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.

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.

The SAQA Benefit Auction starts online through the SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Associates) site on September 10th - barely a month away!  Here is my quilt donation for this year.  It's titled "Fiorabella" and is a little 12" X 12" wholecloth botanical study painted with Tsukineko inks on a wonderfully subtle piece of hand dye from my stash. I free motion quilted it and the traditional feather border using 100 weight silk thread. Pretty traditional for the SAQA auction - I hope is finds some bidders......  You can see it an all the other marvelous works being auctioned online to benefit SAQA programs at http://www.saqa.com/saqa-u.php?ID=2038