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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