Hello Friends,

I always see this weekend as a marker of the start of fall- even the official day is the 22.  I am posting this just a little early as I am off  to do a bit of teaching in Maine this week end.  I  will go back to my Thur posts next week and tell you more about the class at that time.    Summer has rushed by me with all its events and joys.  I did not get as much studio time as I would have liked, but that is the pattern for me at the moment.    The trip to the south west was wonderful.  I had a great time with my friends and took a ton of photos.  The colors and the textures were great.    I found the rusts,browns sage greens  and strong blues of the clear sky really fascinating.   Those influences fed directly into my two class  at Quilting by the Lake.    We experienced the joys of construction this summer  as  well  because we added a new garage to the back of our house.    I did finish both of the graduation quilts- but in the rush I forgot to take pictures of them.  The one for my grandson has already gotten rave reviews as he tells me it really adds color as well as warmth to his dorm room.

Progress Report :Slipping Through

   I have finally finished this quilt.   It has given me lots of challenges.  I had to start over after I discoverd that working this large made the openings for the “ribbons” to pass through saged with the weight of the fabric.  The solution was to put boneing in the quilt at the top and bottom of each whole.   I really wanted this quilt with its new direction for me to be an entry in a quit show so that aspect pushed me forward when I hit the blocks.  The “ribbons” created a problem too as I fused them to Tyntex this time instead of using batting inside.   I wanted them to stand higher off the surface and have more body.   I like the final effect even though it was a challenge for me

Pink Curves

      This was the first thing that I finished this summer.  I think I learned a lot about how to cut curves and I still have more to learn there.   I like the action of the reflective machine work and the hand work also added to the interest on the surface.   I will keep working with curves as I feel there is still lots of ways to use them and there is more to explore here.

 

 

 

 

 

Lace Layers
I started this work  before summer too.   I enjoyed adding the lace on top of the surfaces of yellow  this created strong texture- one of my real loves.   The black is such a great contrast with it’s wonderful detailed lines of yellow ans white that it too works to make the piece stronger.   I added some fancy machine stitches to the surface when I was adding the lace as well.

Canyon  de Chilly – White Tower

 This quilt was lots of fun with lots of new learning exeriences.  I started the work in Vsalerie Goodwin’s class at Quilting by the Lake.  She taught us how to sew on organza to build up layers.  The close up of the tower is a good example of that process in action.The organza was painted with fabric paints a to get the tones and shades I wanted on this part of the work.  Then it was sewn down to the background.   The class was about composition and she did a good job of helping me see how that could be used to my advantage and pointed out to me that I did not need to make my work look exactly like the real location.

Canyon Shadows- Petroglyphs 

  This quit came about because I had made the petroglyphic images for the first canyon piece – but when I got home I felt that adding them to the already too big and busy piece would only spoil it . I had also removed my organza map of the ruins from the first canyon piece as it had become a strong landscape in my mind without that part.  In this piece they serve as a strong transition to the sky section of the workThe organza does mute the colors of the stone I think.   I was fascinated by how  many petroglyphs this canyon held and how very strong the images were.  The figure on the left was done by and Anasazi Indian 2000 years before the one on the right that was created by a Navajo about 200 years ago. 

Tide’s Out

This quilt belongs to the challenge series as it started with the wrinkled silk that is the water portion on this work.    There is a place along the  east coast where the land has these board fences along the shore line and at one point the ocean juts into the land.  That is what I was trying to show here.  I enjoyed doing the machine drawing of the grasses along the fence on this quilt.   Using two types of green variegated thread really helped the process I think.

Excavations

This quilt is also one of the Exploration Challenges.  I was working from a book that talked about cutting and tearing into lower layers of the stacks of fabric.

I like all the texture in this work and the messiness of all the frayed edges only adds more interest to my eye.  I think I will try this idea again in the future and  work with a different more unified color pallet.

Shifting Gears

This quilt came out of the class with Judy Langiel.  I made the screen of the gears in her class and printed the fabric there.  I combined the gears with a photo transfer image of a  model A.  I am challenging myself to new colors and to trying to work with angles as opposed to rectangles and squares.

I hope everyone had a fun filled and creative summer and is now ready to shift gears into the delights of fall.

Keep Creating

Carol