(Sunrise at my house)
I have been getting works ready for our 2nd annual fiber art show and sale, "An Affair of the heART" which will be held over the Valentine's Day weekend and is sponsored by In Good Company. I finished up my challenge piece and it is not really my usual style or colorway, but it is interesting. I don't think it will win any awards but I think people will enjoy looking at it. I also finished a last minute piece that I had put on my entry form as "Untitled" with a guess for the size and price. I'm done with it except for a label and it is bigger than I guessed, and I need to change the price (up). I still haven't come up with a name, but I think it does deserve one.
This piece was inspired by a fabric panel I recently purchased and I think it illustrates how a commercial panel can be used to make an original design art piece. I also incorporated a digital photo that I manipulated, printed on silk, then painted the edges to blend with the piece. I had great fun picking out numerous fabrics from my stash that had potential for use in the piece, but ended up cutting it back quite a bit. That is always one of my favorite parts of the process and it is so fun to find unusual things in your stash that really perk a piece up or that work really well to compliment each other. I added chunky stone and horn beads to the piece and it is heavily quilted. I orginally had pulled out a bunch of yarns and fibers I had that went well with the piece and was going to couch or do some embroidery on the piece, but the beads seemed to complete it and I made that always difficult decision to stop embellishing!
Here is detail of it but I'm going to reserve a full picture until I have decided whether it is worthy of entering in a larger competition/show.
My show at the Whooping Crones Gallery is now done and I have retrieved all but two of my pieces. Those two pieces sold and ironically they were titled "Winter Blues" and "Spring Thaw" (what's with the weather theme?). I was ready for both of those pieces to sell as they had done their time. "Winter Blues" was in shows in Denver and in Seattle, and "Spring Thaw was in the Beaded Pony bead competition last spring and then in the Missoula Quilt show last summer. I'm fond of both of them but very comfortable with the prices I sold them for and in finally letting them go.
The next adventure for Fiber Into Art will be hanging some pieces in the Rocky Mountain Bank lobby in Stevensville for the months of April and May. I have started some smaller pieces and will be making a few more to hang in that exhibit. I'm thinking the smaller pieces might display and sell there better than some of my larger ones. Before that exhibit happens, I am hoping to hear from the Missoula Art Museum in regards to my entry for their Triennial exhibition of Montana artists. They are supposed to notify in March and I am really hoping I might have the opportunity to hang a piece of my work in the museum. That would be exciting, but realistically I am probably too much of a novice to be competitive. Then there is the Bitterroot Quilt Guild's show in June I think, and I have another challenge piece to get done for that. That one has been kicking around in my creative processes for a while now and should be ready to come out onto the design wall in the very near future!
After all that I have no other gigs established. I do hope to get up to Big Fork to show my work to a couple of galleries and probably another gallery or two in Missoula. Hopefully I will get my website up and running in the next month or two before bear hunting starts (my husband the computer whiz is helping me and will be unavailable after that!). Some artists seem to be successful in selling their work through their websites, so you never know. At the very least it gets you out there for people to be able to see what you do and know who you are. At its best it will attract buyers and galleries who want your stuff!
I guess I better get to bed now. I tend to do all this computer stuff late at night when I'm too tired to be creative or do any accurate sewing. Watching TV, checking my e-mail, reading the Quiltart and SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Associates) list postings, and occasionally writing my blog posts are about all I can handle as I start to get tired. Pondering what to do next…..maybe I can finally get that brown tree quilt layered for quilting????
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