNS: A LOADED CONVERSATION.

I Can See Clearly Now...well, kinda.

J

On Wednesday, August 10th I had my first cataract surgery, which brought quite a few changes to my visual world.  As a visual artist, this is both exciting and a little unsettling.

My eyes are (were) minus 9 diopters, which means I've lived in a sort of Mr. Magoo-world since I was six years old and got my first pair of glasses. But, Wednesday, through the miracle of modern technology, my right-eye became -2.25 diopters in the space of about 10 minutes, which means I can see very clearly out to about 3 feet with that eye, and kind of OK into infinity.  That is amazing to me since my previous visual clarity without glasses only went out about 6 inches.  Beyond that, my world was a murky swirl of hazy colors, which even in the familiar landscape of my own home, was often confounding.  It is quite miraculous to wake up in the morning now, open my new bionic eye and see the bedside clock, my sweet husband's face, and even kind of make out the trees and weather outside our window without glasses!

Right after the surgery, my brain went kind of crazy trying to reconcile the 6.75 diopter difference between the surgical eye and the 90-pound weakling eye.  I felt seasick and like I was walking with one leg in a ditch.  I was mentally telling myself to just put on my big-girl pants and tough it out the next two weeks until my other eye got the surgical refit.  Fortunately, my eye doc took pity on me, and gave me a contact lens for the old eye, which helped level the playing field...literally.  The contact lens is not at my exact prescription and doesn't have an astigmatism correction, but it closes the gap between the new and old eye, and helps get my leg out of that dang ditch!  It's a temporary fix, because in two weeks the other eye will get it's own little surgical miracle.

What I learned about my eyes this past month:

Even though I've had these same eyes my whole life, I did not know that minus 9 diopters is an XXL myopic prescription.  I also didn't know I that have unusually large eyeballs.  An average eye length is 24 millimeters.  At 28 millimeters, I'm again in the XXL realm.  I never wondered WHY I was myopic, and nobody in all these years ever thought to tell me...but there it is: Long eyeballs! 

My quarter-inch thick old friends.

I discovered my old coke-bottle lenses shrunk everything--well, I guess I knew that, but never really thought about it.  Turns out my glasses were a bit like looking through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.  The first thing I noticed when the eye patch came off my bionic eye?  My legs are a lot shorter than I thought, and my feet are big as air mattresses!  I can't yet tell the difference between a teaspoon or tablespoon without comparing them to each other--they both look big as cereal bowls, and my depth perception is off enough that I can't seem to get through a doorway without running into the door jam.

Cataracts filter your world through a warm, soft, sepia colored lens.  With my new unfiltered bionic eye I can see that my house is not as clean as I thought, and I've discovered how WRINKLED I am. Pre-surgery, without my glassess, I could only see my face VERY close up, which meant I was only looking at a couple square inches of facial real estate.  With my glasses on, if I stepped back enough to see my whole face, my glasses shrunk everything and my cataracts filtered out a LOT of detail.  But now, I can see the whole naked truth: I'm as shriveled up as one of those apple-head dolls.  

I haven't been bold enough to look at my art pieces yet, because I already know some of the colors aren't going to be what I imagined, and I fear they may look a lot rougher and less finished than I intended.  So I've left them rolled up in bags for now--you can only take so many shocks in one week!

Meanwhile, I'm sort of housebound, since I don't have legal vision for driving, and I can't run or do CrossFit for a month, which makes me a little restless, and I'm still kind of seasick.  Howard's been his usual wonderful self--going to all my appointments with me, chauffuering me around like I'm some kind of royalty, reading to me, and listening to me whine.   After the second surgery, I'll have near perfect close-up vision.  Then I'll have to wait almost a month (til Sept 22) to get refracted for glasses, and another week for the glass to come, at which time, I will finally have distance vision (yay!).  I'll then be legal to drive, and roam at will in the big wide world.  It's all good.  It's just a process that takes a little patience--and, no surprise here, patience is not one of my strong suits!