We have a bid on "Rainbow Fish"!

We have a $50.00 bid on my "Rainbow Fish" quilt auction from a great supporter of Heal the Bay and the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium! Here is the link to all the info about the auction which ends at Midnight on December 21st! http://sallygouldwright.blogspot.com/2011/12/one-of-my-quilts-is-up-for-auction.html . Join in to help fund this wonderful organization. I'll update here and on Facebook as the bids come in.....

My quilt "Silk Fantasy A La Diane" is highlighted on The Quilt Show!

A friend emailed me this morning (Thanks to Aileen - I might have missed it!) the happy news that my quilt "Silk Fantasy A La Diane " is featured today on The Quilt Show's Daily Blog highlighting the quilts shown in the Merit Quilting category at Houston Quilt Festival. Thanks Alex and Ricky!
Here's the link - http://www.thequiltshow.com/os/blog.php/blog_id/4413. when you get there just click on the play arrow - mine is photo #12 in the Smilebox slideshow.

One of my quilts is up for auction!

Inspired by Monika Kinner-Whalen of the My Sweet Prairie blog, I'm placing one of my small art quilts up for auction this week. The total auction price will benefit Heal the Bay - a Santa Monica Based charity which focuses on making southern California's coastal waters and watersheds, including Santa Monica Bay, safe, healthy and clean and supports the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium. 

Here's the quilt....

"Rainbow Fish"

2011 

15" X 13.5"

I chose this quilt as an appropriate subject for Heal the Bay - The title is inspired by Marcus Pfister's wonderful children's book which we read to our son countless times in the 1990s. The quilt was made using Sue Carlson's fabric collage technique  in which small bits and snippets of fabrics are glued to a foundation . The colorful fabrics are all bits and pieces of hand dyes and exotic batiks carefully chosen to blend, delineate and give some sparkle to the simple fish design. When the collage was complete, I captured the fish beneath a layer of tulle free motion quilted it all using gold metallic and silk threads.  The edge treatment is also a Sue Carlson technique adding a quirky pinked edge to the framed composition.  Click on the fish above for a larger version and on the smaller details below.

Here is the information on the auction  The  highest bidder by midnight on December 21st will have the quilt mailed to them (shipping is on me as long as it is within the US).  100% of the final winning bid price will be used sent as a donation to Heal the Bay.  I will post the "highest bid" in the comments section for this post as they come in.
 

If you are interested, all you need to do is email your bid to me at Sally@SallyWrightQuilts.com.

I will post the bids as they come in on my blog. Once the announcement is made as to how much the quilt has sold for, I will contact that person with info on how/where to send payment.  The check can be made out to Heal the Bay if you want a tax deduction. The quilt will me mailed once the payment has been received.  At that time I will forward on the donation in the winner's name to Heal the Bay.  The winner can remain anonymous of they prefer.


Good luck everybody!

Sew.... Food?

For some time I've wanted to integrate my love of cooking and food in general into my blogging attempts, so today, here is my first food related rambling. Inspired by a trip to one of our local SoCal farmers markets on Saturday morning, I shot some photos of my hoard. I was in Santa Monica - not at the world famous, huge and slightly intimidating Third Street market hyped far and wide as one of the world's best  - but at the smaller, homier, more manageable market at Virginia Park on the western fringe of Santa Monica at Cloverfield and Pico Blvd. Parking is easier, it's closer to our home in Westwood and is in general much more user friendly than its huge and glamorous downtown counterpart.

My first find was this amazing display of Romanesco cauliflower all laid out on the grower's table.  Does anyone else see little chartreuse horney toads or dinosaur skin?  I am completely fascinating with their perfectly geometric spirals! The texture is amazing and I only wish Icould figure out some way to capture it in a quilt......



 The same stand  - the charming and smiling  English guy who also sells seven different kinds of potatoes from the teeniest of fingerlings to huge gorgeous German things that looked like Yukon Golds to me -  had several kinds of exotic radishes including the two pictured here on the right - a watermelon radish and a honeydew radish. They both are lovely and sweet with just a tiny bit of radish heat. The pink and green one was spectacular in last night's salad.

 Finally, I was astonished that even in mid- December there were heirloom tomatoes available from some sellers from the central coast. I love these and the still life they provide in my Delft dish on our kitchen counter.oh, the many blessings of living in southern California!

Why was I a few miles away from our neighborhood? Our own beloved farmers' market housed for several years on the Veteran's Administration Campus off Sepulveda Blvd. just a quarter of a mile from our house has been discontinued, a victim of a recent VA policy to ban all commercial venues from the property. I understand that the car rental storage lots, and other commercial sites will disappear as their contracts expire, but it seems such a shame and unnecessary that something like the market which benefited the neighborhood as well as the hundreds of VA employees  had to go, too.

Recently I've been pretty occupied with planning a special event for My Quilt Guild Westside Quilters "An Evening with Kaffe Fassett" on here in Los Angeles on Monday September 26th. Yes, tickets are still available at www.Westsidequilterslosangeles.org! (Forgive the shameless plug...) so some of my projects have been put on the back burner.  But a  few could not wait – namely the baby quilt for a friend’s new grandson due next month and my son’s 21^st birthday quilt due three months ago! I’ve been trying to make time to sew and every time I do I’m so grateful that earlier this year I took a weekend to do some re-organization in my Studio,

I call it “The Studio” but it is actually a tiny 9ft.  X 8 ft. lean-to shed on the back of our garage. In the 50s it was a kids playhouse dubbed “Ft. Apache” (remember Rin Tin Tin? Or are you all too young...) and when we moved in it became a place to put our son’s spinet piano.  When the piano was replaced by an electric guitar I took it over as my sewing room and it has now been officially named “The Studio” because that’s what the beautifully lettered slate sign my husband made for me a few Christmases ago says.

Because of its size, organization is key.  For a long time my fabric stash was in large plastic bins, but as the stash grew they got heavier and more unwieldy and I would go out to buy more fabric for a project rather than get into those stacked up bins to find what I had.  That is a thing of the past with my new purchases this summer at The Container Store of a stackable set of 8 large plastic pull out drawers (see above). I spent two days sorting out the hand dyes and batiks by color, folding them and placing it all in these drawers now carefully marked with their colors with my P-Touch (my Martha Stewart moment).  The drawers are clear so I can easily see what’s in them.  The fabric is folded, and the edges are all visible. I’ve found some treasures I forgot I had.
 
Two other purchases have also made my quilting life so much easier - a clear plastic hanging shoe bag - the kind with many pouches for shoes that hangs on the back of a door (at left) and a clear plastic hanging purse organizer (below), both purchased in the closet department at Bed Bath and Beyond for very little.  The shoe pouches are perfect for organizing small fabric scraps according to color and the handbag organizer hangs on the wall and allows me to slide in many rolls of embroidery stabilizer, interfacing, freezer paper and parchment freeing up a couple of drawers I desperately needed for other supplies. 
 

Here’s a challenge – I’ve found some very ordinary things to make organize my sewing space and make my life easier, so let me challenge you to do the same. Anyone with space saving or organizational ideas that are working for them, send them and I'll post them on the blog. Let’s share more ideas.

Rainy Day San Francisco Revisited

I've had a great deal of positive comment on "Rainy Day San Francisco, Monday, October 25, 2010" both from people who saw it in its debut at International Quilt Festival Long Beach last week in "Bridges" the special exhibit from Quilts on the Wall Artists and from those who've seen in the last day or so posted on my web site or on the gallery section of The Quilt Show.  I am really humbled and grateful for this - it seems to have struck a cord with a lot of people and I have been asked about some of the techniques I used.

The scene was taken from a cell phone photo I took on a rainy morning in San Francisco just as we exited the bridge and were about to turn left on the Embarcadero.  I was driving and my husband was yelling at me to put away my phone! Several months later I printed out the photo and traced it on to an acetate sheet, scanned that, blew the scan up to size on my computer, and posterized it to print out a full size paper pattern for the applique, 

 

I find very often that the serendipity of finding just the right fabric for the right purpose makes a quilt. In this case the lowering, rainy, moody sky was all done for me with a gradient printed Mackenna Ryan fabric (I buy all of those I can find!) No fabric paint there ... sorry to dissappoint all of you who congratulated me on my painting skills. Most of the vehicles, buildings and bridge were done in fused raw edge applique' using wonder under with a fabulous gradated gray package of Cherrywood fabrics. I did use some Jacquard Lumiere fabric paint for the lines in the street  and the reflections of the car and truck on the wet street. 

I added some printed digital images found on Google for the street lights (strangely enough there are hundreds of images of San Francisco's Embarcadero street lights ...) and the license plate on the truck. BTW "I'm Sorry" has no special meaning as many have asked. It was just an interesting plate that I thought might promote some conversation.  It did. For the green street sign I made a Photoshop file which I printed on to fabric and edged with paint. That's not hard - but as you can see I had a little trouble with the first try...

So I finish the top and I'm pretty pleased with it ...... until I realize that it is 4 inches too narrow  to fit the size required by Quilts On The Wall - aarrghh! A frantic trip to a local quilt store resulted in that great bold red stripe at the edges.  Actually I realize now that those red stripes have improved the visuals enormously...... so there you are.  Serendipity!

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!