What I am Working on Now

Our little rowboat decked out for the holidays

I thought I would have this quilt done in time for Christmas. I'm not a big fan of traditional red and green Christmas decore, but I liked the way our little rowboat looked when we decorated it to go moonlight rowboat caroling. Buttttt, i'm still working on the free-motion quilting, and when finishing was almost in sight, I decided to do free-hand feathers on the planks of the boat, which are looking really good, but taking lots of time, so looks like this one won't be ready until Christmas 2014.

What I am anxious to start is the quilt below--sea gulls feeding over a bait ball.  It is based on a photo taken by the owner of the Western Prince, Ivan Reiff.    I plan to do the entire piece in black, white and grays--hence my little cheater value chart at the top of the drawing.  I'm planning for it to be 60" x 48" with no borders.

I also want to do a piece for the SAQA traveling trunk show, but the requirement is for a piece 7"x10".  Even with my newest glasses and a pair of cheaters over them, I can barely see what I am doing on something that small, soooo, I might have to let go of that one.

My Studio

The workbench, 12 feet by 4 feet, with lots of storage
underneath.  My stash is partially visible on the right.

I love looking at photos of other people's studios--cool rooms with vaulted ceilings, huge banks of windows and designer furnishings.

My studio is in the "hayloft" of the blue barn behind my house, and has none of the features mentioned above.  Nevertheless, I love my space, and I am never happier than when I'm in my loft drawing, painting, sewing or just putzing around.

I have intended for years to clean up my studio and take some finely crafted photos to make it look better than it is, but that is never going to happen.  Sooo I've decided to put my studio, the ugly step-sister of studios, out there for all to see.

My space is upstairs in one end of our barn, in a 12-foot by 24-foot bowling alley of a room.  Because it is under the barn roof, it has a high, but sloping ceiling.  The room is insulated, and clad with salvaged corigated  metal on the two sloped sides, and sheet rock on the two flat walls.  I've always meant to paint the metal white, but it's been 12 years since my husband constructed the room for me, and so far, it's still raw metal.  The metal is magnetic, so it is easy to stick up photos, drawings, notes to self…anything that I don't want to lose in the clutter.

One end has a work counter which is really useful when I don't bury it in tons of stuff.  Because of the sloping roof, under the counter I have a space about 6-feet deep to store WAYYYY too much stuff.

SEWING TABLE

My pink foam insulation table.  It was easy to build, cheap,
and works well for free-motion quilting.

The other end of my loft has my sewing table.  I used some pink insulation foam to enlarge the clear acrylic table that came with my sewing machine.  Now I have a huge, flat surface for free-motion quilting.  I painted the foam white, since I didn't want my studio to look like Barbie's Little Stitch and Sew, and then covered the whole thing, including the acrylic table with a clear, plastic shower curtain.  It was ALMOST slick enough to slide my quilts around on, but not quite.  So I sprayed the shower curtain with spray starch, and wiped it dry with a clean cloth.  I don't know what made me think of using spray starch, but it was probably the only spray I had that wasn't glue.  OH MY, do my quilts skate around now.  Some times I have to stick pins through the quilt into the insulation foam to keep them from completely gliding away from me.

THE WET STUFF

The real pig sty of my entire studio is the counter-high table where I work with paints, glues, and small amounts of dyes.  I have a couple of those non-stick silicone sheets to work on.  They clean up really well.  Under the table I stow bolts of fabric.  I typicially only buy fat quarters to use in my quilts, but I do buy bolts of petticoat netting to use as a base for my machine appliqued quilts, bolts of tulle for zillions of things, and bolts of white cotton, canvas and muslin that I use for dyeing, painting, and other odd-ball projects.  Serious dyeing of yard goods happens elsewhere, because my studio doesn't have running water.

DESIGN WALL
On the left you can see my design wall.  It is two sheets of 4x8 foot pink insulation foam glued to the sheet rock , and covered with a queen-sized piece of cotton batting.  Small pieces of fabric stick to it pretty well, and it is easy to stick pins into it.  Because of the sloped ceiling, the far end of my design wall has the corner cut off.  In spite of being 8 feet wide, I often wish it were bigger, as I always seem to be working on multiple pieces at the same time.   To give me more design/construction space I tape two sheets of foam-board together and lean them against the wall.  At any given time, the quilt on the design wall is the favored child, while the ones on foam boards are the problem children awaiting that elusive stroke of genius to salvage the mess I've made.

LIGHTS
I used to have these really cool old industrial-looking hanging lights, but here in the gloom of the Pacific Northwest, in my north-facing studio, they just weren't bright enough.  My husband suggest I go to a place that specializes in designing lighting for industrial shops.  The guy I talked to told me artists need full-spectrum lights, placed in room spanning banks to get bright, shadow-less light.  He looked at the diagram of my studio, and got me all the bits and pieces he said I needed.  I paid him $300, and my husband and I brought the lights home and installed them.  (Well, my husband installed them, and I handed him stuff up the ladder, and made the tea.)  Today I have NINE sets of not-very-pretty lights, but I LOVE them.  (you can see one bank of them in the photo above.)  My room is bright, and there are no dark spots or shadows.  Of course, bright lights highlight the fact that I need to clean up my room, paint the walls, and probably replace the flooring.  All that light is also great for photographing my quilts…but not so great for photographing my wrinkly face!

The Road to California

I've wanted to enter the Road to California Quilt Show for a few years, but never had anything I thought worth of being juried into that pretigious show.  This fall, when reviewing my list of upcoming shows, I noticed the Road to California enry fee was only $10.  Application fees to some of the shows now are as much as $30 or $40 bucks...i just refuse to pay that much on principal.  $40 bucks so someone can look at two digital photos online and reject me?  Nah.

Anyway, ten bucks was a gamble I was willing to take.  I decided to enter Deep in December, which had won an Honorable Mention at the 2012 LaConner Quilt Museum's Quilt Fest.  Then I went off to Europe for a month and forgot about the whole thing.  So it was a nice surprise to come home and learn my ten bucks had been well spent.  This little quilt is going to Road to California.  

Making the Elwha River quilt

When the first dam was removed from the Elwha River  in the fall of 2012, and salmon migrated above the dam site for the first time in a hundred years, I wanted to make a quilt to commemorate the event.

I knew I wanted the majority of the quilt to be water, which presented a number of problems, including:

• how to create the color and contrast of a clear fluid with the opaque medium of fabric
• how to show the dynamic movement of falling water
• how to make the fish look as though they are emerging from the water, and are not just pasted on it.

light-weight Pellon pinned over paper drawing of my turtle

I drew a sketch of the general shape of the water fall, and placement and scale of the fish, scanned my drawing, and enlarged it with an on-line program called PosterRazor, explained in an earlier posting.

After taping all the 8.5x11 sheets of paper together from my PosterRazor printout, I had a full-sized drawing.  I stapled this onto my design wall and pinned a very light-weight non-woven Pellon  interfacing over  the drawing.  I could see the basic outline of the drawing through the Pellon.  I don't have a photo showing this on my fish quilt, but you can see how easy it is to see through the Pellon to the drawing below on my turtle quilt.

I use seed flats to store scraps of fabric by color.  The flats stack nicely.

Then I raided my stash for every blue fabric I own from almost white, to almost black.  I keep bins of scraps from earlier projects, sorted by color, and these scraps became the bulk of the water fall.  I used an ordinary kiddy glue stick (washable) to attach the pieces of fabric in place on the pellon.  The good thing about a washable glue stick, is it does a half-hearted job of gluing, which means it is easy to pull off pieces that just don't work, and move them to another spot on the quilt , or toss them back in one of the bins.

THE WATER
Constructing the water was really a case of trial and error.  A lot of pieces got glued on, and the next day, pulled off.  Eventually I was satisfied with the water.  At this point, I used clear polyester thread and stitched the strips in place.  This wasn't incredibly exacting, but the edges of most of the pieces were snagged under the "invisible" thread.  By this time I knew I was going to add a top layer of silk organza, so stitching every piece in place wasn't necessary--quilting was going to finish the job of securing each piece, with the organza keeping the lose bits from coming undone.

I cut a layer of silk organza (from Dharma Trading (they sell a reasonably priced, good quality silk organza) and covered the entire piece.  I did this because I was not satisfied with the water...it didn't seem misty enough,  I felt the organza would help blend the colors a bit better.

THE FISH
I looked at a lot of photos of salmon jumping water falls, to get the shape of my fish.  The fish are cut from gray batiks and layered over with bridal veil to give the impression of fish scales.  The lateral line and shading around the gill slit were added with Berol Prismacolor pencils, and iron to set the the color.  The feedback I got from the quilt Judges at the LaConner Quilt Show said the fish were too small in relation to the water...i rhink they are right.

I pinned my fish in place, and stitched them down with a very narrow zig-zag stitch and invisible polyester thread from Superior Thread.

QUILTING
Then I made my quilt sandwich and free-motion quilted the piece on my domestic sewing machine.  I simply followed the flow of the water, and used a mix of threads from silver and white through to navy blue.  The hard part was keeping it all flat, with no puckers, because there are five layers in play--the backing fabric, the batting, the Pellon base, the quilt top and the organza.  I lightly quilted the piece working from the center out, this helped hold everything in place, and prevent puckers.  Then I went back in and quilted more densely.  The Judges at LaConner said my free-motion stitches were too small.  The stitch length should have been longer.  To that I say, oh, for pity sake. 

The bottom panel of the quilt, which in retrospect, I don't like, is micro-stippled with the words, "home to the Elwha...at last".  I drew the letters on with a fine-tipped chalk marker, then stitched the outline, and finally micro-stippled inside the letters with white, light-weight #40 wt.  polyester thread

The final step was to add beads--silver, blue, pearl, white and clear to represent the splash and add a bit of sparkle. On the water across the quilt.

  

Headed to LaConner Quilt Fest

This quilt, a tribute to the removal of dams on the Elwha River, has been juried into the 2013 LaConner Quilt Fest. I am pleased about that, though I am not satisfied with this quilt itself.  It doesn't have enough contrast for my tastes, and though I wanted it to be clear that I was representing the Elwha River, I don't like the dark strip across the bottom with the micro stippled writing.  I wish I had carried some of the strands of water into the lettered strip.  Oh well, too late now.

What doesn't show in this photo are the clear, white, and pearl beads scattered across the watery splashes.  The beads are subtle, but does give the quilt surface a bit of watery sparkle.

Little Quilt for SAQA

Every year the Studio Art Quilters Association holds a benefit auction. They ask members to donate one 12inch by 12 inch quilt which they auction off in two separate venues: one on-line, and one at the Houston International Quilt Show.

Here's what the SAQA auction has taught me about donating art to worthy causes:
--A 12x12-inch quilt brings in about the same amount of money as a larger quilt donation, with far less investment of time and materials. So when asked for an art donation for an auction, i find myself working in this smaller scale.
--12x12-inch quilts are large enough to experiment with elements I might wish to include in larger works.
--The quilt name needs to tell the whole story, since an artist's statement is not typically included with the art donation, but the "story" can and does add value. This is particularly true with topics that have strong messages that may not be blatantly obvious.
--I donate art pieces because my work usually brings in more money than i could afford to donate to the cause or organization in cash.
--Rumor has it that donating art work "gets your name out there." I have not found that to be true.

I've Gone Off Press n Seal

After struggling to remove all the plastic Press n Seal from under the stitches of my free motion projects, I'm giving it up.

I'm back to using Golden Threads paper. I mark the paper with a thin chalk pencil, then pin it to my quilt. The paper gets perforated as I stitch, and mostly falls away. The chalk easily brushes off the fabric, unlike the ink I used on the press and seal that sometimes got driven into the fabric and thread as I stitched.

Press n Seal was a good effort, but just doesn't work for me.

Mark Quilt Top with Press 'n' Seal

Ella's self-portrait, heavily free-motion quilted

When Deep In December won an honorable mention at The LaConner Quilt Fest, the reviewers wrote that the composition and construction were good, but the free-motion quilting needed help.  Since then I've been working on my free-motion techniques.  Working on little practice squares just doesn't do it more me.  I need the tension of working on a real quilt to push my skills along.

So, I've made a couple simple quilts that rely on the quilting to be effective, including this one I made from my granddaughter's drawing of herself.

Marking the quilt top is one of the challenges.  Mostly I've used a blue, water-soluable pen, which is OK if the finish quilt top can be wetted, and if the fabrics aren't too dark, though I swear, I have ghosts of blue pen in spots on my quilts. 

Advantages of Press'n'Seal
 Recently I've been experimenting with Glad's Press 'n' Seal.  I like it for these reasons:
1.  You can easily place the Press 'n' Seal over the design you want to copy, and trace it on to the Press'n'Seal.

2.  When finger pressed on to fabric, the Press'n'Seal stays put...even if you have to pick out stitches, it doesn't budge.

3.  After the stitching is done, the Press'n'Seal can be torn away.

Disadvantages
1.  Tearing the press and seal away from heavily stitched areas can be REALLY tedious.
2.  Some of the marked plastic may get trapped under the thread and be impossible to remove.

Press'n'Seal partially removed

Considerations
1.  Make sure the pen you use doesn't rub off because the smears can end up on your quilt, defeating the whole purpose of using  Press'n'Seal. 

2.  Chose an thin, permanent marker, and test the product by sewing through marked press and seal with white thread on white fabric.  Tear off the Press'n'Seal.  If you see any color on the white fabric or thread, chose another pen.  So far, my fav is an extra-fine Sharpie.

3.  Be wary of piling up a lot of thread on the Press'n'Seal, as you will inevitably trap some of the plastic underneath the thread.  If the plastic has dark markings and the fabric or thread is light colored, the ink on the plastic will show and be just about impossible to remove.

Posterazor for Enlarging Photos for Quilt Patterns

A while back I wrote about enlarging photos to use them as a basis for a pictorial quilt.  At that time the only ways I knew how to do this with reasonable accuracy and minimal expense were:
 

New Quilting Art Goals

newest work...Going Home (Salmon to be added.)

When I was a teacher, every fall I had to write annual goals.  I found that process useful, so when I retired and changed professions, I decided to keep the goal-writing practice.  It has been a useful tool for bumping me along the road of my art career.