It’s been a busy week!

It’s been a productive studio week! Two exhibit entries - A Better World and the Cherrywood Bob Ross Challenge - finished and entered! Now the wait to see if they get in! Sent off my quilt to the Mandell Center In Connecticut for their Immigrant themed show. Packed up my quilt for Sacred Threads to be sent to Virginia soon. Framed this great Hatch Show Print ( a gift from a friend) and hung it in the studio. Now on to other projects promised after those exhibit deadlines were passed. 

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Check out Nina Sayre’s Off the Wall Fridays

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"Urban Graffiti" ... My view.

I  conceived this small quilt recently as my response to a Quilts On The Wall Fiber Artists call for entry "Urban Graffiti" but unfortunately it didn't make the cut.... However, it did crystallize my own feelings about graffiti in the urban landscape. I remember traveling to New York in the 1970s and feeling so smug that at least the cityscape of my native city of LA was not scarred with graffiti. Alas, of course, this is no longer true. My feelings might have been further cemented later on when our place of business was tagged - not by gang members or serious graffiti artists, but by local wannabes from the surrounding upscale neighborhood.  I spent hours scrubbing it away from a painted brick wall.

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I know that in today's art world graffiti artists are subjects of study and veneration and I can certainly see that is valid in some cases, but my appreciation cannot help but be colored by my own experience and the feeling that what I've always thought of as a beautiful city is being diminished by what is painted all over its buildings and infrastructure. Certainly most of the artists that offered up work for the QOTW exhibit "Urban Graffiti" explored this artistic view of the subject and I applaud them for seeing beauty and meaning in the ugliness that I see around me.

For those interested, the quilt was constructed using a fused raw edge technique. The individual bricks were cut and fused on to a printed mottled gray fabric that served as the mortar. The letters were from a "graffiti" font I found online. The bricks were dabbed with textile paint for an aging effect and free motion quilted in various small fill patterns with silk thread. If you are wondering about the two white objects on the quilt in front of my machine, they are pieces of rubber shelf lining which I find helpful in guiding the quilt sandwich during quilting. Much better than gloves, or hoops, etc. I hate having to put on and take off gloves!

My congratulations to those QOTW members whose works were juried in to "Urban Graffiti" There are some remarkable images in the quilts that were included in the exhibit that will debut at Road to California in January 2016. I'm looking forward to seeing all of them together!

In the meantime, this quilt will soon be added to my website at www.sallywrightquilts.com and will be added for sale in my Etsy Shop

See this and other great blogs at  Off The Wall Fridays with Nina Marie Sayre

California Dreaming: Down in the Grove

When my Pennsylvanian Dad came out of the Navy after serving in the Pacific in World War II his dream was to settle in Southern California with his Californian bride (who, legend says, he met at the Officers Club at the Coconut Grove, buy some property, raise and show 5 Gaited Saddlebred horses and watch things grow. In the early 50s my parents bought Mulberry Farm, an orange ranch in Chatsworth at the north end of the San Fernando Valley. My earliest memories are from that grove - the smell of the orange blossoms wafting in the evening, the dappled sunshine filtered through the leaves and the contrast of the bright yellow and orange fruit against dark green. A real California dream.....

Sadly, a few years later Mulberry Farm was sold for subdivision and the horses were gone - not a very practical economic plan to raise a young family. after all, but I've always loved the orange groves of my native southern California though sadly the majority of them have disappeared in favor of tract homes and shopping malls.

This latest quilt "California Dreaming: Down in the Grove" is from a photo I took in our own little urban garden of a dwarf limequat laden with fruit this past spring. Though it's not exactly from a grove it brought back all those memories of California's citrus heritage.

As for the technical stuff - I manipulated the photo on my Ipad in Sketch Guru to obatin a watercolor effect and again on my desk top computer in Photoshop  to tinker with color and saturation.  The photo was printed on a large scale by Spoonflower.com.  I added fabric paint to highlight some of the effects, thread painted the resulting image with silk and polyester threads to obtain texture and trapunto'd the fruit and a few leaves in the foreground to give depth and dimension. The background was free motion quilted very tightly to flatten and thus pop the other design elements. This is the third piece I've finished using these techniques, tweaking each along the way. I'm liking the results.

 

Off the Wall Fridays

Sacred Threads 2013 Opened Yesterday in Herndon, VA

Sacred Threads 2013 is open as of yesterday at Floris United Methodist Church in Herndon, Virginia and will be open through July 28th. Two of my quilts both pictured below are included and it is a very happy moment for me to be included for the third time in this lovely,  meaningful exhibit. 

Check out Sacred Threads 2013 on Facebook

 Chaco I

2009: A Space Odyssey

If you're going to be in the suburban Washington DC area this month I hope you'll visit! If you do, I'd love to hear your impressions and if you're there with your camera take a photo or two of my pieces and if you're so kind, send them off to me at Sally@sallywrightquilts.com

Off the wall Fridays at http://ninamariesayre.blogspot.com/

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.

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.... 

Finally Finished MY TAFA List Profile!

It was one of those jobs that I knew I had to get to, but it kept getting lost in my emails and my written and printed reminders buried on my desk.  Finally, goosed by a conversation with my friend Linda Miller of Linda Miller Designs last week and another gentle reminder email  from Rachel Biel the founder of TAFA - Textile and Fiber Art List a few days ago, I got down to my computer yesterday afternoon and today it's finished. A couple of hours of work, a couple of false starts and stops, a session in Photoshop and lots of help from Rachel and it's up and working.My biggest quandary was deciding on which quilt to use for my banner. I chose, Fossil Fueled, but what do you think?

Check out my profile on this great marketing resource for fiber artists at http://www.tafalist.com/members/sally-gould-wright-quilt-artist 
It's all there in one place, photos of my quilts, a link to Facebook and my Etsy shop and a place for news and upcoming events. Rachel has created a beautiful site and  I'm thrilled to be in the company of such a large group of talented artists.

SAQA Benefit Auction Quilts - 309 Little Masterpieces

The SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Associates) Benefit Auction begins September 12th, and the 12"square quilts can be previewed at http://www.saqa.com/news.php?ID=1791.  There will be 309 one foot square works of art available for your collection.  Take a look at them all, but I've added here a few of my favorites.



Lynn Welsch's sun washed  "Acoma Pueblo" takes me back to a visit to
this amazing native American living museum. She's gotten the light absolutely as I remember it. 

Linda Miller's "Striations" has wonderful line and really amazing texture (I've seen it in person!) her technique for the gilded "pebbles" is pretty clever.....

Kathleen Murphy's "Rain in May" - what a superbly graphic composition! The whole thing is so atmospheric...

Nancy Turbitt's "Girasole"
What amazingly whimsical sunflowers. Love the buttons!

I am always enamored with Betty Busby's work and I especially love the armadillo and the use of fabric alone to delineate the cactus.

Pat Gould's "Rockhopper" utterly charms me. He  (she?) has so much character.  I love the contrast between the bird and the stone background.

Sherry Kleinman's "2011 Year of the Rabbit" is done with water soluble crayons and colored pencils on artist canvas.  She's acheived some amazingly realistic fur on the rabbit and great saturated color....








And lastly, my own "Poppy Love" - watercolor pencils, crayons,
needle felting, beads and a three dimensional thread painted butterfly.

I'll post more of these soon..... Save your pennies for the auction in September!

SAQA - Art Meets Science

I was so sorry not to be able to see my quilt in the SAQA Art Meets Science exhibit at the Festival of Quilts in the UK this weekend, but I've had many reports that it was a great show and very well received.


I received a message today from Jill Jensen who spearheaded the show that Alex Veronelli of AURIfil Threads posted a video of the exhibition at Festival of Quilts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU1NBKzvGDM

Jill said the exhibit was very well received and SAQA is getting very positive feedback. It is on its way back to Houston so that it can be checked in, then repackaged for shipping to Pfizer headquarters in New York for its next gig. ..

The catalog is now on sale online on the SAQA site and the quilts for sale are also pictured at http://www.saqa.com/store.php?cat=22 Be sure to check it out!

My Latest Work....

My blissful week at Empty Spools Seminars at Asilomar in Pacific Grove in March has finally resulted in a finished quilt - "Fossil Fueled".

My son's childhood fossil collection became the inspiration for this fused applique' quilt. Begun in a workshop entitled "Quilt Like Leonardo Da Vinci" with the ever creative Barbara Olson ( shown talking about her own gorgeous quilts below) in which we were asked to make detailed still - life compositions from natural objects, the quilt evolved from photographs and pencil sketches of fossils of sea-life from the Permian and pre-Cambrian periods.

My final photographic composition is shown at left. Hand dyes, batiks and printed cottons were used along with metallic copper braid, glass beads and textile paints for the final illusion in my fiber composition.




We were encouraged to arrive at Asilomar having read Michael Gelb's book How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci and were challenged to use many of the thought processes and exercises in the book to jump start our own creativity. For me the incredible beauty of the Asilomar State Park environment is usually enough to inspire me (especially this year with beautiful sunshine and blue seas even in mid March - see the snapshots below) but exercising my left brain in new ways was a fascinating experience.

One of the reasons I adore the Asilomar Conference Grounds is the opportunity to walk on the State Beach each morning before breakfast and classes. A boardwalk stretches from the dining hall over the dunes to the beach beyond. Fabulous on a slightly misty morning and even better at sunset!