Blue Plate Special II off to Houston......

Got the word last week that my "Blue Plate Special II" will be going off to IQF Houston to be part of the new "What's For Dinner" show this fall. The show curated by Jamie Fingal features place mat sized quilts featuring answers to her favorite Facebook question. Rumor has it that they are going to try to display these on an actual table. What a cool idea!

My offering includes digital imagery of my great-grandmother's silver tomato server and an actual linen napkin along with a painted, thread painted and trapunto'd digital image of last summer's
 heirloom tomato bounty on a  pieced background .
Hope to be there in person to see the show!

Check out Off the Wall Fridays at www.ninamariesayre.blogspot.com .

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Welcome!

Join me as I share some news and events from my textile art world as well as some thoughts on travel, food and the creative process.

View my website at www.SallyWrightQuilts.com for more from my studio....

Sally Wright, Textile Artist
Los Angeles, California

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Color is Everything

As I have been concentrating on an on-line art marketing class, I have focused on how to write a cogent artist statement. Lots of thinking - not much actual writing. The more I think about it I realize that my artwork and indeed my life revolves around color. Color in my art, my garden, the food I cook and consume, the colors In our home interior, the sky, the earth, the eyes of people I meet - it's all about color for me.

 

I have been told that my work shows a good natural eye for color , but to improve it I have been watching a class with Joen Wolfrom featured on Craftsy.com.  She started the class by asking students to paint their own 12 step color wheel. I, of course, decided to sew one instead and used a bundle of 12 hand dyed fabrics with a luscious sueded finish for just this purpose from my favorite Cherrywood in Minnesota. I adapted Anelie Belden's Dresden plate techniques and drafted my own twelve blade Dresden using these sumptuous fabrics which I also strip pieced into a rainbow like border - all of this on a black background.

 
Also last week I found myself watching a series of lessons online on The Quilt Show site with the talented quilter and teacher Libby Lehman demonstrating how she uses stitches already in her sewing machine to add color and interest to her quilts. So I got out my polyester embroidery threads and tried a few stitched borders using the decorative stitches on my Viking SE.

I added four different colored narrow flanges to finish the setting for this smallish quilt and then thought about the quilting. What I thought would be a quick and easy project, was quickly becoming quite an undertaking!

 

I  hauled out my box of #100 silk thread from YLI and Superior. I love the sheen , the beautiful saturated colors and the fine gauge of the thread for close quilting.

Diane Gaudynski has been a real mentor for my free motion quilting. I enjoy her technique for feathers - mark the spine only and then let go and see what happens.... I also use her technique of stitching an extra outline around the feather in another color - these were all done in a complimentary color and they really pop! Only one corner left to go!






I continue to think and pray for Libby Lehman as I worked on this quilt. I learned that the day after I watched her videos she suffered a brain aneurysm, has had two brain surgeries and has subsequently suffered a stroke. Quilters from all over the world are praying for her and her family.


 Check out Off the Wall Fridays at www.ninamariesayre.blogspot.com .

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....

A New Look

There are lots of textile art projects I should have been working on this week, but, inspired by several conversations with "artsy" and "quilty" friends about their marketing techniques and different ways to get their work out there and noticed, I embarked on revving up my own rather tired website at www.SallyWrightQuilts.com.
My friend Sherry Kleinman's new web/blog was particularly inspiring in that it morphed the functions of a blog and a website into one.

When I looked at it critically, I realized that my site had been out there in the ether for four years and in comparison to many It looked tired and dated, overblown, too wordy and as my work has progressed, really in need of an edit.
So on Monday I started and by this afternoon it is up (and working which is a blessing!). My back has a permanent spasm from long hours in front of my laptop and my husband says he has missed me, but it's done!

I changed the colors and the banner to be almost seamless with my Blogger design I added a photo of me on the home page - very brave of me.... I took out a bunch of older work that bored me, added some new pieces and some photos of charity quilts in hopes of inspiring other quilters  to spend some more time for others.

I edited a lot of the overblown and unnecessary text, changed the fonts and a new crisp white background. I even added a slide show to the home page unfortunately it took me two days to find one that I could deal with, place the code properly and could be viewed by Apple devices. I know I do most of my surfing on my IPad. Don't you?

I use an ancient version of Dreamweaver that I taught myself years ago, but i always get really useful advice from an old friend who is a professional website designer in Virginia - Thank you Jill Probst of Classic Web Design for helping out when i get in trouble!  "HTML for Dummies" comes in handy, too.

Now that I've sold an important piece and done some private commissions I need to think of myself as more of an art professional and hopefully the new site is a step in that direction. to that end I changed the title of the site to Sally Gould Wright "Textile Artist", abandoning the quilt word. The current thinking is that not identifying oneself with quilts is friendlier to art collectors.

Please take a look and let me know what you think. Comments both good and bad are absolutely encouraged! So now I'm going back to the Studio to get down to work....

3D Textile Sculpture with Susan Else

If any of you readers attended Road to California in January 2012 you were probably as impressed and fascinated by the exhibit of Susan Else's textile sculpture. Susan is a nationally known fabric artist from Santa Cruz, California and this year she was listed as an instructor for four days of classes - a one day fabric collage workshop and three days of 3D sculptures in fabric. Though wildly out of my comfort zone, I had to sign up.....




Susan is an extraordinarily talented fabric artist who creates her own magical and fantastical world. As it turns out her figures, trees and embellishments are not that difficult to make using the techniques she very generously shared, but the poses, gestures and wonderful sense of whimsy and color are hers alone.



She had so conveniently put together complete kits for our cycad or palm-like trees and our little beast figures including all the fabrics, batting, knitting needle supports, covered floral wire for posable extremities/tree limbs, steel washers to add stability and a wonderfully silky batting for easy stuffing.


Gradually our trees with wildly colorful leaves and flowers and little beasts took shape. when finished (or at least pinned together) we worked on poses and gestures to give them all individuality and spark. On the last day of the three day class we were able to pose them in her proscenium arch theatrical background (see the first photo) to see how they related to that space and to each other. A really interesting exercise.



The week after the class in my own studio my little beast which had originally been some sort of a Maurice Sendak character, very upright with horns, was taken apart and morphed into a more birdlike pose. Now he has become a baby T Rex with purple horns in his forehead peering out from behind his prehistoric cycad tree embellished with leaves and flowers.










He makes me smile.

"Creative Inspiration"

Three of my art quilt pieces will be on display as part of "Creative Inspiration" a SAQA regional exhibit opening January 3 at the Poway Center for the Performing Arts near San Diego. Mary Tabar is the Curator.


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Quilts for others...

Recently I've been thinking and musing about some art quilt projects - waiting for inspiration - but nothing has totally gelled for my next big project, so instead of pushing forward I've been spending my time on some pieced charity quilts. One for Quilts From the Heart and another for the Transitional Housing and Education program at the Santa Monica YWCA. I'm also sharing a project with a friend to be sent to Hurricane Sandy victims through a quilt guild in New Jersey.


The most meaningful project, though has been a little pieced child's quilt for Operation Kid Comfort. It took only an afternoon to put together and another day to quilt but in this season of giving and giving thanks, it seems so very appropriate to do something for the kids of currently deployed military personnel.

From the Military YMCA website: "The Armed Services YMCA’s innovative Operation Kid Comfort program creates custom-made quilts and pillows for children of deployed U.S. military personnel who experience grief from missing their mom or dad. Photos of the deployed parent are printed onto fabric and sewn into the quilt or pillow. Each child received a quilt/pillow depending on age. Children 6 and under receive a quilt, 7 and older receive a pillow. Both quilts and pillows contain pictures of the deployed parent. Each quilt takes eight hours of volunteer sewing, as well as $50 worth of quilting materials. The program started at the Armed Services YMCA Fort Bragg Branch as has expanded to serve military families nationwide." for more information, or to volunteer yourself check out the Military YMCA website at http://www.asymca.org/index.php/what-we-do-3/national-programs-services/operation-kid-comfort/

The kit to put together the quilt was organized by the Santa Monica Quilt Guild and included all the fabrics and fabric printed photographs for the quilt - photos of the little boy named Michael with his Marine Corps Dad and the rest of his Camp Pendleton family. I just hope that this little quilt will make the holidays while his Dad is deployed, little brighter.





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Quilting Bee? Sort of....

I don't know about the rest of you out there, but when I tell people I meet that I'm a quilter, often the first or second question asked is "Do you go to Quilting bees? " Too many grew up with The Walton's or Little House on the Prairie, I guess. No, not many quilting bees on the Westside of Los Angeles, but last Saturday I did participate in something close.



My local Quilt Guild Westside Quilters organized a philanthropy sewing day to make these quirky shaped heart pillows for recovering breast cancer surgery patients. The pillows which are stuffed fairly tightly with poly fiberfill are placed under the arm of a patient putting pressure to relieve the effects of lymph edema. My mother who was a long term breast cancer survivor suffered the effects of lymph edema the rest of her life, so I'm well aware of the problems with this condition.

And there we were, 30 of us coming and going over the course of the day sitting around a huge dining room table piled high with colorful fabrics, thread, stuffing and finished pillows.



We sewed, we stuffed, we chatted and, yes we gossiped a little now and then. We tried not to talk politics - emotions still running high so soon after the election. We sorted out the problems of the world ( so why don't they listen to us?) while we stitched closed the openings on the pillows with very tender fingers by the end of the day. 50 pillows.... I guess we formed our own very LA quilting bee...







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Sometimes it just feels good to sew....

Sometimes it just feels good to sew.... There are times as a quilt artist when you want to relax and free oneself of all those artistic decisions - sorting through all those ideas going on in your head, finding the subject matter, deciding on the right techniques to further your vision, making the perfect fabric decisions, etc. Sometimes you want someone else to make the major decisions. Sometimes it just comes down to "give me the pattern and the templates and I'll sew it". It's just me and  my trusty Viking SE and an old movie or the news in the background and I'm happy. I'm one with the machine.....

So this quilt came to be.... It's from a workshop with Judy Sisneros - her "Circle Pizzazz" design.  I had taken the workshop to brush up on some curved piecing techniques (always a vulnerable area in my  technique).It required purchased templates and very few fabric decisions.  

Deciding to make a scrappy version, I already had a pile of blue to green fabrics including prints, hand dyes and batiks pulled from my stash for another quilt - too lazy to put them away in the pull out bins in  my studio - so I just used a selection of those already out on the table that pleased me. I had made a couple of the blocks in the workshop (in which I had decided Judy's curved piecing techniques actually worked) and came home and in a few days more had enough blocks for a smallish lap quilt.
 
The one conscious decision I made was to change the layout of the blocks (seen at right). I turned them so the consistently dark blue bands ran in the same direction throughout - instead of in circles as Judy's original design decreed.  I liked the way it moved the eye across the quilt diagonally making it, I think, a bit more visually interesting. 


When the top was pieced I layered it with Warm and Natural batting which I will not do again.... I know lots of people use it, but I'm used to wool and this batting gave me lots of problems. It bearded through the darker colors and poked out of the needle holes on the dark blue batik backing. The free motion quilting was done in Superior Rainbows - a polyester thread that variegated from blue to green.



The final and easiest decision was to donate the quilt to Quilts From the Heart a non-profit group here in Southern California of volunteer quilters, both women and men, who share a common goal and make quilts to donate to disadvantaged children and adults.

The group was started in 2004 by Evie Steinberg and has grown in size to over 25 dedicated quilters with varying degrees of skills and talents from beginning to advance. Meetings and workshops are held on the second and fourth Friday of each month from 1:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. in the Community Room at the Mar Vista Public Library located at 12006 Venice Blvd, Venice, CA 90066. There is no membership fee or quilt quota required. The group continues to thrive and grow as a result of the generosity of others through the donations of fabric and miscellaneous items.Some of the organizations that they work with are: City of Hope, Children's Hospital, The Shriners, Good Shepherd, Foster Children, Venice Family Clinic, and the Asian American Drug Abuse Program (AADAP). I'm not a member, but I'm happy to know that this little quilt will go out into the world and help someone.... 

California Dreaming - Asilomar

Over the years of attending Empty Spools Seminars at Asilomar near Pacific Grove California I have snapped almost 100 photos of the Conference Grounds campus and the wonderful Julia Morgan Arts and Crafts style buildings, the rocky beach and tidepools,the Monterey Cypresses, the weathered redwood fences, the boardwalk across the dunes nearby and of course the deer that wander freely everywhere. I filed them away thinking I would someday design a quilt around them, but was never quite sure how to combine all the disparate elements.

This last spring in a workshop with Australian quilt artist Gloria Loughman which focused on just this idea - how to combine different scenes in one quilt composition - I was finally able to put it together.
So it is finally finished.... About seven of my photos combined in a fantasy landscape that includes it all - even the deer. 

The quilt is a combination of piecing and fused appliqué using hand dyes and batiks. The ocean and the cypress tree are painted with Tsukineko inks and Jacquard textile paints. The deer are actually digitally printed from my photographs and over painted. The stonework border on the right is fabric printed at Spoonflower.com from a photograph of one of the Asilomar buildings. (Many thanks to the Pixeladies and their great Photoshop classes where I learned how to fashion a fabric repeat) and the vegetation on the dunes is free motion embroidery.

Here are a few of my photos.... 

Into Fall.....

In Southern California there finally comes that magical day at the very end of a hot dry summer when the light softens, the shadows deepen and there is just the first hint of fall in the air. Yes, we do have seasons! they are just a little more subtle than in other parts of the country.

It's the day I start thinking about baked apples and how soon it will be until it's cool enough to think about making some great red wine pot roast. That day of thinking may just be today..... It's not terribly cool, but there are wispy high level clouds and the light is definitely different. So welcome Fall!

So this means it's time to change out the summertime quilts I hang in the house and replace them with autumn hues. So out comes Kyoto Kaede with its fall colors and Japanese maple leaves made quite a while ago in a Ruth McDowell workshop (and still one of my favorite quilts) and the table runner with all the Guatamalan stripes and appliqué maple leaves.

It also means I have to start thinking about Thanksgiving and even sooner The San Francisco Fall Antiques Show the end of next month. Hoping there will be some wonderful Autumn color up there and some cool crisp days. In the meantime I'll just look at the quilts.



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Tug Comanche

A commission came from an old friend and US Coast Guard veteran to design and make a quilt of the US Coast Guard Tug Comanche to be presented to the non-profit foundation which is restoring the ship. He served
on the Comanche's sister ship USS Modoc and planned on presenting the quilt at that crew's reunion in Tacoma, Washington the beginning of September. The Comanche has a long history - built and commissioned as an ocean going tug during WWII she served in the Pacific towing damaged ships to safety. After the war she was transferred to the Coast Guard and stationed in the Pacific Northwest. She was later owned privately as a working tug.

My client requested that the Comanche be pictured as she was when she was still used by the Coast Guard and provided small resolution scanned photos from the 1970s. He also asked for her to be shown steaming in Puget Sound with Mt. Rainier in the distance. If possible there should also be signal flags fluttering, seagulls and orca. I gulped .... And then said "sure....".

The size of the small scanned photos he emailed me and of those I found on the Internet was definitely a problem. I had to interpret and in some cases imagine some of the details on the ship. For the basic layout and composition I put together a photo mock up in Photoshop and then drew a full sized cartoon from which I constructed the basic quilt top.


The fabric selection was fairly easy. An ombre printed blue Mckenna Ryan print provided all I needed for the sky and a Hoffman Bali batik stripe in aqua and purple was the answer for the ocean. cherrywood cotton solids were perfect for the ship itself. I digitally printed some of the details including the anchor, the both Coast Guard crests, the flag and the name of the ship on my inkjet printer and fused them in place.




At this point I brought out the paints and using a combination of Fabrico markers, Tsukineko inks and Jacquard fabric paints added shading and dimension, rigging, highlights to the ocean waves and the seagulls. The pod of orca were painted individually, cut out and fused in place. The bow spray and the wake of the ship were done with painted and heat shrunk cellophane cut in slivers and applied with glue before stitching down. The serendipitous discovery of signal flag printed fabric at a local quilt store certainly made that job easier... Just cut out and fuse them on. My US Navy vet husband says that the ship is "over flagged", but I was having so much fun putting them on, I couldn't stop.


For free motion quilting I used polyester invisible thread to outline the motifs and then YLI silk for the rest. The texture and realism of the ocean was greatly improved with undulating lines of quilting.

The finished quilt was presented as a surprise to the Foundation last weekend at the reunion to much acclaim, I'm told. I was certainly happy to bring this historical ship back to its old gloried appearance.