Quilt Festival Houston Part II

More of the sights and quilts at Houston Quilt Festival..      



Of course, there are vendors.......                                                                                      

Hundreds and hundreds of vendors.  I got in trouble with a few - some wonderful watery batiks, a light/magnifier for my machine,  A lovely piece of over dyed cotton from Wendy Richardson, a French cotton tablecloth and napkins, some repro glazed chintz from the ladies from Amsterdam and some big spools of YLI silk thread. There's lots of other stuff arriving the end of the week in my shipped box. 

I spent an hour or so volunteering in the SAQA booth selling books, cards, memberships, etc  where I met some wonderful quilters from Texas and all over the country. The last group  of 12" auction quilts for the SAQA Benefit Auction were exhibited and selling. My Mated for Life II was on the wall in the middle below the sign and sold! Always a great feeling of relief....  Two SAQA shows were on display - Celebrating Silver and Redirecting the Ordinary. What a great experience touring them with SAQA President Kris Sazaki! 

And, of course, there are winners in the judged show.... here are just a few of my favorites among them. 

Nancy Prince won Best of Show for this wonderful thread painted snow scene 

"On This Winter's Day" 

David Taylor's magnificent "Beneath My Wing" won the Fairfield Master Award for Contemporary Artistry for this intimate and sensitive portrayal of a swan and cygnet. All of David's quilts are hand appliquéd and very closely machine quilted - hundreds and thousands of tiny pieces. As you may know from seeing some of my recent work, I have a thing for swans. 

"Hurricane" by Janneke De Vries-Bodzinga of The Netherlands was awarded first place in Art- Abstract- Large. She told me that it is all hand appliquéd, but machine quilted. The color and movement of this was spectacular  - I was completely enthralled. 

The World of Beauty Award - "Gift of Appreciation "by Kyoko Yamauchi from Japan. Such wonderful detail and amazing workmanship. 

"Moody Beach, Maine, 1957" by Margot McDonnell from Arizona won a second place in Art - Pictorial . This one reminded me of the work of the French Impressionist Boudin - I loved the gray skies reflected in the water. 

And so many quilts that are truly outstanding, but went without awards.  I don't always agree with the judges anyway.  Here are some of my favorites from the long aisles of quilts in the judged show Quilts: A World of Beauty.....

Collaged entirely from various colors and sizes and textures of sewn on buttons

"Red Sunflower" by Susan Bianchi of Saratoga, California 

"Treasures of Egypt" by Jennifer Richenberger from Australia (I apologize if the last name is wrong, I can't read my notes) featured wonderful use of unusual fabrics and appealed to my closet Egyptologist soul. 

Two by one of my favorite artists and friend Sherry Kleinman, the one on the left "Geisha" painted painted on canvas and "Waiting Expectantly" on the right drawn on her iPad and then printed digitally. 

"The Iris" by Judith Roderick. Beautiful abstracted image of the flower. Bright clear color. 

Jerry Granata's "Samson and Delilah".  I'm taking his class in January at Road to California on quilting with unusual fabrics. He certainly does that!

My friend and traveling companion Sandra Lauterbach and her moving and very personal piece "The Wailing Wall of Krakow" digitally designed from her photographs, letters and documents telling the story of her Polish family's history in the Holocaust.

And a fabulous antique  from an exhibit of Mary Koval's Collection - a hand painted Indian Tree of Life cotton Palumpur in all its original unfaded glory. 

In the "Inspired By Libby" exhibit (honoring Libby Lehman) Laura Wasilowski's "Libby's Leaves" I adore her use of glowing color and purchased some of her hand dyed fabrics at the show. 

 

In a beautiful exhibit of French patchwork masterpieces sponsored by Bohin  "Etoile De Bethlehem"by Nathalie Ferri - quilting is truly international. 

So by 3:30 on Saturday afternoon I was totally exhausted and limped over to the lovely and comfortably elegant Four Seasons Hotel across the park to repair myself over a lovely pot of tea and pick up my bags before going off to the Airport. Festival is a terrific experience - absolutely go if you can! So much inspiration that I can't wait to get back into my studio and create something.  Won't be there next year, but see you there in 2016...

Check out http://ninamariesayre.blogspot.com for "Off the Wall Fridays"

Home from Long Beach

Home late last night from International Quilt Festival Long Beach feeling pretty exhausted but inspired and happily remembering all the wonderful quilts and the friends I connected with while there.

"Bridges" a special exhibit at Festival put together by Quilts on the Wall Fiber Artists was very well received and included my quilt "Rainy Day San Francisco, October 2010". It's great to finally be able to include it on my blog. It was turned in early last spring for the jurying process  and we were asked not to show any of the quilts in the show until after the debut this weekend in Long Beach.

Mine was based on a cell phone photograph I took at an intersection on the Embardcadero last October as we arrived in the city for the San Francisco Fall Antiques Show. it was interesting to interpret the weather conditions of that dreary wet morning in fabric, textile paint, couched yarns and a few digital images using a very limited grisaille pallette with just a minor splash of bright red.

Over the weekend i was often asked the question why "I'm Sorry" was the license plate.  The only answer is that I searched the internet for a plate that would be make the viewer wonder and maybe make up a story to match it.  It worked!

The next stop for Bridges is a quilt show in Pennsylvania and then we hope on to Road to California next January in Ontario. The show will travel for one to two years.  

The vendor side of the long Beach Festival is always a huge magnet - and along with aisle after aisle of the the normal fabric, notions and embellishments there were some interesting new stands. Among them a company selling casual and dress shows made from the colorful mola applique's of central America, a software developer with a program to organize all your quilts and their information on your computer (had to have that one - www.QuiltAlbum.com) and some jewelry pieces made from rolled and stiffened filigree fabric.  A whole stand selling Derwent Intense colored pencils - my new favorite surface design tool and a lady demonstrating everything you can do with them on fabric was another winner.

All that and three great full day classes in three days with Esterita Austin, Pam Holland and Judy Coates Perez! Again it was a great, but exhausting weekend. Can't wait for next year!                                    

Noriko Endo Inspiration!

The other night I took this recently finished piece to the monthly meeting of the Santa Monica Quilt Guild for the Show and Tell part of the program. I received some great feedback and lots of questions about the technique used in "Autumn Aspens" - so to answer all those questions, here goes....

When the catalogue of the recent International Quilt Festival Long Beach arrived last spring I was excited to see Noriko Endo's name among the teachers and quickly jumped at the chance to take her "Confetti Naturescapes" class. She is a charming and talented, though very self-effacing, quilter and teacher from Japan. A truly lovely lady with a delicate sensibility and a talent for translating the natural world into fabric and thread, her quilts have an ethereal quality I am drawn to.

I had first seen her technique on Simply Quilts and had followed her work since. She has recently published her book Confetti Naturescapes which is published by Dragon Threads Publishing and is available on the Dragon Threads site. My painfully inept attempt at her technique is woefully lacking in the "je ne sais quoi" so visible in hers, but take a look online at her magnificent quilts and I will attempt to describe the process.

First we started with a photo - I chose a photos of a grove of aspen turning to autumn color on the edge of a Sierra Nevada meadow. Looking now at that photo, I realize I should have added more detail in the trunks and branches, but ah...hindsight...

From the colors in the photo we chose fabrics to match (hand dyes and batiks work the best because they are two sided) and chopped strips up into small confetti like pieces. Literally 1/4 to 1/8 inch in size. Lots of slice and dice with the rotary cutter. Following our photos these confetti pieces were piled on to batting and backing the size of our intended quilt to suggest areas of color along with larger pieces of sky to suggest sky or water.

Next, we laid down a piece of fine black tulle over the whole piece and pinned with straight pins every inch or so to keep the whole thing together to get it under the sewing machine. Invisible polyester thread was used to squiggle around the whole surface to apply the tulle and hold the little bits in place. On the next layer free cut pieces of fabric were laid down to suggest trees, branches, and any large foreground details. At this point more confetti was laid on to give an illusion of depth and shading. Noriko went around the room adding very tiny pieces of black and purple confetti fabric which she calls the "magic" of her quilts. Adding these dark bits truly makes the scene look like an impressionist painting.

A final layer of black tulle is laid on and pinned again. More invisible thread is added to secure the layer as well as any free motion stitching in colored threads to add shading, highlights, etc. On my piece I added some gray and white textile paint and some light gray thread to suggest the sun slanting over the tree trunks from one side.

At home I finished my aspen piece by trimming it, and mounting it on a quilt sandwich with thin batting to add to the size and provide a frame which I free motion quilted with silk thread.

I have ordered Noriko's book and look forward to spending many hours appreciating her beautiful work.

2009 - A Space Odyssey

This week I finished this quilt in time to send it off as an entry to the SAQA show Art Meets Science which will debut at the Festival of Quilts in the UK in summer 2010. The deadline was yesterday and I made it by the skin of my teeth. Click on the image to the left for a larger photo posted on my website.

It is wholecloth - painted on sateen in a variety of paints including Tsukineko inks, Jacquard textile paints, watercolor pencils and crayons. It was free-motion quilted using silks, rayon and polyester threads. I added beaded stars and laid the quilt on another free motion quilted piece which was also beaded with Swarovsky crystal beads. I based it on a photograph from the Hubble Space Telescope website entitled "A perfect storm of turbulent gasses in the omega/swan nebula" . I was entranced by the swirling colors and juxtaposition of light and dark in the original image.

Realizing that there is no such thing as a unique idea - I was eagerly looking through the World of Beauty winners at the current International Quilt Festival in Houston (no my quilt "Stairway to Heaven" was not included in that list) I found another quilt based on the same photo which won an honorable mention in the Art-Painted Surface category and was made by Anne Munoz of Holladay, Utah. Congratulations, Anne, it is wonderful..... sigh.

I've been painting, texturing, absracting - all those arty things - for months. I think I'm ready to take a break and just piece something traditional... Possibly relaxing?