A Little Time Out...

For the last ten days or so I've taken a little time off from my normal fiber work to make two small crib size charity quilts for the St. Joseph Center Pre School program in Venice, California. Every once in a while I find it amazingly therapeutic to abandon the art quilt aesthetic - the color choices, the complicated techniques required to get my ideas on to fabric, the choices of materials and embellishments, the paints, dyes, fusibles, etc. - in favor of some old fashioned piecing. It clears out the cobwebs, simplifies things and makes me feel like a real "quilter".


A buying spree of some packs of 5" charm squares and layer cakes of fun bright modern cottons at a local quilt show gave me the raw materials and I was off. A quick way to sew and slice 10" squares into half square triangles given to me by a friend resulted in a fairly "Modern" chevron quilt and a package of Moda charm squares with simple sashing became a sweet pastel cuddly thing for a little girl.

 

  
I found some great modern border and backing fabrics on the sale rack at Sew Modern in West LA for 40% off. I love their bright modern prints and I'm not always able to use them in my other work. My one problem was adapting my usual very tight compact decorative quilting with fine silk thread technique into large overall quilting with strong heavy thread that would stand up to pre-K abuse. The great part is that quilting that way finished the thread work on each piece in one day! I also used a great technique from the AQS magazine American Quilter for an attractive, but durable faux piped machine binding.

 

 
They are both done and ready for delivery, leaving me cleansed and ready for some art quilt projects that have been dancing in my head.

A Few Tomatoes on a Plate

I've been asked to write a bit about the technique I used for my little "Blue Plate Special" quilt for the SAQA Benefit Auction. So here it is...

It all started last August on a warm Saturday morning in Southern California when my husband came back from the local farmers' market with a bag of gorgeous heirloom tomatoes. There were big overblown Brandywines, striped Green Zebras, Purple Cherokees and some I couldn't name. I piled them up in my favorite blue floral Porselyn Fles Delft bowl and put them on the marble counter in front of the kitchen window. They looked so luscious that I had to photograph them.I liked the photo and a month later used it on the label for the Roma tomatoes I can every September and then quickly forgot about it.



So, come early this month I was in a class at Asilomar taught by the wonderful Australian artist and quilter Jenny Bowker during a lull in the class one day, we were talking about IPad apps for use in art and she mentioned Sketch Guru which she uses it to make applique' patterns out of her photographs. The program is also available for Android....

 I was intrigued and later that night downloaded the app and started playing.The app allows you to download a photo from your camera roll, then crop and apply a number of art filters such as pencil sketch, watercolor, engraving, gouache, black and white print, blackboard chalk plus several more. I started playing with the watercolor function on my tomatoes, played a bit with the settings- saturation, brush strokes, etc. and ended up with an image I really liked. It was so easy.....




I opened it in Photoshop Elements on my computer and sized it correctly for a 12x12 image and uploaded the image to Spoonflower.com to be printed on a fat quarter of their best quality cotton. Then I waited patiently..... In 10 days I had my fabric.

I took it into the studio where I enhanced the shading and contrast a bit with with Tsukineko Ink markers and thread painted the tomatoes themselves with some shiny variegated polyester threads to emphasize the contours and highlights. To achieve some actual dimension to the rounded forms I added a layer of cotton batting to the back and machine stitched around the tomatoes. I trimmed the batting away very carefully to the stitching line. This achieves almost a trapunto like effect when the piece is placed on the final larger piece of batting and the background is closely machine quilted. the piece was bordered with a rich red hand dyed cotton and trimmed to size.



I found a a printed backing fabric full of luscious tomatoes in my fabric stash and the tight background quilting was done in fine silk thread in a fill pattern Diane Gaudynski calls "bananas". The tomatoes stand out and proud! The final finishing included a facing hand stitched to the back, a sleeve and label.

It's been packed and sent off to the SAQA Benefit Auction which will begin in early September, but I had another fat quarter printed at the same time and I'm playing around with ideas for another version of Blue Plate Special" Stay tuned....