FIBER INTO ART by Heidi

Goals for the New Year

2012-01-30T21:34:00.007-07:00

Today I submitted two show entries so now I currently have 5 shows that I have submitted entries to and am waiting to hear about. I start getting very anxious a week before the stated notification date and start watching for mail or e-mail from the shows. I know that most of them wait until that date and sometimes even later, but I still am ever hopeful that a big fat envelope will show up in my mailbox a week early!

Keeping track of what pieces have been submitted to shows for jurying or have been accepted and are thus committed to shows is very complicated. I have to pay attention to the dates they want the pieces to be shipped to them and how long before they will be returned, as well as how long the jurying and notification process will take. Some shows have a quick 2-3 week turnaround (thank you Mancuso's!) and other shows take several agonizing months to let you know your fate. My husband is attempting to create a database for me that might help with some of the confusion of what is going where and when.

I have to say I really enjoy the process and that might be partly because I have a pretty good success rate of getting into shows. I haven't yet made it into any of the prestigious art quilt venues, but I keep trying and am ever hopeful. I have been in two AQS shows and as I mentioned last post will be sending one to AQS Lancaster this year. I've been in quilt and art quilt shows all around the country and one mixed media show. I have had very good luck regionally getting into galleries and selling my work. I guess if I had gotten more rejections I might not find the process so rewarding! I get anxious as the notification date gets close and then it distracts me from getting other things done. I'm waiting for one tomorrow and then one on Friday and it is definitely preoccupying my mind.

One thing I have learned is that you never know who might see your work in these various venues and what opportunities might arise from that. I sold a large piece as a result of having it in a show in Lowell, Massachusetts, and there is a magazine publisher who has noticed my work after having seen it in a machine quilting show and that has provided me with a recent opportunity.

My goal for the last three years has been to get my work out there and get a name for myself in the art/quilt world by entering shows and trying to win some awards. I have won several awards in major shows and have sent my work all over the country. I feel that I have been successful in this goal and this year I need to set a new direction for my efforts. I have not won a top award at a show yet and I have not had a quilt in Houston or Paducah (size matters here---they want larger pieces than I usually make!). I'd like to submit some articles to magazines and see if I can get published. I'd like to make enough money with my art to get myself a nice printer, a nice lighting set-up for photographing my work, and attend one of the shows where my work is being shown.

I have never been one to formally set goals, but after a few of years of having a pretty good clarity about what I wanted to do, now I feel like I need to redirect my efforts. Wish me luck!

Here are some more pictures of recent work:

"Nothing Lasts Forever" - Tan sections are made from layers of glue-fused tissue paper (Kleenex!) that is painted. I stitched the paper pieces to brown felt before layering them onto the quilt.

This next piece was in my September show at The Artist's Shop. It is not my favorite piece as I feel it is rather unsuccessful, but I had people tell me it was their favorite. One woman did not understand why the price on this piece was lower than on another that appeared to have taken much less work. That's because I tend to include the level of success and sale-ability (is that a word?) a piece has when I price it. Definitely a subject part of the pricing process, but I feel it is legitimate. This piece is called "Nature's Window". I just kept doing things to it to try to make it better and as a result it is overdone and not cohesive. Someone will like it (as I said, some do!), and it will be a bargain for them!

I showed the full view of this piece, "A Hoop That Never Ends", in a previous post, but I thought this detail showed the embellishments that make this piece interesting. The hand stitching on this piece took a great deal of time.

Now to get working on those goals!

Ornaments and New Works

2012-01-24T21:23:00.010-07:00

I spent about a month before the holidays making small quilted and beaded artworks with hangers that I call “ornaments” but most of them are too large to actually hang on a Christmas tree. I layer fabric with heavyweight stablizer like Timtex and use a gluestick to secure them. I quilt them, satin stitch or couch yarn around the edges, then embellish them with beads, yarn, etc. They are rather time-consuming to create and I don't really make much on them for the materials and time put into them, but people do buy them and seem to enjoy hanging them year round. Some of them are still hanging in River's Mist Gallery in Stevensville and in The Artist's Shop in Missoula. The prices on them range from $22 to $30. Here are some more:

Here are a couple of pieces that I made this fall. The first one was a project using pearl cotton and embroidery floss to make buttonhole stitches around circular objects like washers, plastic loops, pony beads, and whatever else you might find. I suspended them from the top of the quilt and called it “A Hoop That Never Ends” which is from a song in the Disney movie, Pocahontas and I believe refers to the circle of life.

The piece below, "Fade to Dark", started with the ombre fabric that fades from light orange/red to almost black. I love the textures and lines of this piece and I feel that the quilting was rather successful. This piece really glows when it is hanging on the wall. It has been in two galleries and the lighting really made it stand out. There is quite a bit of stamping using Lumiere fabric paint and a stamp I made myself. The beads are mostly dyed bone, but there is also a stone donut in the top left corner with a cascade of fiber strands dangling from it. The red strips in the area of criss-cross strips is a faux suede. I used a double flange around the inside of the binding which I think is quite effective for the piece. I have been using a lot of flanges, which are actually just unfilled piping, around the edges of my pieces. They are easy to do and add another shot of color to the "frame".

I found out yesterday that my piece, “Tapestry Strutting” (see my August 26, 2011 post for a picture) will be shown at the AQS Lancaster quilt show. They chose 202 quilts for the judged show and they have $44,000 in prize money. They are expecting at least 20,000 people so it is good exposure for my work. I was very happy to get that "fat" envelope in the mail. I thought it was somewhat of a risk to choose this piece because it is so different, but I think the color and the quilting are very effective. I have enjoyed living with it on my walls at home. Wish me luck---I'd love to get published in American Quilter magazine with all the winners again! [“Red Sky” won 3rd place at AQS Des Moines a couple of years ago so it was in the magazine]

Birthday Treats and Halloween Sewing

2011-11-07T22:59:00.010-07:00

I made cake pops to take to my son's class for his 9th birthday. I had never made them before but we had tasted them and both liked them so I gave it a try. Rather messy mixing and shaping, but they turned out really cute. It is my own design. Some of the kids thought they were "angry birds" which I had never heard of so that isn't what they were intended to be. I told them they were "friendly" birds. The tail and beak are candy corns and the eyes were premade sugar candy eyes. The kids were almost afraid to eat them and some wanted to take them home to show their moms. They all ended up eating them though and they were very well liked.

Once again a costume was required for the now 9-year old son. My usual MO is to search the house for items that can be "adapted" instead of starting from scratch for a costume. This year I laid eyes on the long stuffed tube I had made for my son a number of years ago to wrap into a coil and sit in or lean against. I quickly stitched up a head and tail to stuff and attach to the ends of the already made stuffed tube. I put eyes and a forked tongue (maybe not truly python-like, but a hit with the 9-year old) on it and made a python. I attached the head part to an old adult size t-shirt so it would be positioned over his shoulder and I wouldn't have to pin it every time he put it on. We wrapped the body around him and strapped coils up by wrapping them with ties that went over his shoulders. I put a "safari" hat on him and a pair of toy binoculars and he was transformed into a National Geographic explorer having a bad day! The costume was a hit! It did require a number of gyrations for both of us to get it off and on him each time, but once he had it on there didn't seem to be any problems for him and actually in the trick-or-treating crowds it acted as a sort of bumper protecting him from harm!!

Although I spend a lot of time making sure my art pieces are well made and sturdy, when I make a costume I use large stitches and safety pins, and I don't worry much about raw edges and other imperfections. It is only for a couple of days of wear so for me comfort is the key requirement, not quality. A good idea creatively executed that the kid will wear without complaint is a success!
Here I am helping him put it on at his class party:

And here he is with the complete outfit:

We went to a neighborhood where there must have been hundreds of kids trick-or-treating because most of the houses decorate and prepare for the masses (although we were late getting started and many ran out before we got there and had their lights off already!). One house we went to told my son that his was the best costume she had seen all night and had to bring her son to the door to show him. He had lots of other comments about his costume which wasn't surprising since the crowds are full of ninjas and witches and other purchased costumes so anything homemade is unique. Another successful Halloween and a happy 9-year old trick-or-treater!

Hunting Season

2011-10-21T19:27:00.006-06:00

"Geometric Forest" - From a recent TARTs kit that involved using rayon thread to create design features. Not my usual color palette or design style, but I like it. Information on TARTs projects and lessons can be found on In Good Company's blog--see my list of links.

Opening day of rifle hunting season is tomorrow (Saturday). That means the boys are off doing their thing and I'm home doing mine. Plenty of time to work on my art and not worry about meals, dishes, housework and that kind of creativity squelching stuff! And I can turn the heat up when I want to!

I'm currently working on a piece using one of my recently created soy wax batik fabrics along with some hand-dyed fabrics and batiks. The colorway is pink to dark red with some gold and a touch of blue. With the rainy days we've had I haven't been inspired to take any pictures because the lighting is so dim, but I will get some on here soon!

The soy wax batik class I took last month was very fun and I came out with some wonderful fabrics to use in my work. I tried to get a nice variety and think I succeeded. I think they are all usable and will add a lot to my work. Thanks goes to the women of In Good Company of Hamilton, Montana for holding this class and providing the myriad of colors of fabric paint and piles of mark-making tools! I would not do this at home because of the space it takes and mess it makes so I was happy to get to take the class and not worry about that.

Just got back my three quilts from MQX (Machine Quilting Exposition) West and found out that I received a Faculty Award from Linda McQuean which was unexpected. Each teacher at the show is allowed to pick a quilt they like and give it a ribbon without having to justify their choice. I think that means my work isn't technically as perfect as it could be but it has artistic appeal! The quilt, "Blackberries and Dandelions" has a lot of fans here locally and has received a few other accolades for its artistic appeal. I'll have to work on that technical part though....

I did not get into Artquilt Elements, again. I have attempted to enter this show for several years now and have never gotten in. It is highly competitive and I'm not sure my work fits in with what they tend to include in their show. It would have been a particular honor this year since the SAQA/SDA joint conference is at the same time and nearby location from the show. OH well, maybe next year...

Back to sewing. Need to get the binding and then beading done on this pink piece I'm working on!

For Sale, For Show, SOLD!

2011-10-04T23:34:00.005-06:00

Since the last post was so WORDY, I thought I'd give you some pictures! The first one is currently getting ready for judging at Machine Quilting Exposition (MQX) - West in Portland, Oregon. It is called "Go Where It Takes You" and is 18"w x 21"h and priced at $280.00. It was created for a challenge requiring us to use the grey/blue oriental fabric and the white background fabric (which actually has a touch of light purple but very subtle).

Next is a little piece I made a while back that has not sold but is definitely worthy. My local gallery, River's Mist, is hanging this months show tomorrow and if she isn't able to fit this piece in, I will likely take it to The Artist's Shop or Art City. Price is $85.00 and the piece is 8"x14". It is called simply, "Abstract Triangles".
This last one is called "Oxygen" because that is what it told me to call it! It has fabric leaves hanging from bead dangles and is one of my favorite little pieces. It is only 8-1/2"w x 25"h but has nice impact because of the light background and great color--and leaves of course! The fabric that inspired the piece was from Selvedge Studio in Missoula, Montana. Not the first time one of their fabrics has inspired something for me! Price is $110.00, but this piece just sold at The Artist's Shop bringing my total number of pieces sold in my solo show there to 8 (as of Saturday)!

Have been busy with show entries, son's birthday, and such, so anxious to get back into the studio so I can show you something new!

By the way, the piece I blogged about recently that I made for the Trout Unlimited fundraising auction sold for a disappointing $100.00. They started bidding at $25 which was rather low in my view as I had valued the piece at $450.00 and if I had put it in a gallery likely would have put a price over $500.00 on it. But, hopefully whoever got the piece will enjoy it and appreciate it. It is a lovely inspired piece. Wish I could have enjoyed it myself a little longer!

Final Days of Solo Exhibition, Other Venues

2011-10-02T22:17:00.004-06:00

My solo exhibition at The Artist's Shop in Missoula, Montana will be taken down on Wednesday this week (October 5). I have now sold 7 pieces there and am very happy with the success of the show. It has been well received and I've had lots of wonderful comments about my work. Please stop in and see the show if you are in Missoula--and sign my guestbook!

I do not have any other shows booked in the area until next spring. In February I will participate in the annual fiber art show in Hamilton, "An Affair of the heART" sponsored by In Good Company. There are many fiber artists in the Missoula/Bitterroot area that participate in this and it is always a wonderful show.

I will be curating a show in Stevensville, Montana (River's Mist Gallery) in April, 2012, that will focus on fiber of different types including clothing, weaving, quilting, and whatever else I might find in the next few months to feature in the show. I haven't worked out the parameters of this show yet but I am currently keeping an eye out for artists to include in the mix.

I have a solo exhibition booked at Montana Art and Framing in Missoula for May, 2012. I'm hoping to have another show in Hamilton and am waiting for a gallery there to get back to me to finalize this. I'll keep you posted...

Remember, you can always find my work at The Artist's Shop in Missoula, Art City in Hamilton, and River's Mist in Stevensville. I will be giving a lecture/trunk show at the Missoula Quilt Guild at their November meeting. I am no longer showing at Madison Creek Furnishings. For details on the galleries please visit my website: http://www.heidizielinski.com/CurrentVenues.html

I just sent three pieces to Portland for the juried Machine Quilting Exposition West. If you are going to Houston for Quilt Festival look for my piece, "Glorious Leaves" in the SAQA Sense of Adventure special exhibit, which will also travel to the other IQF shows and to the Gerald Ford Museum.

As always I am waiting to hear from a couple of shows as to whether my work has been accepted or not and I am getting ready to fill out a couple more show entries. It is never ending! Hopefully one of my pieces will be in a venue near you sometime soon!

Thanks for visiting my blog. Let me know if you see my work at one of these venues and what you think of it. I can take it!! Also, if you would like to receive notification of my upcoming shows, please e-mail me your snail mail and/or e-mail addresses and I'll send you a postcard or e-mail you the info. (heidi@heidizielinski.com)

Recently Sold Pieces

2011-09-27T21:46:00.004-06:00

I have sold 5 pieces at The Artist's Shop this month and I thought I would share a couple of them here. One of them is a piece I could have kept myself and enjoyed on my own wall. It was one that I did at the very last minute for my earlier show in Hamilton at Art City. I had purchased a stamp with the flowers on it and wanted to use it right away so I made this piece. It come out so lovely that I'm sorry to see it go! This piece is called, “Why, Oh Why Can't I?”. I stamped the flowers and bird onto a linen type fabric then stitched them with black thread. I did some hand embroidery on the sides and in the sky and then finished up with more machine stitching. I love the touch of blue in the sky, and how the floral fabric compliments the piece. This piece was hanging right at the entrance door to the gallery and the person who bought it had to take it right away. Now another piece is suspended there ("Nautilus") and looks almost as nice.

The next piece is one that I made a couple of years ago using the pearls, crystals, and findings from a necklace that broke. I did some thread-painting on the flower at bottom left. This is a little bit out of my usual colorway, but people have always seemed to enjoy it when I have showed it. It is called, “Dreamin' On A Winter's Day”. I made it on a late winter day with the intention of choosing some fabrics that did not reflect the cold, hard winter we were having and make me look forward to warmer summer days.

It was amusing that one small piece that sold off of the back wall (which is the feature wall visible from the front of the gallery) I had replaced with a piece the same size and colorway and it sold three days later! I guess it is either a good spot or people like red pieces that size!
Too bad the 2nd person had to take it as well so again there is a small hole there! Not sure I can turn out another one right now.

All the pieces that sold were taken by the purchasers leaving various empty spaces on the walls. I'm glad for the sales of course, but it would be nice to see the pieces still hanging with the little red dots on them. Just my thing---love those little red dots!

Auction Activity and Art Quilts to Share

2011-09-18T22:11:00.008-06:00

The Saqa On-Line Auction is well on its way and my piece was in the first round of bidding. It sold at the $75.00 level to what looks like a collector as she purchased a number of pieces. Obviously someone who appreciates fiber art so I'm glad to see my work go to a good home! Go to http://www.saqa.com/saqa-u.php?ID=1791 to see my piece and many more that you can bid on over the next two weeks.

Speaking of auctions, I just finished a piece for the local Trout Unlimited fundraiser auction and here some pictures...

Going to try to keep my text to a minimum here. Our next "TARTS" project (short for Textile Arts) this month is spraying diluted fabric paint onto silk. I will be doing that tomorrow, but thought I would show a previous paint on silk project that I used in one of my pieces. This project was a layering of various types of silk and applying the paint so that it would seep through the layers. The raw silk piece in the center was at the top of a stack so it has intense color. There are also rusted hand-made Thai silk and rusted cotton fabrics in this as well as hand embroidery and beading.

“Mushroom Habitat” was inspired by my love of hunting for those treasured edible mushrooms such as morels, oyster mushrooms and the occasional puffball. It has mushrooms in the fabrics (which I had been collecting for a while) and in the quilting motifs. I'm not sure this is a very successful piece as it is quite busy and doesn't have enough negative space for eye rest. Love the colors though!

Frost on the Lawn

2011-09-04T18:13:00.008-06:00

Not only is summer winding down, but we had some frost on the grass yesterday morning! The last couple of nights have been rather chilly and I'm starting to think we aren't going to get more than one red tomato (which I already picked and ate!). Here in Montana we tend to get an early frost that really slows things down and with the cool nights we have all summer we just don't get the ripe tomatoes like some parts of the country. Back in Illinois where the nights are warm and humid we actually had tomatoes to give away. In this country a ripe tomato from your own garden is a precious thing! We do give away zucchini though!

In my last post I mentioned wishing that I would get an award to help with all the show entry fee/shipping expenses for my work. Well, at the Pacific West Quilt Show last weekend I won second place and a nice cash award in the Innovative-Small category for my piece "Twist of Lime, Pinch of Purple" which uses Log Cabin blocks in a unique way.

The judge's comments were very nice and they really appreciated my quilting which is especially nice since this one was a real problem child when it came to the quilting. I actually started quilting it and couldn't get the stitches to stop skipping so ended up ripping it all out and ripping the backing off the quilt and putting on a different fabric. I still had some problems quilting it so I set it aside for a while. That meant I missed the deadline for the show I had been planning on submitting it for, but when I picked it up again later it seemed to quilt just fine and I finished it with no problem. I guess it just didn't want to go to that show! Anyways, it is a lovely quilt when it is displayed with good lighting and the color combination is very striking.

So, Friday evening at The Artist's Shop show opening in Missoula, Montana, there was a decent crowd but, maybe because it is Labor Day Weekend, there weren't as many as I would have liked. No one was buying, but they did seem to really enjoy my work and I had a lot of good questions and a number of people took business cards. You hear the old, "I really like that one so I might be back..." line, but unfortunately they rarely do come back! That just gives them time to talk themselves out of it! The show will be up the entire month of September so there is still some time for some sales to happen...! Once again, if you are in the area please stop in and see the show. I believe there are 23 pieces there and some are brand new. Let me know what you think if you do go!

Summer is Winding Down...

2011-08-26T20:50:00.005-06:00

August is almost over and so is the family art show at River's Mist Gallery. It was a nice show and lots of people came to see it, but not too many sales. I sold two small pieces, my mom sold one, my sister sold one (to my mom!), and my son sold 6. It would have been nice if everyone would have sold something, but I guess it just isn't too be! The show will be up until Tuesday next week (August 30) so you have a couple of days to see it if you are in the area.

My next show (postcard image above):

The Artist's Shop

N. Higgins Avenue

Missoula, MT

406-543-6393

Opening Reception: First Friday, September 2, from 5pm-8pm.

I've got some brand new work for this show so please come and see it!

Once I get this show hung I will be working on a piece for the Trout Unlimited Banquet auction fundraiser later in September. I have been sketching out some ideas and thinking about this for some time now. I'm leaning towards a representation of a stream with shadowy fish swimming through it. I would include either cutouts or sheers for the construction. Another idea I had would incorporate the swooping line of a fly rod with a fly on the end. I love the gentle looping back and forth of the line and the graceful arch that allows the fly to drop gently on the surface of the water. This might also include the rings of water moving outward from the point where the fly lands---quilted in of course. As soon as I get this next show off and running I'll get to work on this piece and decide exactly what I'm going to do. Still thinking....!

I have two pieces in the Pacific West Quilt Show this weekend and just sent one quilt to the SAQA Sense of Adventure exhibition which will premier at International Quilt Festival in Houston. I'm waiting to hear from a couple of shows that I sent entries to and I'm going to be submitting a couple more entries in the next week or two. Keeping my work out there is a challenge---an expensive one. It would be helpful if I would win an award or two and get some funds to help with the entry fees and shipping costs for all these shows. I'm honored to be accepted to them, but it all adds up. The sales I have made in the last few months have all been small pieces. I'm grateful that, unlike many artists, I'm selling work on a regular basis, but the small pieces just don't get me too far!

Some images of newer work....

The first is called "Tulip Skies", and the second image is one that I believe I published on this blog in October of 2008 when I was initially working on this piece! I had met with irreconcilable difficulties and wasn't able to move forward with it at that time. When I pulled it out a few months ago I was able to work through the design issues and finish the piece for my August family show! It has received lots of positive comments and is a very bold and dramatic piece.

This next one is called "Tapestry Strutting". I used a small section of pin weaving that I had made over a year ago to create the body of the pheasant. I challenged my family members to all create a pheasant piece of some sort. Four of us participated and it was a beautiful display. The sculptural effect of the quilting over the pin weaving was very successful.

Triggering New Ideas for Art

2011-08-02T22:49:00.006-06:00

When I am trying to determine what is going to be my next project I have several ways of triggering ideas. Most often I go to my fabric stash and look for that certain fabric that will inspire an entire piece. Once I even built a quilt around a fabric and then eliminated that fabric because it didn't work well in the final design! Choosing the fabrics from my stash to go with the inspiration fabric is one of my favorite parts of the whole process!

Another way to figure out what to do next is to look in my sketchbooks and see what ideas I have had that I've probably forgotten. Everytime I look through my books I see the value of making little sketches or notes about ideas that pop into your head at odd times. The recording of those thoughts is a great jumping off point and many of my pieces have started there.

A third way I trigger ideas is by looking at my design wall where I often pin up unusual items I have acquired---a piece of beaded trim, some dyed gauze, a hank of nubby hand-dyed yarn, or a new strand of particularly stunning beads. The reason I put them there was so they would be in the forefront and not forgotten when I am looking for ideas. Sometimes unusual combinations arise because of what happens to be pinned up next to what. The trick for this technique is not to cover up so much of your design wall that you can't work on it!

Recently I created a couple of quilts that started with rubber stamps that had an inspiring images on them. Both of these pieces turned out very interesting and seem to be well received. The simple black printing on simple/solid fabrics can then be quilted and embellished to create a interesting piece. Here is one of my new ones that will be in my family's show opening on Friday:

Violet Shadows - $250.00

In a previous post I showed you some detail images of two pieces I was working on. One was inspired by the simple idea to quilt with white thread on black fabric, and the other was inspired by the round copper beads that are dangling at the bottom. Neither of these are masterpieces, but interesting I think. They are both going to be in the show opening on Friday.

Nautilus - $220.00

Zen Copper - $90.00

One more way I get inspiration for a design is from a technique I'm playing around with. The quilt below is one that arose from a fabric weaving technique my mom showed me using those wonderful ombre fabrics that fade from one color to another or from light to dark.

You never know where your next quilt idea will come from. Keep a sketchbook for those ideas that come when you aren't ready for them yet. Keep some key items out where you can see them to help trigger that next design idea. Run your fingers through your stash once in a while to see what gorgeous fabric you had forgotten you bought knowing it would be just perfect for building a showpiece around! Then get in your studio/sewing room and design that fiber art!!

Frog Pond - (Sold)

Unusual Embellishments

2011-07-22T19:02:00.007-06:00

I love to embellish my art quilts with all kinds of things. I most often use beads but I use more than the usual seed beads and bugle beads. I love to combine stone, glass, and metal beads with the fiber because they compliment it so well and add great texture.

Here is a piece that I made recently which is currently hanging in my solo exhibition at Art City Gallery in Hamilton, Montana. The piece is called "Indian Summer" and the dangling leaves at the bottom are made with shrink plastic. I colored the plastic with Sharpie markers, punched a hole in the top of each leaf, cut them out, and shrunk them on a baking sheet covered with foil in the oven. They are strung from the quilt on beaded strands and when they happen to knock together they make a very nice sound. The color is vivid and permanent (a little difficult to see on the detail picture because they are shiny and reflective). A very fun and easy embellishment. Shrink plastic (yes, the same as those Shrinky Dinks you used to make when you were a kid!), is available at Joann's and probably lots of other places. The hanging cord is a strip of suede and the rod is a stick I found early this spring when I was out hunting for morels along a stream.

Another piece I made recently (also in my Art City show), uses little butterflies purchased from a local drugstore that has a craft section. They are made from feathers that are painted to look like butterfly wings. I glued them onto the quilt using E6000 adhesive. They are somewhat fragile, but isn't it amazing how well they match the fabric they are perched on? It was purely by accident that I had picked them up just a few days before making this quilt. I did not buy them for anything in particular, just liked the colors. I made the quilt and only then remembered the butterflies and wondered if they would go with it. Serendipity!

You never know where an embellishment or an idea for an embellishment might come from. The quilt I am currently working on is a pheasant and I went outside to pick some tall grasses so I could lay them out on the quilt, position them attractively, mark the placement with chalk, and quilt them into the quilt. Worked great! And I had them there next to me so I could quilt the tops of the grasses fairly realistically.

I am finishing two pieces up for my family show that will open on Friday, August 5 at River's Mist Gallery in Stevensville, Montana. I gave the gallery several collaged images for the postcard and I think the one below is the one they used. You can see there will be a nice variety of art in our show, although my sister wasn't able to get me images of her wearable art for the postcard. Anyone in the area is invited to attend the opening reception Friday evening from 6-9pm, or visit the gallery anytime in the month of August.

Detail Images of New Pieces

2011-07-11T16:15:00.008-06:00

I just finished a very small piece inspired by some round copper beads that I just recently purchased. They are dangling at the bottom of the piece. I used copper thread for some of the quilting and an interesting long skinny copper bead as well to carry through the copper inspiration. Not my best work but an interesting little piece.

I recently experimented with Artist Transfer Paper and the following quilt utilized an image that I colored onto the transfer paper with regular Sharpie markers. I would not usually use these on fabric since they tend to spread and you cannot do this small detail that I was able to do on the transfer paper. I also used some pastel crayons for some of the color and they also worked well. You can paint, draw, stamp, print, almost anything onto this paper and then transfer it to fabric or almost anything else. It is really fun stuff to experiment with.

Here are some detail images of the current piece I am working on. It has a section of nearly black fabric that I am quilting on with white rayon threadwork. I will likely do some beading here as well.

As you can see, I am still busy getting ready for my next shows opening in August and September!

Finishing a UFO

2011-07-05T23:31:00.004-06:00

At the end of last week I picked up a piece that I had worked on more than a year ago and never was able to get it to come together. I wasn't sure if I could even salvage it or at the very least would have to do a major re-work, and I just wasn't at a point where I was ready to do that. So, now when I picked it up again and looked at what I had done I thought it had great potential. Gorgeous color, bold and textural fabrics, interesting lines. It was actually ready for quilting so I tackled it and spent three days quilting my head off (father and son were off hiking the hills and left me home with my passion!). I had made some dimensional attachments for the piece and I reworked some and created more and pinned them on.

Then I hung the piece on my design wall. I left the room and came back----voila! It works. I really like it and every time I turn around and see it hanging there I like it more. I just love it when a plan comes together! Now I have a great piece for my August show at River's Mist Gallery and if I can figure out how to attach the dimensional pieces and finish off the edges of the quilt it will be ready to hang. I think it will be a show-stopper!

Lesson learned: Sometimes a piece that isn't working just needs to be put away for a while until you are ready to see where it is supposed to go and what it is to become. What I thought wasn't working about this piece turns out to be the best feature of it. Areas of hot clear color and of soft romantic pastel become the hotspots and the eye relief for the piece. The juxtaposition of the different styles/colorways turns out to be interesting and intriguing to the eye. I guess I should have trusted my instincts in putting these together. We'll see if others agree with my feelings about this piece when they see it in August.

Now that the piece is almost done I wish I had documented the progress with some images, but alas I did not. I will share some images of the piece in the near future but I want to keep it a bit under wraps until my show.

I'm kind of hoping this piece does not sell right away as it has some potential for getting into some shows (but my gallery owner doesn't want to hear that!). I guess I'll just have to wait and see.

Bitterroot Quilter's Guild Show, etc...

2011-06-25T21:07:00.008-06:00

Finally summer has arrived here in Montana. We had a very wet spring and there is still lots of snow in the mountains. Now it is melting off and causing streams and rivers to run very swift and high. My husband and son are backpacking this weekend near one of these swollen streams so I'm hoping they are staying safe and dry. I have been busy helping with the Bitterroot Quilters' Guild Quilt Show in Hamilton. I helped hang the postcard challenge yesterday and then counted viewer's choice ballots today. Tomorrow I will help man the Silent Auction area. I donated three pieces to the auction and hope that whoever gets them will enjoy them. It is one way that those who can't usually afford my pieces can get them for a reasonable price---not that my prices aren't "reasonable"!!

I stopped by the Art City Gallery to see how my solo show was doing and saw that one more piece has sold so I was very happy about that. The gentleman manning the gallery this afternoon said that a woman who was just in was admiring one particular piece and hoping her husband might buy it for her for her birthday or something. Those comments rarely come to fruition, but at least there are people interested in the work and enjoying it. I hope to sell at least a couple more pieces before the show ends July 31.

I heard today that the Missoulian newspaper hopes to do a story in the July First Friday arts and entertainment section about our Trunk Show at Montana Art and Framing. That will be great publicity for us and maybe we'll get a good crowd at the First Friday reception that month. I was really hoping that the newspaper would discover the show and write up something about it. I hope they get some good photos. Can't wait to see the story!

Two of my pieces were just accepted to the Pacific West Quilt Show in Tacoma, Washington which is 8/26-28. I also had a piece just accepted to the Northern National Quilt Competition in Wisconsin which is a fine art show--my first. I guess this area of Wisconsin has lots of cottages where people from Chicago and Milwaukee go to vacation. This is the 24th show so it is well established and hopefully well attended. They have some cash prizes, but I would like to sell my piece and I haven't really heard how well they sell from this show. It gets to be very costly entering all these shows, so winning or selling something and getting a cash award is very helpful.

As soon as the quilt show is over tomorrow I'll be getting started on a new piece. I have some fabrics up on the design wall but I'm not feeling very excited about them so might move to something else. I have a lovely piece of hand-dyed fabric with a manipulated digital image that I transferred onto it using TAP (Transfer Artist Paper) and it is very interesting. I have already chosen some fabrics and been pondering how to proceed with this piece. There is a great deal of detail in the photo image and I'm thinking that threadwork might distract from the wonderful image so I might end up doing some simplistic stitching in that area with monofilament or at least a thread that really blends with the background. Haven't figured out anything as far as the design yet, but I'm thinking that as soon as the quilt show is done my head will be freed up for some more creative thinking!

Speaking of the quilt show, it is a wonderful one. There are extremely talented and skilled quilters in the Bitterroot Valley of all types from traditional to innovative to art quilters. Our featured quilter is Jeanne Doyle who is 86 and does beautiful traditional and innovative pieces with great skill and wonderful color sense. I probably enjoyed her exhibit more than any other featured quilter I have ever seen. Wonderful work. There are also many other great quilts in the show and voting was a real challenge---for me and many others. It is a privilege to be a part of this guild.

I just looked out to the south west and the sky is blue, purple, pink and slightly orange with streaks of clouds. Then out the other window is my garden bursting with huge orange poppies in full bloom. I love living where we do and being able to enjoy the Rocky Mountains out my front window and the beautiful Montana skies and landscapes out every other window in my house. I don't get out into the woods as much as I should these days but I think I will try to go more in the next few months. It is inspirational to walk among wildflowers, Ponderosa Pine trees, and huckleberry bushes and enjoy the sounds of birds in the trees. Getting some exercise would be a good thing too! Having a passion that is basically sedentary doesn't do much for the figure. And I have a 30th reunion coming up soon so I guess I better get started now!!

Trying To Move On....

2011-06-18T21:38:00.008-06:00

After opening two shows this month and with all the cloudy, rainy weather we've been having, I'm having a difficult time getting myself back into the swing of creating. I have two more shows coming up in August and September so I need to create some new works for those. I did just complete a challenge quilt for the Pacific West Quilt Show in Tacoma and tonight I finished my postcard challenge piece for our local Bitterroot Quilt Guild's show next weekend. Now I'm ready to start a new piece. But here I sit on the computer not in my studio!

I sold two small pieces at the opening reception of my show at Art City in Hamilton. Here are pics of the two pieces. They were both small but lovely little works and I will miss them, as I do many of my quilts when they go!

Nature's Palette I:

In The Pines - Detail of Thread-painted branches/needles:

In The Pines - The pine branches on the bottom and right are threadpainted over a stamped image and the one on the left (in the detail above) were created free-hand.

In April the Art City Gallery had a "Recycled Art Show" and in the spirit of recycling our project for the Tarts class was to use plastic shopping bags to create a sort of "fabric". You layer 3-5 layers of plastic bags and fuse them together with your iron between two applique pressing sheets. Then they can be cut up and used however you like and there were quite a number of unique uses. I just used mine as fabric and then chose complimentary fabrics and found items to create three fiber art pieces. The embellishments and most of the fabric are all things that were given to me or found or from past projects.

Refuse II: Rescue

Refuse I: Transformation

Refuse III: Gathering

If I don't get back in my studio to create some new pieces, these may be in one of my next two shows!

The "Trunk" Show

2011-05-13T21:37:00.006-06:00

The art group I belong to has chosen a name: Montana Bricolage Artists (MBA). "Bricolage" (brēkō'lä zh) is defined as a construction or creation made from a diverse range of available things. We needed to finally commit to a name for the marketing of our first fiber art exhibition which is called The "Trunk" Show. The pieces are long narrow fiber works meant to portray tree trunks in any form, style, or techniques that the artists wished to use. We hope to hang as many of the pieces as possible suspended freely instead of against the wall so that you can have the experience of walking through the "forest" of trees. I have seen most of the finished works and I can tell you it is going to be a beautiful show. We are premiering this exhibition of approximately 25 pieces at Montana Art and Framing and the opening reception is June 10 from 5pm-9pm. The show will be there until the end of July. We will be seeking out other venues and hope to get it exhibited several more times in the next two years. Tentatively it will be in Billings in the spring of 2012 at the same time that the Creative Forces exhibit is there which is a Studio Art Quilts Associates exhibition. I hope that if you are anywhere in the Missoula area in June and July you will stop by Montana Art and Framing at 709 Ronan Street in Missoula (406-541-7100) and see our show. I believe that you will find it an experience to remember.

We are currently working on a postcard and will be designing some kind of poster/flier for marketing our show. We have a work session planned for later this month in order to prepare all the pieces for hanging at the gallery and finalize our reception plans. There are a lot of details to organize for an effort like this and we are all new to the process so we are hoping it goes smoothly. The best thing about it is the universal enthusiasm for the theme of trees. Particularly in this Rocky Mountain region in the midst of mountains, wilderness, and nature we are inspired by trees and fascinated by their endless variety, beauty and majesty.

Also in June and July I will have my solo exhibition at Art City Gallery (407 W. Main St., Hamilton, MT) with an opening reception on June 3. The show is entitled: Art Quilts: Images of Nature. I know, I know, rather trite, but it is what it is and I felt it a fitting title for my work.
Here is my postcard image for that show to intrigue you into coming!

I just received notice this week that one of my pieces, "A Twist of Lime, A Pinch of Purple" will be exhibited at the AQS Knoxville quilt show in Tennessee which is a new part of the country for me. I was pleasantly surprised for this quilt to be accepted to this large show. I have shown this piece a number of times and it can look very beautiful or rather unremarkable depending on how it is displayed. Let's hope it is hung well in Tennessee with nice lighting! The color in this quilt is very lovely and the unique setting of the log cabin blocks is interesting. I hope viewers enjoy it.

I am waiting to hear from a few shows including the Pacific West Quilt Show in Tacoma and Larkin Van Horn's "Deep Spaces" exhibition. I'm currently working on a couple of new pieces for my Art City show and today I bravely cut many holes in one of them and am now backing them with contrasting fabric and satin stitching the edges. I think it will work nicely.

Off to the studio...

Art as a Business

2011-05-08T22:41:00.008-06:00

Before I get to some more serious discussion, here are a couple of small pieces for you to ogle. The first is a fairly recent piece that is completely hand stitched and beaded. I worked on it in small bits of time over a year or so. It was the piece I took with me when I needed some handwork to do at my weekly casual quilt group gathering. It is rather heavy with beads and embroidery floss! The title is: "With Silver Bells and Cockle Shells"

Here is another piece I did fairly recently which sold right away at River's Mist Gallery to our local newspaper owner. It is called "Haiku" because of its somewhat oriental feel and it is a small, simple piece. It received a lot of nice comments when it hung in the gallery.

I have a bachelor's degree in Business Administration and one in Hotel Administration so I have taken my share of marketing and business classes. I am currently not working a 9 to 5 job where I would apply my education, but I find that I am using many of the skills for marketing and promoting my art and myself in the art/quilting community.

I have been successful in getting my work into 8 different area galleries over the past few years and I am continuously showing work in three of them. I prepare paperwork to keep inventory records of what I take and pick up from these venues, I have images of all my work so I have a record of what it looks like, I make up price tags and artist statements and sometimes prepare an artist profile for these various venues, I rotate my work in and out every month or so to keep them fresh, I have insurance coverage for my work and I claim all my art-related expenses and income on my taxes. This serious business!

I spend quite a bit of time organizing my inventory of work for preparing show entries and determining what can be entered where and what is available or in galleries. This is a very complicated task since each show has different requirements for size, type, deadlines for entry and length of commitment for the quilts, and some need the quilts to be for sale so they are then unavailable for entry to later shows until that show is over. I have a good inventory of pieces and I enter quite a few shows, so keeping track of what is available for a particular show can be difficult. My husband is in the process of creating a database for me that might help with this, but I don't think it will eliminate all of the issues. Some of the decisions I have to make are purely subjective like trying to find a piece to fit a theme or style of show.

I try to keep my website and blog updated but haven't been as prompt with that as I should be. I have a slow dial-up computer connection and that makes it a chore to upload images to my blog and even get in and out of the management site for it. I am hoping to keep more current with my blog and vary my topics so that readers might actually feel like they get something out of it. I've tended to go on about my accomplishments more than anything else! I'd rather start sharing some knowledge about how I create my art and run my business.

I have done some lectures and some trunk shows and a few small mini-classes and have found these things rewarding and fun---although I do get very nervous. I am trying to decide about whether to pursue the teaching thing right now and am leaning towards devoting time to writing instead of teaching. Maybe down the road I'll feel more comfortable charging people money to learn something from me, but now I don't feel I can devote the time and effort into it that will make it worth what I want to charge. I'd rather be creating! And writing I can do in little bits of time that I have available as opposed to the intense preparation of materials and curriculum for a successful class. I think I'm just not ready to be a teacher quite yet, but I'm still debating this.

Donating

2011-05-05T11:06:00.004-06:00

"Oxygen"
[leaves dangle from beaded strands]

It is an interesting proposition when you are deciding to donate work to various causes. I have recently given several pieces to my church and will soon be selecting some for my guild's silent auction at their show in June as well. The pieces I gave to the church are for their fundraising efforts at the annual Outdoorsfest they sponsor. I had to ponder what to give based on whether the pieces were to be given out as "door prizes" randomly or if people would be bidding on them as auction pieces. It would be too bad for someone to get a quilt who had no use for it or interest in it. I know that I am giving them up and whatever happens to them is really none of my concern now, but it still would be sad!

When I give them to a guild effort I know that whoever wins the piece or buys the piece will likely enjoy it so that is not as difficult. The pieces are not usually my best or most sellable ones but they are nice pieces that I feel comfortable using to represent me and my work. I don't want to give them really bad pieces that I don't think are any good, but I don't want to give up my most sellable or show-worthy pieces either. And larger pieces are difficult for most people to find room for in their homes so I usually give small pieces.

Here is one of the quilts I gave to my church. It is one I made last fall that I really like and felt that it fit in with the outdoor theme of the event. It is called "Flyway".

This next quilt is one my mom wanted to buy from me so I gave it to her. I really like the abstract imagery of this piece that really has a lot of feeling and evokes memories for me. I really enjoy creating pieces that are very abstract in nature but definitely are suggestive of something real. This one works for me.

Friday evening (May 6) is the opening of the Bitterroot Artist's Showcase sponsored by SASS (Stevensville Art and Sculpture Society) at River's Mist Gallery. The reception will be from 6-9pm so please join us!

Back to the studio to churn out some more work for my upcoming solo exhibit at Art City!

Exhibitions and Activities

2011-05-03T23:31:00.003-06:00

I just completed a quilt for entry into the “Deep Spaces” exhibition being organized by Larkin Van Horn. I am very happy with how the piece turned out and very hopeful that it will get into the show. She is an artist that I greatly admire and I like the theme she chose. I'm sure there will be great competition, so I'm just hoping that my images can compete. The piece I made has three large cutouts and two layers added behind the cutouts to create depth and interest. It also has fabric leaves dangling from seed bead strands. Both of these techniques are ones that I use quite frequently in my work and really enjoy experimenting with. This was a rather dramatic experience for me in regards to the cutouts because they are so large. It is an interesting experience to cut large holes in a quilt that you have just spent a good deal of time creating, layering and quilting! Luckily I think it turned out well and if the piece does not make it into the show I will be happy to show it locally in one of the shows I have set for this year.

I found out recently that one of my pieces, “Glorious Leaves”, will be traveling with the Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA) exhibition entitled “Sense of Adventure”. It will be first exhibited at the Houston International Quilt Festival which is very exciting. They are publishing a catalog for the show so that will be my first time having that experience. This piece incorporates some of my shibori dyed fabric and some hand embroidery along with the thread-painted leaves and extensive machine quilting.

"Glorious Leaves"

I am busy creating new pieces for my June/July solo exhibition at Art City in Hamilton, Montana. I just finished creating an image for a postcard. I was happy to be able to figure out how to collage some images together and put them on a black background and I am happy with the result. The show will open on First Friday, June 6 so if you are in the area please join me and see some new and some not so new work! Also, if you are in that area in May the Recycled Art Show is still up and there are some interesting pieces there. I have 3 quilts in the show made with plastic shopping bags fused together and combined with fabric and some other found or re-purposed items. It was a fun project to work on, but plastic is not my favorite medium!

Last Wednesday I gave a presentation to the Bitterroot Quilter's Guild about my work and inspiration and it went very well. I had lots of nice comments and it is always good to have it reinforced how supportive they all are of my work. I think I was able to combine a little bit of education and information with some eye candy to make everyone happy! Now I am ready to do more programs like that for other guilds or fiber art groups in the region. Will have to look into that.... Will also have to work on reducing my nervousness. My mouth started drying up as soon as I got into the car to drive to the guild meeting and continued all the way until I was done with the program!

Ready to start a new piece tomorrow after I attend my son's final field trip of the year to the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation in Missoula. His school is getting out early this year (May 6) because of construction on the campus, so I'll have to work around him in getting new work ready for my show. I'm sure he'll be able to occupy himself for part of the day and let me get some things done although I will definitely not have the nice uninterrupted big blocks of time that I have when he is in school. It's ok---I enjoy having him around and taking him with me wherever I have to go as he is well-behaved and usually doesn't mind going places.

Next week is my 48th birthday and I'm starting to think about that milestone coming up—50! Boy, I don't feel that old. Hopefully 50 is the halfway point since people seem to live longer and longer these days. I guess I'll have to get myself out from behind my sewing machine and get some more exercise so I can have one of those long lives too!!

Judging and Jurying

2011-03-08T12:21:00.006-07:00

I just got my quilt, "Twilight", back from the Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival out in Hampton, Virginia. The comments from the judges were good, but I did not get an award. It is nice to get feedback from these nationally known teachers/judges about your work and I find it worthwhile to enter these shows for that reason. Here is what they said:

"Beading is very effective. Juxtaposition of quilting designs is interesting. We like the use of textured fabric. Stitch techniques (and we are nitpicking here) needs to be neater--watch your binding."

I usually get comments about my stitching since I'm not a perfectionist in that regard. I usually do try to make neat bindings, and I think this one is pretty good, so I'm not sure exactly what they mean. I always wish I could be there to hear their discussion about my work and get even more hints on why a piece is not a "winner". I believe that usually for me it is my lack of perfectionism that puts me out of the running. Sometimes I'd like to know where I was in the standings---did I get out right away or was I considered for an award and bumped out because of my stitching.......? Always all these questions cross my mind and make me wish I was a fly on the wall!

This weekend I am driving to Billings, Montana for their retreat and quilt show (I'm not participating in the retreat). I entered three pieces in their show just to get my work to other side of the state and see what people think. I'm staying with a friend for a couple of nights and hope to "peddle my wares" to a gallery or two while I'm there. I'll take some of my work with me as I always do and see if anyone has time to take a look. It has worked before!

Next week I'm taking a design workshop with Lyric Kinard here in Hamilton and I'm really looking forward to that. It is rare that we get anyone of her caliber in our rather rural setting so it is a great opportunity. No matter what she was teaching I would have signed up!

The local gallery where I show my work, River's Mist, is having a show this month of artwork from Stevensville Highschool students and it is a very nice show. If you are in the area I recommend you stop in to what these young people are doing. You will be impressed. Many of us in the community thank Gretchen, the proprietor of River's Mist, for hosting shows like this. She is very supportive of local artists and we greatly appreciate it!

I have two of my pieces on www.infinityartgallery.com which is a site that sponsors on-line art show competitions. The pieces in the Spring Expo will be out there in this "pre-exhibit" until the juror chooses the winners and then those will be there through April. There is quite a variety of art there so evaluating it must a difficult job. Take a look and see how you think my fiber art compares....

Fibery February

2011-02-21T22:34:00.004-07:00

No excuses for the long hiatus, just pure procrastination! I really need to try to get into a routine with my posting and do it on a regular basis. Anyways, here I am!

We had the Tarts fiber art show, An Affair of the heART, over the Valentine's Day weekend in Hamilton, Montana, and it was a great show. There are many wonderful fiber artists involved in this group and it was nice to see such a variety of styles and talents. Many pieces were sold, although only one of mine (to one of the members of the sponsoring company, In Good Company!), but then mine are a little pricey. I was very pleased with the continued positive response to my work and loved all the accolades I received about it. No one guessed which challenge quilt was mine as it was unremarkable. I didn't even place in the voting this time. I entered quite a number of pieces this year in a range of prices hoping to sell a few, but even without sales the exposure to the number of visitors that attend this show is a definite positive advantage to showing here. The show is hung in a gallery type style and the four women from In Good Company do an excellent job of it. I hope the show will continue for many years to come!

I did sell one new piece on opening night of the floral theme show at River's Mist Gallery in Stevensville. It is a beautiful little beaded piece called "Haiku" and I wish I had longer to bond with it! It is still hanging in the show and when I see it I grow more and more fond of it. One of those that I could live with myself if I ever chose to keep any of my work! "Everything's for sale" I always say, since that is the goal of my efforts.

In January the show at River's Mist was all photography in one form or another so I thought I would play around with some digital images on silk. Here are two of the pieces that were in the show and at the Tarts show.

This one is from a picture I took of a bright orange and black poppy in my garden. I manipulated the color and created a collage. Technicolor Poppy - $300.00

This next one is a small piece with an image taken in my back yard looking through the cottonwood trees along the creek. The Glow at Dusk - $64.00

These next pictures are from one of my sketchbooks showing some of my doodling to try to come up with new quilting designs or variations of designs, or sometimes just to get the hang of the directional aspects of a design. Just moving your hand with the pen/pencil gives you a good feel for moving the quilt under the needles when you are creating free motion quilting designs. In the class I am hoping to teach one of these days, I will highly encourage my students to keep a sketchbook and use it for doodling. I also use my sketchbooks for recording ideas for quilts or for parts of quilts. Sometimes I sketch and then make small notes about what I'm thinking so that when I look at it months down the road I might remember why it was such a good idea! I also use my sketchbooks to draw variations on a theme when I need to make a piece for a challenge or show that requires a certain theme. I find those most difficult to be inspired for, but drawing out whatever ideas come to mind and then choosing the most interesting one has worked pretty well. Most often the finished piece is only loosely based on the original sketch, but that's what creating is all about for me. I rarely have a complete vision of a how a piece is going to end up, it just evolves as I go along.

I just completed my little 12"x12" piece for the next SAQA Auction and am very happy with the results. In order to travel to the Cincinnati quilt show and be considered for some of the marketing efforts for the auction it has to be there by March 15 so I have a little while to bond with it before shipping it off. The piece goes back to a style I haven't done for a while with cutouts, dangling leaves, and a reversible panel. The logistics of creating this type of design, particularly in a piece so small, was rather daunting, particularly since I did not account for how I was going to hang the piece and had to some up with something that would work with the reversible panel. I think it works fine and hope that someone will enjoy the color change opportunity that it presents. The piece is called "Choices" for the reversible panel as well as for the choices we as fiber artists make throughout our processes and in our creative journey.

My next project to tackle is my tree trunk for our group exhibition which is due at the end of April. I have it started on the design wall and am ready to pin it together and start stitching down the components. I think I like it, but it might be a bit cumbersome to quilt. We'll see how that goes. I seem to have a bit of a block for working on it and I'm thinking it is because of it being in a group show and wanting it to turn out well---and not being sure it will! As always, I will just hope that through the processes of quilting and then embellishing it will become worthy! I am really hoping to create at least two trees, so I better get moving!

I now have some work at Madison Creek, a very nice furniture and gift store in Stevensville. They will soon be opening their "Gallery at Madison Creek" upstairs. I'm hoping to hear from them any day that they are ready to open it up for visitors.

This weekend one of my quilts will be at the Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival on the east coast. "Twilight" will represent me well I think. I really like getting my work to other parts of the country to see how well they are received and have been very happy with those efforts so far.

New Year's News

2011-01-10T15:15:00.005-07:00

Well, I have survived through the holidays and I sold a few ornaments for some spare change (but not much else)! Now I am hoping for some success in this new year in selling a few pieces and maybe getting something published. I am planning to submit some articles to see if there is any interest in publishing my writing but first I need to get images to go with them. Most of the magazines seem to want images illustrating your discussion up front so that is what is currently holding me up. Hopefully I can work on that in between upcoming deadlines.

Our yearly TART's show of fiber art will be February 11-13 at the Hamilton City Hall (old Bedford Building) at Bedford and South 2nd streets in Hamilton, Montana. I will have some pieces in the show and am currently working on a piece for their challenge. Hopefully I will have some new work that no one has seen yet. This has always been a pretty good venue and I usually sell a piece or two so I'm hopeful!

There has not been much success in getting people to sign up for the classes at Patchwork Quilts and I think I will try to come up with a condensed class that will be more inexpensive for people. Maybe just a one day class on a Saturday. I'm planning to work on that this week . Since I have all the plans outlined for the three session class I'm sure I can work up a shorter class fairly easily. I certainly understand why people don't want to spend the money I'm asking for, so I'll just have to adjust my plans and see if I can't offer what they want. That is really the goal, isn't it?

I have mentioned that my piece, "Blackberries and Dandelions" is in the Art Quilts XV show in Chandler, Arizona. I was interviewed by a reporter from the Phoenix newspaper (Arizona Republic) about my piece. The article was about the new space that the Vision Gallery is occupying and they mentioned several other artists in the show who are from Arizona and the names and prices of their work. She went into a little more detail about my work and my background. The reporter incorrectly stated that I created the batik fabrics in the piece, but they are commercial fabrics. I did dye one of the fabrics in the piece and she misunderstood what I said about that. Unfortunately they did not publish a picture of the quilt as she had hoped and they didn't give my website address, but it was nice publicity to be mentioned prominently in the article. The reporter told me that my piece was her favorite in the show which was very flattering since there are almost 100 pieces and many much more seasoned artists than I. Hopefully the article will send some more people to the show--and someone will buy something. I heard that only one piece has sold so far. I believe the exhibit is supposed to be taken down on January 18.

I am currently working on a small piece to send to Studio Art Quilt Associates for their Traveling Trunk Show. The pieces are supposed to give people an idea of the great variety of techniques and styles being used in art quilts and hopefully my piece portrays what I am doing. I have finished the piece and need to write up a description of the work and techniques used so I can send it off. The pieces are sent out to lots of places all over the country for interested people/groups to look at and be inspired by. We had some of them come here locally last year and enjoyed the variety and quality of the work very much. I regretted that I hadn't submitted anything for that grouping, so I'm making to sure to get one in this year! I'll put a picture up soon...

Friday evening I attended the opening of the Missoula Art Museum's auction exhibition at which one of my pieces, "In A Heartbeat" is displayed. It is in the silent auction which will take place the same evening as the live auction in February. It was a wonderful exhibition of art from many local artists (and others) and I enjoyed the great variety and quality of the work. I do hope that there is interest in my piece as I would be somewhat embarrassed for them to have to give it back to me! There was only one other fiber art piece and it was quite different from mine (by Nancy Erickson) and I don't believe it was a recent work. This was a juried submission process so we had to send images of some pieces to be considered and I was honored to be included.

I have been somewhat disappointed in the lack of comments on my blog and wanted to ask if there are any problems people are having doing that, or if you just don't have anything to say. Please e-mail me at heidi@heidizielinski.com if you experience any problems with commenting. I'm curious as to how other bloggers get people to make comments and get feedback for what they are sharing. If you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them!

Small Art Quilt Classes at Patchwork Quilts

2010-12-18T22:45:00.006-07:00

For those who are in my neck of the woods, I am pleased to announce that I am offering a 3-session class in making a small art quilt at Patchwork Quilts in Hamilton, Montana this coming February. The classes are on the first three Thursdays in February (2/3, 2/10, and 2/17). The first session is on making an art quilt top, the second is on layering and quilting the top, and third session is on embellishing and finishing the quilt.

Patchwork Quilts is at 1720 N. First St. in Hamilton which is the main road through town (Hwy 93). You can call them at 363-5754 for details, or stop in and see the samples for each of the sessions that I just dropped off at the shop.

By the way, you can take one or two or all three sessions as you like. If you only want the quilting one, just sign up for that one. I will be attempting to make them independent of each other, but if you take all three they will definitely be a nice progression towards a finished piece.

Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions about the classes. I would really like to share what I know with you and hope that you will let me know what you'd like to learn. I've had many people tell me they would like to do what I do but don't think they can. I think I can teach you some things that will help you move in the right direction. I will hopefully even share some things with you that you can use no matter what kind of quilting you like to do.

Also, if you sign up and need help with the supply list please don't hesitate to contact me. I'll be bringing some fabric, thread, and embellishment stuff for each relevant session that will help to supplement whatever you bring, so there is no need to stress out about it!

Hope to see you there! Thanks!

Holiday Ornaments

2010-12-17T11:17:00.009-07:00

It seems like I move from one deadline to another all year long. It would be nice to have a month where I'm not working on something for some future deadline! It seems like I don't have time to just play around with stuff in my studio as I am too busy creating things to sell and enter in various shows. This year I am going to try to trim down my commitments to those that are potentially most valuable to me and see if I can find the time to experiment with some things that interest me like using photos in my work, doing more with cutouts and unusually shaped pieces, and possible more painting on fabric. If I would just stop committing to shows and galleries maybe I would have time---probably not going to happen!

The past month I have been making ornaments that are quilted and beaded. I layered fabric with heavyweight Pellon stabilizer (or Timtex). The fabrics I'm using are some of those great pictorial pieces I buy and never use in my art quilts, but they have some wonderful images on them like owls, animals, trees, etc. It has been really fun to match fabrics and beads together to make tiny little works of art. I have sold quite a few at a couple of galleries and on my own and there are more at Art City in Hamilton and River's Mist Gallery in Stevensville (317 Main St.).

Some of the cutest ones I made used fabric from Selvedge Studio in Missoula (509 S. Higgins). They have some wonderfully whimsical fabrics that worked great for the ornaments. The owls on the grey background and the birds are from Selvedge Studio. The sun and moon ornaments are double-sided and were a little more time-consuming to bead and stitch. That is an older fabric that I had in my stash. Not sure where I got the other owl fabric with the darker background. It was fun to go through my stash and find little images to use and then match beads to them. I did get a little carried away with some of the beading!

The fabrics are attached using glue stick and I used satin stitching and various quilt designs to secure them. I satin stitched the edges all the way around and then did the beading. I tried to do extra securing stitches for all the dangles and hanging loops. I've sold these from anywhere between $12 and $20 and have really enjoyed making them. Now I need to get myself to STOP (I'm obsessed!) so I can move on to this month's Tarts project and possibly creating a piece for a show opening in January utilizing photo(s).

Here are some images of the ornaments. The pictures are not of the best quality, but you can get an idea of how fun they are!

Daly Mansion Holiday Art Fair Booth

2010-11-10T10:28:00.008-07:00

I had my first booth show this weekend. I was a vendor at the Daly Mansion's juried holiday “craft” show in Hamilton, Montana. I had heard that his was a good venue because people usually came with money to spend and were interested in quality art. Unfortunately, either due to the economy or the nature of my work, there was very little spending going on in my booth! I heard a rumor that there was not much going on in other booths as well, but I did see people with bags walking around.

I had many, many positive and enthusiastic comments and accolades about my work. Most of the people who actually came into my room were interested and intrigued with it and spent a reasonable amount of time looking at. Very few looked at price tags, and those that did just moved on. Because my work is not cheap or even inexpensive, I'm guessing that most people need more time to make such a purchasing decision---especially if it is to be a gift. It is hard to buy art for other people.

I am glad that it is over and I have all these wonderful little works to sell at the local galleries where I show my work. I can take a breather and maybe clean up my house and particularly my work space! I did my duty in exposing many people to the world of art quilts. There were people who had never seen this type of art and obviously found it fascinating. There was one who asked, "So these are meant to hang on the wall?", which I thought was fairly obvious, but I answered her politely and let her look. Lots of people took business cards and if even one of those results in further contact and maybe even a purchase down the road it will have been worth it.

Here some images of a few small pieces I had at the show. The little owl piece was one of two small pieces that actually sold. I at least made my booth fee back and a little more, but not enough to make the whole effort worth doing again.

Six Little Owls (SOLD):

Little Pine ($60.00):

I've Got Rhythm ($180.00):

Upcoming November Activities

2010-10-12T10:28:00.004-06:00

Two posts on one day---do you believe it? Don't miss the last post down below this one.

In November I have several things happening. I will have a booth at the juried Daly Mansion holiday craft show and have been working on lots of new small pieces for that. My booth will be on the second floor. This is my first experience with this kind of selling, so I'm a bit nervous about how it will go. Whether I sell much or not, I will definitely enjoy finding out how people react to my work and what they think of it. It is three days so I'm hoping I'll make a few sales and have fun talking with people about what I do.

I will also have some work in the "Many Faces of Fiber" show at The Artist's Shop in Missoula, Montana. There will be some quilted table runners by Judy Hartz, some weaving, wearables and I'm not sure what else, but I know it will be a very interesting show. This is a wonderful coop gallery that is worth visiting, particularly if you are looking for gifts for the holidays. I highly recommend it.

I will also have work at The River's Mist Gallery where the featured show in November is Master Woodworkers. I think my fiber art goes particularly well with wood, so I'm hoping there will be room for a few to hang with this show. I will likely have "Jewel of the Forest" there so if you want to see it in person please stop by. The gallery is on Main Street in Stevensville. In December River's Mist Gallery will have work by all of her featured artists, including me. Look for more of my small pieces perfect for holiday gift-giving if they don't all sell at the Mansion!

As always I will have some work at Art City and The Frame Shop which are both on Main Street in Hamilton, Montana.

This weekend my mother and I will be headed to Spokane, Washington for their quilt show. I have three pieces entered and I'm looking forward to seeing the show. I have heard this is a very nice show and I'm sure they will have a lot of vendors where I can spend some money!

It's a "NO" from Quilt National

2010-10-12T09:17:00.008-06:00

Before I get to my rejected Quilt National quilt, I have some other news. My quilt, "Blackberries and Dandelions" will soon be shipped off to the Art Quilts XV: Needleplay exhibition in Chandler, Arizona (near Phoenix) for a show that will be up from November into January. This is my first gallery art quilt show and I'm very excited about it. Sure wish I could be there to see it. Also, I had one piece, "From Winter We Emerge" at the Innovations 2010 show in Tacoma, Washington and it won Judge's Choice and a Peer Award there. Then this past week I had a phone call telling me that my quilt, "Red Sky", won third place in the Fiber Art category at AQS Des Moines!! That is my biggest award yet and has a nice cash award attached to it. Maybe I'll finally get that digital camera I've been hoping for!

"Jewel Of The Forest"

Now on to the Quilt National story!

This year I finally had a piece that I felt might be worthy of Quilt National so I submitted an entry. Unfortunately it did not make the cut, so now I can share it with you. This was a truly inspired piece and it created itself as it was made. I didn't know what I was going to do with the tree trunk when I made it. The piece evolved around it.

The fabrics on the left and right sides of the piece are my rusted Osnaburg which was wrapped around a large rusty chain. I painted the fabric that the tree trunk is on with fabric paint. The remaining fabrics are commercially made, including a hand-made marbled fabric (not by me).

The tree is made of molding paste that has been colored with PearlEx powder and then put onto the fabric with a palette knife. It was then painted to give it some highlights and shading.

I knew that something needed to be added to make the trunk more interesting and I spotted some coated wires about the right gauge. They were each less than 8" long and I had maybe a dozen of them. I found a wonderful multi-colored rayon flat ribbon in my stash and started winding lengths of it around to cover the wire and then left about 4" dangling at the end. When I held these up to the quilt the dangling ends just hung limply and it appeared that I needed to do something more. Of course then I thought of using beads and collected some that went with the piece and started stringing them in random "pattern" between loops of the ribbon (see pics). It worked wonderfully and the weight of the beads was perfect for the strenth of the wire. I securely stitched the ends of each wire to the top of the trunk so they would extend out from the wall and curve gracefully, draping like willow branches. They bounce ever so slightly when you walk by or if there is air movement in the room.

Enjoy the pictures. The quilt is now for sale: $1400.00. Be sure to let me know if you are interested!! ;o)

SAQA Auction Has Begun and Anniversary Art

2010-09-25T13:37:00.009-06:00

Please check out the http://www.saqa.com/ website to view and participate in the on-line auction that began on Monday, September 20. My piece is in the second round of bidding which begins at the $750 level on Monday, September 27. The purpose of this effort is to raise funds to support SAQA – Studio Art Quilt Associates, which promotes art quilts by sponsoring exhibitions, educating fiber artists, providing means of networking for fiber artists and art venues, and by many other means.

I also have a new gallery on my website, http://www.heidizielinski.com/, Gallery 3, so please check it out. These pieces were mostly created in the past six months (except for the Christmas ornament which I forgot to include in the last gallery!).

Several months ago I was asked by my mother-in-law to create a piece of fiber art for some friends of their family who were going to be having their 50th wedding anniversary. Initially she suggested a memory type quilt which related to their life experiences, children, etc. Unfortunately I wasn't comfortable doing a piece like that since it is so different from what I normally do, and I was finding it very hard to find inspiration for it. I knew that this couple and their family loved to go camping and had visited Yellowstone, Glacier and other western destinations on family vacations and such (they are from the Chicago area). So I suggested that I do a nature themed piece more similar to what I usually create, and since I had an idea from some recent experimenting I was ready to get started.

What I came up with was a piece that incorporates a large tree with a textured trunk created from molding paste. The paste comes as white and I added Pearl-Ex powder to it in a bronze color and painted the paste onto the fabric with a palette knife using a paper template to maintain the shape with a little more control. I let the molding paste dry, then I used some of my fabric paints to add highlight and shadow. I used Elmer's Blue Glue (gel) to draw out the mountains, let it dry, and then painted the mountains and the lines of glue acted as a resist. I painted the rest of the landscape of meadow, sun and blue sky using fabric paint. When it was dry, I rinsed out the washable glue in warm water. I appliqued a path that moves into the distance, then I free motion quilted the piece adding in some clouds in the sky and grass/flowers in the meadow. After quilting and binding the piece, I added a bit of beading in the foreground and along the path.

Now I was ready to work on the leaves for the tree. I layered fabric and batting and machine stitched around leaf shapes I drew onto the fabric, added vein details, and satin stitched the edges. Then I cut them out. In order to cover the batting which showed around the edges and secure the threads, I painted the edges with Lumiere fabric paint and pinned them to a piece of foam to dry. I stitched the leaves to the branches on beaded strands so they dangled and swayed. Then I added meaningful words to the backs of the leaves using fabric markers and paint so they were readable but not too bold. Words like: Love, Friendship, Family, Hope, etc. If I had known what I wanted to do with the words earlier, I could have written them BEFORE I attached them to the piece. As it was I had to lay paper under them and make sure not to mark on the quilt top as I did this---and making sure they did not flip over onto the quilt before they were dry!

The piece was done in plenty of time but unfortunately we didn't get it shipped in time for it to be presented to the couple at their anniversary party---images were shown to them instead. My mother-in-law, Diana, has the quilt now and will be presenting it to them shortly. I truly hope they enjoy it and that they are all happy with the results of my work. It was a fun piece to do, although different from my usual. Painting the entire piece instead of using commercial fabrics was somewhat out of my box, but I enjoyed the process and was satisfied with the results.

I learned through this process that I probably don't want to pursue commission work at this point in time because I find it difficult to be inspired to create something with someone else's vision. I am usually inspired by fabric, beads, a technique, or something else and I envision where it might take me and then have enthusiasm for moving towards that vision. Trying to work with another person's vision is very hard for me, but maybe if I continue to participate in challenges and learn to accept suggestions from others about what they find interesting (translate: sellable!), maybe I will get there at some point in my “career”. In case you aren't familiar with “challenges” they are usually initiated by some group and have parameters and rules about what you have to do (a theme, style, colorway, etc.) and sometimes what materials you can use. I have participated in several of them over the past few years and I think I have improved, but they are definitely still a CHALLENGE!

Gushing---so don't read if you can't take it!!

2010-08-30T00:20:00.002-06:00

Tree of Life - SOLD

Quite often I read about artists who are depressed, lacking in self-esteem or self-confidence, have doubts about the quality/worth of their work, and generally have negative feelings about their art and what they are producing (or not producing). I am always grateful to realize that I don't have these feelings. I have been so fortunate to find success and happiness in what I am doing with my art and as a "glass half full" kind of person I just don't get those negative thoughts about it all. I've had people make comments to me about how I can look at my show ribbons whenever I am feeling down about my art and feel better.   In the three years that I have been seriously pursuing my art quilts I have not had a time when I felt negative or down about what I'm doing! It has been a fun, positive, rewarding and fulfilling journey. I love what I'm doing and am proud of my work.   I have had more support from people in many different capacities than I could have ever hoped for. It is usually accepted that friends and family will be kind, but I have had such an overwhelmingly positive response about my work from an incredible array of people that it is just plain wonderful.

It is all new and exciting to me now, so maybe sometime down the road I'll need to think back to these happy times of satisfaction with my art in order to boost my spirit. Every time I enter a show and get accepted I am astounded, flattered, and proud. When I win an award at one of those shows I am truly honored. When I take my work to a gallery and they accept it and want to show it I am elated and encouraged. I hear that many artists are still not selling much with the economy not recovered and people not spending on "luxury" or discretionary items like art. I have sold more work this year than any other year. I'm going to have to remove those lines of "sold" pieces on my inventory list so I can sort out what is still available without all those sold ones in the way!

Now, that is not to say I don't have my problems, but they are what I would consider "good" problems. I don't have time to crank out all the work I have inspiration for. I am constantly in the process of getting an entry ready for a show, shipping a piece to a show, or trying to determine what pieces to commit to shows I want to enter down the road. It is getting to be a major organizational effort to coordinate the commitment of pieces to shows and make sure they aren't sold in the meantime or committed to another show, or that I have them back in time to send to another commitment.   I have pieces in four galleries in my area and keeping them up-to-date and current is a coordination effort as well.

I think I'm going to have to slow down and commit to a certain number of shows a year and choose those that will be the best exposure for me. I have been in numerous Mancuso managed quilt shows and they have been a good experience for me but I think I will be giving those up. I'd like to try for Houston and Paducah even though they emphasize the traditional quilt because they are prestigious and will get my name out there. I'm trying to enter more of the art quilt shows at galleries across the country because they emphasize sales and many of them have become quite prestigious in the art quilt world. That includes shows like Quilts=Art=Quilts, Art Quilts XV, Form Not Function, and many others. I have yet to get into one of these shows, but I'm still trying!

When I do an entry for a show it can be rather complicated to figure out what I can enter. For one thing it needs to be available (not at or committed to another show) and not in a gallery because it cannot sell in the meantime or it might not be available to show and they don't like that much. There are size requirements (minimums and maximums), show themes, and image requirements. I have to make sure I have good quality full quilt and detail images of my pieces so they are ready to submit. There are fees to pay, shipping arrangements to make, packing quilts so they arrive ready to hang in decent condition, worrying about them getting lost in shipping, worrying about the condition they will be in when they are returned to you, anxiety about whether or not they might win a ribbon and be recognized in some way, and, for some shows, if they sell. My mind races!

This summer has been particularly busy for me having been the featured art quilter at our local show and of course having my son here to occupy my mind and time. He is a good boy and can entertain himself, but there are not nice blocks of time in the day when I can really become lost in my work. Because of that I don't accomplish as much. We have had a great summer and I enjoy having him around, but when school starts I have a whole list of things that I will be attempting to accomplish with all the uninterrupted time I will have during the week! We'll see how that goes...!

I just finished a quilt for my mother-in-law who asked for something to give to friends of theirs that are having a 50th wedding anniversary in September. I wasn't able to do what she originally proposed to me since it would have caused me much angst and frustration (not being my style and not being inspired by it), so I designed and created something I think they will like and will ship it off soon. Hopefully they will all find it suitable to the occasion.   I will post in progress and finished quilt pictures soon...

Now I am moving on to some small pieces that are pieced and layered and ready to quilt. I'm hoping to accumulate some things to sell for the holidays, in particular a holiday show at the Daly Mansion in Hamilton, Montana which seems to be a very strong and successful venue for artists. I have applied to have a booth space and it will be my first foray into that sort of display of my work. I think it will be fun, but I really need to get a good inventory of work to sell so I don't have a naked booth!

I previously blogged about a piece that I worked on for about a year called "Red Sky" which went to the Lowell Quilt Festival in Lowell, Massachusetts recently and is now headed to AQS Des Moines. It has tentatively been sold and I'm hoping that becomes a permanent thing, but I need to get it back safely first. It is a wonderful piece and I know that the new owner will enjoy it.

Red Sky - SOLD

I will be getting some new images posted on my website soon and will put a notice here when that happens. I need to get to formatting the images and writing up the descriptions so I can have my husband put them out there. It all just takes time..................................!!

Just for fun, this is a piece created a while back to try to get into a show entitled "Art Meets Science", but it did not get in. The moon in its phases is created with shiny/sparkly angelina fiber. There are carved beads of bone and metallic glass beads which are to symbolize the primitive and yet space-age aspects of the moon. One of the few things in science that I can think of that is both primitive and modern at once.

Thanks for visiting!

2010-08-02T17:32:00.000-06:00

I finally figured out how to get some photos downloaded here so I'm getting back to posting! I have had some fun this summer getting my work out there and even selling!

At the beginning of July we had the Stevensville Sapphire Quilters' Show and I was the Featured Quilt Artist. That meant I got some floor space to myself to set up a display of my work and I filled it up with fiber art! I was able to borrow some free-standing panels for displaying some of the work and they were black so they set off the quilts nicely. I had some of my older pieces as well as new work. It was very fun to be there for two days and talk with people about my work and answer questions. I sold three pieces and received some ribbons for various pieces I had entered in the show. Here is a picture of one of the pieces I sold which I will miss! It is called "Run Free".

My Sapphire Challenge piece won numerous ribbons including Best Overall Challenge piece. The challenge involved using two fabrics that they gave us and up to four other fabrics to create a fiber item (didn't have to be a wall hanging, but mine was). Here is a picture of it:

The quilt show went very well and the two ladies who were brave enough to volunteer to organize and run the show did a wonderful job with it. All of the committee chairs seem to have things well under control and I thought the show looked wonderful and things ran smoothly. The vendors seemed to be happy and the visitors seemed to enjoy it. I know that I had a great time and thoroughly enjoyed the weekend!

I took some of my work to a co-op gallery in Missoula, Montana, The Artist's Shop, to get juried in for consignment there and was accepted so some of my pieces are hanging there now. I don't think anything has sold yet, but it is good to have some of my work in Missoula. I will be having a solo exhibition at the gallery in September of 2011.

My son, Michael, is going to be the featured Emerging Artist at River's Mist Gallery in Stevensville for the month of August. His opening will be on First Friday (August 6) from 6-9pm. I can't wait to see him interacting with people at the reception. Some of his work will be for sale, but he is rather attached to it and most of them he doesn't want to sell. His work is mostly watercolor paintings which he has created during lessons with my dad which he has been doing most every week for a couple of years now. He has done some very nice pieces and I think people will really enjoy them.

I just sent two pieces off to Images 2010 – Lowell Quilt Festival in Lowell, Massachusetts. Here are images of the two pieces I sent: "Blackberries and Dandelions" and "Red Sky".

I also sent “Twist of Lime, Pinch of Purple” to the World Quilt Festival which is a Mancuso managed show. I am currently waiting to hear from a show in Ohio and to see if any of my pieces will be featured in the fall SAQA Journal which will be featuring nature themed quilts in the gallery pages. I sent in several images hoping one might get in. We'll see...

Don't forget to go to the SAQA Auction site to view the 288 donated auction pieces. There are approximately 12”x12” and made by SAQA members. They will be auctioned off in September and they will start at $750 and go down to $75. The site outlines the process for bidding if you are interested. Here is a picture of the piece I donated:

Gallery Talk

2010-05-28T21:02:00.002-06:00

On Friday I had my "gallery talk" where I shared some info about my history, the way I work, and the inspiration for my work. There were about 15 people there and most, but not all, were people I knew who work in fiber (quilters or art quilters). I think it lasted about 45 minutes and towards the end of the time I started to feel like I was just babbling on and they were probably getting bored! Based on what they told me afterwards, that wasn't the case, and I think most of them really enjoyed what I shared with them. I tried to be organized with notes, visual aids, and some additional fiber art that wasn't in the show (mostly older pieces to show them what I did before I started the heavily quilted and beaded art work that I do now). I felt the talk was a worthwhile opportunity for me, and I learned a lot from it. An added bonus was that there was a play going on at the theater next door and several people stopped in to look at my work before the show and during intermission.

I have sold three small works since taking my pieces to the gallery. I am happy with that, but do wish that one of the larger pieces would sell. There are some interested parties but they haven't made a commitment, and might never do so! If the interested parties want me to bring pieces to their homes so they can see how they look I will be glad to do that after my gallery show is over and I would share the commission with the gallery since she has done a wonderful job promoting me and my work. It is wonderful to have a gallery that is supportive of your work and wants to continue a relationship with you. I hope to continue having a few pieces of my work at the gallery on a permanent basis, and in a year or so I will have another show. I just hope my run of creativity and productivity can continue so I can have enough new work to show!

I have had very good feedback from my gallery exhibition and the owner has said that pretty much everyone who has seen it has enjoyed it. The comments are very positive and many viewers seem to spend a good deal of time looking at the pieces and discovering their details. It is fun to be there and be able to answer questions or just talk about my work with interested people. I am really looking forward to our quilt show in July (July 9-10) when I will able to sit with my work as the Featured Quilt Artist. For two days I will be able to share my work and see how people react to it and tell them about it. What fun that is! I love answering questions and explaining things about my work. It is very satisfying to find out that people really want to know about it.

Right now I am in a holding pattern on creating new pieces, and trying to catch up on some things I need to get done around the house and yard. I also need to straighten up my workroom since after the whirlwind of getting pieces ready for this show and then preparing the lecture I have left it quite a mess. I need to try to organize my room a little better and get rid of lots of clutter. Some of these magazines have just GOT to GO!! I am quite a saver and just find it hard to part with any quilting or cooking magazines and yet they are in such disorder that I'd have a hard time finding anything in them anyway. I have some older ones that I never look at so I'm going to toss those and make room for the ones I do use like Quilting Arts and Machine Quilting Unlimited.

Blogger has changed something with how pictures are downloaded here and I have been having some trouble trying to get it to work. I'll definitely will keep working on it so I can get something posted here for you to look at!!

Gallery Openings and Talk

2010-05-15T22:53:00.001-06:00

On First Friday in May my fiber art show at River's Mist Gallery in Stevensville, Montana opened to a nice crowd and some enthusiastic admirers. I sold one small piece before she even had the work hung up, and then sold another small piece at the reception. Another small piece was sold sometime this week and I'm looking forward to more pieces flying out the door in the next couple of weeks. The gallery owner did a beautiful job displaying my work. I was sharing the gallery space with the Stevensville Art and Sculpture Society's (SASS) spring showcase and was pleased that my work seemed to fit well in the space I had and the SASS show was nicely done with a wonderful variety of interesting artwork.

I really love gallery openings when my work is being shown because I usually have such a difficult time making small talk at social occasions, but talking about my work is much easier. I love talking to anyone about what I do, how I do it, why I do it, etc. etc. It is fun to share my work and inspiration with people who are actually interested (or least they appear interested!). I will have the opportunity to do this in a more formal way when I do my gallery talk on Friday, May 21 at the gallery. The free lecture is at 7:00pm and anyone is welcome to attend. I am nervous, but somewhat excited. Hopefully I can keep an audience interested for a full 45 minutes!

Next Thursday I have to attend a private reception at the Dana Gallery in Missoula, Montana for their Celebration of Missoula Artists showcase which includes numerous artists from Missoula and the Bitterroot. I have one piece in this juried show and am quite anxious to see how well it works with all of the other forms of art displayed in this show. And it will be interesting to see if there is any other fiber art. This show will be on display through the first week of June. There is an open public reception on First Friday in June (June 4).

In July I will be the Featured Quilt Artist at the Sapphire Quilters 2010 Quilt Show. I will have my own space to hang whatever pieces I want and then be able to sit there with them and answer questions and share my work with people for the two days of the show. I look forward to this opportunity and hope that I will exposing a lot of people interested in quilts to a whole new perspective on them. Many people are not aware of "art quilts" although they are becoming a more prevalent quilt form throughout the country and the world. Most quilt shows have art quilt categories and there are many galleries across the country that are doing fiber art shows on a yearly basis. I have submitted entries for a number of these shows in the last two years and not been able to break into those venues, but I will continue to try and hope that I can choose the right pieces for the right show and get accepted.

Somewhat off the usual quilt art topic, today we went to the awards ceremony for the Montana Jr. Duck Stamp Contest. My son got a 3rd place award in the K-3 category for a swan he drew with colored pencil and crayon. He was one of the youngest award winners and we were very proud of him. He got to pick out some prizes and acquired some fun art supplies to hopefully encourage his continued interest in art.
The young girl who won Best of Show for the State had her piece sent to DC for the national competition and was one of the top 10 finalists. Her Canada Goose painting was very impressive. There were something like 26,000 entries across the country so getting in the top 10 is a great honor and tribute to her talent and hard work.

Sorry about no pictures again. Need to get on my laptop and get some out pics of recent work out here for you, and I will try to do that soon. Please come back again!!

Under the Weather

2010-04-20T13:37:00.000-06:00

Isn't it unfortunate how ill health saps creative and motivational juices from a person? I have been ill for a few days and am just now recovering so I have not accomplished anything creative for days. Today I am nursing my ailments when I'd rather be at my monthly textile arts group meeting sharing and being inspired by what others share. I love the interaction at this group and look forward to it every month. It is painful to miss a session. Now I will have to go in to pick up my next technique packet without advantage of hearing the lesson and seeing the examples for it, and interacting with my fellow artists about it. This Thursday I have my small art discussion group gathering and I'm hoping that I am recovered sufficiently to attend and enjoy that experience. I love being able to discuss what I do with others who understand, enjoy, and are inspired to create art as I am.

My quilt, “From Winter We Emerge”, won a Judge's Choice ribbon from judge Scott Murkin at the Machine Quilting Exposition this past weekend. Since the judges choose from all the quilts in the show in every category I am very honored by this award. I expect that my two pieces that were in that show will be arriving home in the new few days so that they will be available to hang in my gallery exhibition beginning May 7.

Yesterday we mailed off my two entries to the Denver National Quilt Festival hoping that they will arrive unscathed by the deadline.

And, I am anxiously awaiting the arrival of the May edition of Machine Quilting Unlimited magazine which will contain a page showing my piece, “Twilight” in the Noteworthy column of reader quilts. I don't know when that will be out, but I look forward to seeing one of my works in print so every day I check the mail with great enthusiasm.

This past weekend, despite being somewhat under the weather, I enjoyed a few days of camaraderie and socializing with fellow quilters at a retreat. We went to Double Arrow Ranch at Seeley Lake, Montana. I was able to attach a sleeve, prepare and attach a binding to a larger piece I'm working on, and quilt on some unusual pieces that I then cut out and will be put together in a unique open-work piece. Some of the “pantry dyed” fabric I used in this piece are from our recent TARTS (textile arts) technique project and I used turmeric and instant espresso to create it. I created three batches of dyed materials (lace, ribbon, fabric, etc.) using blue Kool-aid/instant espresso, lemon-lime Kool-aid/instant coffee, and the turmeric/instant espresso. It was interesting to see how different materials absorbed the color in different ways. Silk ribbon, dryer sheets, and some of the lace (likely depending on it's fiber content) really soaked up the color. Other items were rather muted in color tone. Some of the fabrics that I scrunched up showed definite areas of espresso concentration versus the Kool-aid color. My intention was to not have bright clear color tones that I would have difficulty using and I obtained that by adding the instant coffee/espresso. One piece of cotton flannel that I pleated and then clipped using clothespins and dyed in the turmeric mixture came out very interesting.

It is supposed to get up to almost 80 degrees today and yet I cannot enjoy it. I'm sure once I feel well enough it will be 40 and raining. Oh well, then I won't mind so much as I will be entrenched in my studio creating a new piece fast and furiously to finish it for my show!! For I now I will rest and watch movies. I'm currently enjoying “Mona Lisa Smiles” with Julia Roberts. It's a good one.

Holiday Weekend

2010-04-06T23:37:00.005-06:00

My husband, son and I took a short trip to Freezeout Lake to see the huge flocks of Snow Geese that migrate through there every Spring. We left on Thursday and got back on Sunday. We always take our trailer and spend a lot of time driving around in our Suburban since it is often windy and usually cold! There were thousands of Snow Geese and we also saw lots of ducks, some pelicans, swans, bluebirds, horned larks, and a golden eagle. I always get to visit The Quilting Hen in Carter, Montana and Cotton Capers Quilt Shop in Choteau to add some choice items to my stash. This year I overdid it (yeah, like I don't do that EVERY year!), but I got some very inspiring pieces and I know they will all find their place in a quilt some day. I also got some great threads which is almost as much fun for me as fabric!

Next week I will be going to our guild retreat at the Double Arrow Ranch in Seeley Lake, Montana. I really need to get my act together and come up with something to do there. It is hard for me since I work from my stash when I make a piece so I have to do the initial stages here in my "studio". I'd like to take something to do handwork on as well as something to do machine work, particularly some quilting. Last year I was able to get most of the quilting done on a piece and that was good for filling up a lot of time over the weekend. I'll try to get a piece or two to that stage and then I just have to make sure I have a good selection of threads to take. There are two quilt shops and a bead shop to hit during the weekend so I'll have to try to control myself.

I just found out that two of my pieces were accepted into the Denver National Quilt Festival. This is the third year I will be in that show. The pieces are "Phases of the Moon" and "Leaf Play" and they are both pieces I made in the last year. I am waiting to hear from a gallery in Missoula to see if any of my pieces will be accepted into their local artist show in May. Everything seems to be in May! I had to be very selective as to which pieces to enter into these shows in order to still have an excellent showing in my solo exhibition at The River's Mist here in Stevensville. I still hope to complete a couple of pieces before that show. Luckily I do have a very strong inventory of work. I'm hoping that my two pieces at MQX get back quickly after that show so I will have them for the solo show.

If you are interested in textile and fiber art, please visit http://www.tafalist.com where I have a post about my work along with many other artists and businesses. Not all are quilters, there are many types of fiber art included.

Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival and MQX

2010-03-12T23:13:00.003-07:00

Some nice things have been happening for me lately and I feel very blessed. One of my pieces, "From Winter We Emerge", was in the Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival out in Virginia on the east coast and it won Best Hand Workmanship in the Wall Quilts category! My first national award and I was very excited about it! The quilt then traveled to the New Jersey Quilt Fest and I should be getting it back any day now.

Then I got two pieces accepted into the juried MQX (Machine Quilting Exposition) show in Providence, Rhode Island which I believe is the largest machine quilting show in the country. I will be shipping those off shortly!

I recently took a number of pieces to The Frame Shop and Gallery at 325 W. Main Street in Hamilton, Montana and they sold a small piece already. They have some other fiber artists and some other 3-D art displayed very nicely together, so go take a look if you're in the area!

I finished the piece I have been showing you and talking about and I think it turned out really beautifully. I will not be showing it around except here on my blog since it will be one of my new pieces for my gallery show in May. I love how the quilting and beading work together and really bring the whole piece together. It is going to be entitled something to do with blackberries and possibly dandelion tufts. Haven't got that quite decided on yet! Some of the beading and threadwork on the piece is not evident in this picture, so if you are in this area be sure to see it at my show---it is really lovely. One I am rather proud of.

Also, about a week ago I had called the Missoula Art Museum to find out if there might be any opportunities for showing my fiber art there. I was forwarded to the curator and left a message on his voicemail, including my website address. This morning the curator called me and asked me if I would rather have them visit my website or bring some of my work in to show them. Of course I'd rather show them in person since pictures never do justice to my work so I enthusiastically made an appointment for later this month. I was thrilled to have the opportunity, although I have no idea if this will lead into anything at all. At least they might give me some feedback as to my work and where it might fit into the museum in the future. Always the optimist, I'm hoping they will love my work and schedule me in! I know they are in the business of promoting art and artists, particularly Montana/local ones, so they might be willing to look at the work of any artist who approaches them. Hopefully mine is worthy of their time and they receive it enthusiastically. It would be a great honor to have my work in this museum as it is a wonderful building with beautiful space that is well respected in the community. Well, we'll just have to see where, if anywhere, this opportunity might lead.... It pays to show your work to everyone you know at every opportunity. I've sold many pieces that way! And I always put my website and blog at the end of my e-mails and when I go to galleries or other possible venues for showing my work, I always conveniently have a few pieces out in the car just in case they have a few minutes to take a look! It's worked for me more than once!

Thread Class, Choosing a Postcard Image, and WIP

2010-02-24T22:42:00.007-07:00

Last weekend I taught a small class of eager quilters about how to use different threads in their machines to do free motion quilting. These were all beginners at using free motion quilting and I believe they all enjoyed the class and learned a lot. It was very fun and I felt comfortable teaching this topic as I have been doing so much quilting on my work and using numerous kinds of threads. I have since found out that others might have signed up but they thought it would be a more advanced class based on the kind of work I do, but I assured them it was a beginner class and that I would do it again if there was interest. We'll see at our next quilt meeting whether there are any who want to have me teach it again.

I spent a couple of hours last week going through images of my pieces and trying to crop out a suitable image for a postcard for my solo exhibition in May. I created a half dozen images and then let them sit there for a few days as I could not decide. When I went back to them and looked through the choices I had no difficult in selecting the one to use. It was quite obviously the most eye-catching and dramatic one and really showed nice quilting, beading, and applique that was representational of my work. The gallery owner loved it so at least I have that done.

The gallery owner has asked me if I would do a gallery talk during the month of my show. I have never done this, but I am certainly willing to give it a try. I get very nervous talking in front of people, but hopefully with preparation, notes, and a topic near and dear to my heart it will be ok. Hopefully someone will find my process, inspiration, and technique interesting enough to listen!

I am currently working on a small piece and I have been documenting the progress with some pictures. I had a little problem with the camera, but hopefully I can get more of them posted here shortly. I believe the piece will be entitled "Blackberry" or something like that based on the fabrics and motifs on them. I am currently working on the beading. It took quite a lot of auditioning to determine what I wanted to do with the embellishment and it has taken a quite different direction than I had originally thought. You never quite know until after the quilting is done, and sometimes even after the binding is on, quite how the embellishment will take form. It is an exciting process that I truly enjoy.
Here is the pieced base for the quilt before quilting:

And a detail of the base:

Here are some fibers and beads that I was considering (but so far NONE of these are on the quilt!):

Here are a bunch of threads that I pulled out for potential use in this quilt, and I have used many of them:

I have completed the quilting and am now in the process of adding some beads, but had a little delay in getting the digital images. More to come...

Currently I have a number of pieces being shown at The Frame Shop and Gallery in Hamilton, Montana. The owner of that gallery saw my work at the local fiber art show over the Valentine's Day weekend and asked me to bring some in. The fiber art show, An Affair of the heART, was a great success. I sold two pieces and they sold 21 pieces over all. There was a steady stream of onlookers and admirerers. I was fortunate to win the challenge and receive a gift certificate to use at In Good Company which sponsors the show and the TARTS (textile arts) classes I attend every month. The show was excellent and work is of high quality. I am honored to be able to exhibit with so many other talented fiber artists.

If anyone happens to go to the Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival and see my two pieces there (From Winter We Emerge in the main show, and In A Heartbeat in the Fibrations special exhibit) I would love to see how they are displayed. I've never been in this show before, although I have exhibited twice in the Denver Mancuso show.

New Gallery on the Website

2010-02-11T09:18:00.003-07:00

Please check out my website at heidizielinski.com and see the new quilt pictures in Gallery 2.

This weekend there is an art quilt show here in the Bitterroot Valley and I have entered 7 of my fairly recent works. Two of them are new ones that I just finished. Most of these pieces are now loaded on my website. The show, called "An Affair of the heART" is Friday evening, Saturday, and Sunday at the Hamilton City Hall (also called the Bedford Building). There are numerous fiber artists exhibiting their work and there is a challenge that should be very interesting. It is usually a very good show.

I have one quilt in the Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival and it should be arriving there any day. That is a national juried quilt show over in Virginia on the East coast. This is the first time one of my works has been over on the East coast. The SAQA exhibit that my piece, "In A Heartbeat", is in, will also be showing at the Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival. That exhibit is called "Fibrations" and includes small fiber art works from artists across the country.

I will be hanging a few of my pieces at a wonderful local retail furniture and home decorating store here in Stevensville called Madison Creek Furnishings. They have a beautiful inventory of furniture and accessories that I think some of my pieces will blend very well with. I need to write up labels with descriptions and prices on them and get them over to them pretty quick here.

Our project this month for the textile arts class I'm involved in, is gelatin plate printing and I haven't done anything yet (class is next Tuesday). I plan to make my gelatin plate today and then will be able to do some printing in the next couple of days and maybe make a small piece from one of those. I have a print from a friend which she didn't like and made me take it off her hands. I have added to it with some Shiva paintstiks to make it hopefully a bit more interesting.

Here are some of my recent pieces, which are also now on my website. This first one was inspired by the fabric beads we made for last month's textile arts workshop. I wound materials around a skewer and then melted them with a heat gun. The materials included felt, tyvek, fabric, threads, and sheer fabric. I thought they looked like little cocoons, so this piece is entitled, "Chrysalis".

This next piece has already sold and it is called "Midnight Cowboy". I really like how it turned out. The quilting around the border started at the upper right and I went around the piece quilting a pattern that reminded me of barbed wire. when I got to the top I ran out of thread! Since I knew I could not make another thread blend and not be noticeably different, I decided to change to a metallic silver and the barbed wire pattern became a starry sky. It is really effective and was a happy accident!

One week in January I decided to do some wholecloth pieces in order to work out some quilting patterns. Two pieces turned out nicely and I ended up adding some beads and finishing them. This is one of them. I just used a piece of black fabrics and quilted it with rayon and trilobal polyester threads including some varietgated ones. I like how the quilting is accented on the black fabric. This is a small piece, but it has great impact.

Teaching? Am I ready?

2010-01-11T22:17:00.004-07:00

I have been tentatively contacted about teaching a short workshop about how to use different threads in free motion quilting and I believe I am ready to take the plunge. I have been saying that I'm not ready to teach yet as I am really committed to creating my fiber art, but when this possible opportunity was presented to me I felt like it was something I could really do and am ready to do. I have done extensive quilting on many of my quilts and used numerous types of thread in the process. I know what kind of needles I like, what I do when I have tension issues, how I handle skipped stitches, and how I plan/determine motifs for quilting. I can share what I know in a short workshop that may be very helpful to people who are just starting to venture into quilting their own work, particularly small pieces. Even if they are making placemats, tablerunners, or pillows, this is a topic that could be helpful to many and just maybe I could make a difference. I'd like to see more beginners learning how to do their own quilting instead of sending everything they make to a long arm quilter to complete for them.

If I hope to make any money at this endeavor, I really need to start teaching, writing, and sharing whatever knowledge I might have. Up until now I haven't really thought that I had anything unique or original to share, but I have been doing a lot of free motion quilting and working on perfecting it for myself. So maybe I have enough knowledge and have worked out enough problems that I would be able to help others to improve their free motion quilting.

Now that this seed has been planted in my head, I have begun thinking about what other workshops I might offer, like how to plan out your free motion quilting or fit designs into specific spaces. How to use the quilting to draw the eye across the quilt or to highlight or mute certain areas of a piece. How to use doodling on paper to help come up with new quilting patterns and practice the rhythm and motion of certain quilting designs. How to vary quilting designs in order to have variety in a piece and maintain some unity or cohesiveness. How to create an abstract piece that is balanced, interesting, and completely original. How to use embellishments such as beads, yarns, paint, stamps, etc. to enhance and create interest in a quilt.

Any of those interest YOU? We'll see if this current opportunity with the local quilt group pans out or not. If there is enough interest I'm very willing to give it a go. If not, maybe I can try setting up a class through the local fabric shop since she has been looking for people to teach classes.

There seems to be no end to the ideas for quilts in my head these days. I have been able to create one piece after another with very little down time in between. Some have been more successful than others, but most of them are acceptable pieces and several of them have sold in recent months. My only problem is not having enough time to just create without the other obligations of life getting in the way. Even the business aspects of my activity take more time than I would like---entering shows, pursuing gallery exhibitions, keeping track of expenses, keeping an updated and accurate inventory, etc.etc.etc..!

I don't have any new quilt pics to put out here just yet, but here a couple of pictures I took the other day when there was some wonderful early morning sunlight and frost patterns in the yard and garden. Enjoy!

Thanksgiving and Christmas

2009-12-21T22:39:00.005-07:00

So, I'm finally getting back to my blog after a "brief" intermission. On Thanksgiving Day my mother was put on a Life Flight plane and flown from Missoula, Montana to Houston, Texas for emergency surgery to repair her aorta. My dad went with her, my brother went on Thanksgiving day, and I followed the next day. The surgery to replace a section of her aortic arch went very well (had a world-reknown topnotch surgeon!) and there were only a couple of days of high level stress! Aside from some minor issues with med reactions, she has been steadily recovering, is back home now, and is doing very well. There were a few stressful days for my parents when they weren't sure whether they would be able to get on a plane to fly home because her picture I.D. was wandering around somewhere in the UPS "overnight express" system--and my mom was more than ready to get out of the hospital and back to Montana!. Luckily they had enough documentation to get through security and made it home.

I got home just in time to hang some of my work at The Beaded Pony here in Stevensville and to be there for the opening reception on First Friday. There were a good number of people through to view my work, and I even sold a piece which was very exciting. It was one of my favorite pieces called "Copper Leaves Dancing" and I know the buyer will enjoy it in their home as I have enjoyed it in mine! I really appreciate the opportunity to show my work even if there aren't many/any sales, but it is nice to sell something once in a while! I also sold a small piece at the Stevensville Art & Sculpture Society (SASS) holiday art show, and the ornament I made for the Art City gallery in Stevensville recently sold.

There is a new gallery in Stevensville called "River's Mist" on Main Street and I have contacted the owner and will be showing my work there as a featured artist for the month of May, 2010. This is a really lovely gallery with a great mix of quality artwork, and I am pleased that the owner has agreed to display my work. I look forward to creating some new pieces to show in this great space.

I just finished the piece that I showed pictures of in my September 13 post (in progress) and it turned out really nice. I like the quilting and beading, but am still trying to convince myself that it is enough. It is always a debate with myself as to whether or not I am done embellishing a piece or if it needs something more. I haven't put the sleeve or label on yet so there's still time!! When I have the pieced photographed I will post the finished work.

I also finished a couple of pieces for my recent TARTS (Textile Arts) class on using fusible web as surface design on quilts. One pieces uses foil on the web to create webby-looking metallic color and I did some 3-dimensional design on this piece. Originally I was going to cut up the quilted piece to make some ornaments out of it, but ended up twisting strips and attaching them to the base so they arc up over the piece. Hard to explain, but I will get a picture of it and post it here. It is in black, white, and purple. The other piece uses Pearl Ex Powder to color Misty Fuse (just shake a 1/2 tsp in a baggie with the piece of Misty Fuse) and then I adhered it and quilted it to a quilt. The powder I had was a bronzey/coppery color and very pretty over the black fabric that I put it on. I quilted a feather medallion centerpiece on it and it creates a very pretty relief and has a nice sheen to it. Once again, when I get a good picture of it I will post it for you!

I apologize for not having any pictures at this time, but I will get them soon! I'm sure you are all as busy as I am this time of year, and having a seven year old there are much more fun things to do this time of year than messing around with digital photos on the computer!

My son and I have been having a good time making beaded snowflakes. I took him to The Beaded Pony for one of their short workshops and he learned how to create them. We bought some extra wire forms and have been busy making many different patterns and designs. It is fun to see what different beads do and how different combinations look. There are as many possibilities for bead design as there are real snowflake patterns! We have talked ourselves into parting with some of them for gifts, but are keeping our most favorites of course. They will be this year's addition to our Christmas ornaments. I have made something new for the tree every year since Michael was born, and in recent years he has helped.

I wish you the very, merriest Christmas and a truly Happy New Year! May you be blessed with good health, happiness, and financial security. Create, imagine, or dream every day. It is good for your soul. It has done mine wonders!!

Dates for Holiday Shows

2009-11-17T22:26:00.003-07:00

I thought better put some dates on here for my "holiday" venues so that all you local friends can try to see my pieces on display---and maybe considering buying something? Art quilts make great gifts!

November 20 (Friday) - Outdoorsmen Church (12208 Pulp Mill Rd, West of Missoula) - Lady's Harvest Festival- 6:30pm

November 22 (Sunday) - Art City Gallery, Main Street, Hamilton - Holiday Open House 2pm-5 or 6pm - Several of my pieces will remain on display at the gallery.

December 4 (Friday) - First Friday: Stevensville Art & Sculpture Society Holiday Art Show - Stevensville Hotel

December 4 (Friday) - The Beaded Pony, Main Street, Stevensville - Solo Exhibition - Evening Reception - Exhibit will be on display through December.

ENJOY!

Halloween/Entries/PIQF

2009-11-13T23:19:00.006-07:00

I recently heard from another juried fiber art gallery show that I attempted to enter, and as has been the norm, I did not get in. I had sent in three pieces to be considered and I guess they were not competitive enough. This particular show received over 250 entries and accepted 50, so I am definitely not alone. And it probably won't be the last time I don't get in to an art show!

I am still waiting to hear from the Art Meets Science exhibition as to whether any of those entries are accepted. I should hear in the next few days. The time waiting is always a bit painful--particularly when it ends in a "decline" notification! This is a SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Associates) sponsored show so only SAQA members are allowed to enter, but there are a great many of those!

I am still working on small pieces for an attempt at some holiday sales. I have been showing them wherever I go and because of that I just sold two of them to friends. It is definitely worth showing pieces off to anyone willing to look! That means I need to make some more so I have small ones to hang in two shows in the next two weeks. Here are a couple of "in process" photos of one of the small pieces I hope to sell:

Halloween was fun with my 7-year old this year. He wanted to be a Ninja and I talked him out of that by suggesting one of his favorite movie stars----Groucho Marx! I made a big brown cigar, some felt eyebrows and mustache, and found some wire frame glasses at the thrift shop. I put him in a white shirt, black pants, a large suit jacket, and a skinny tie. He looked really cute and funny, but he was rather disappointed that none of the kids knew who he was! His teacher knew immediately and told him a story about her parents taking her baby sister to a baseball game and being asked by Groucho Marx to let him hold her and she ended up watching the game with him. Michael was impressed. Even most of the parents are too young to know who he was (I'm one of those older moms!). I heard a couple of them agreeing that he must be the guy from the Monopoly game (I think they were referring to the banker). When I took him to a community event on Halloween most of the adults running the games and many of the people with their kids or grandkids knew who he was and loved the costume. He just wanted to take it off----the eyebrows itched! He has to put it on one more time so I can take pictures since I keep forgetting to get out the camera when he has it on!

A friend of my mom's went to the Pacific International Quilt Festival (PIQF) in California where I recently had two quilts exhibited. She sent me some pictures of my pieces hanging there. I was very disappointed to see that they were both hanging at the bottom of the panels they were on, near the floor. It is my experience that when pieces are hung underneath other pieces and near the floor they are virtually invisible to most passersby and get very little attention. They just do not get good light and are below eye level so people don't notice them. It is really too bad as they both have wonderful beading and quilting on them that if they were hung at eye level would catch the light and show well. I did receive a very nice e-mail from a woman I didn't know from Seattle who also went to the show and did manage to notice my pieces and really enjoyed them. She then checked out my website and blog and was very complimentary about my work. I thought it was very nice of her to take the time to share that with me and I really appreciated that she took the time to e-mail me. The judges' comments on both of my pieces were also very complimentary and I was very appreciative of those as well. One of these days they'll be good enough to actually win an award at one of these shows!

I need to get a binding stitched on my latest piece so I can move to the next one!

Creating Small Works to Sell for the Holiday Shows

2009-10-24T22:54:00.006-06:00

Long time no write! I just had to share the pictures above that I took of an early morning October sunrise. It was truly awe-inspiring.

I have been busy creating and trying to get some small art works done for the holiday venues I have lined up. I will be showing my work at a gallery in Hamilton, Montana called Art City beginning with their holiday show at the end of November. I will have some pieces at our local Stevensville Art and Sculpture Society (SASS) holiday show on the first Friday in December, and I will show (sell?) some pieces at our church's holiday fair on November 20. In order to actually make some sales at the events I think I need to make some smaller, simpler pieces that I can price a bit lower than my usual work. I am finding it difficult not to spend too much time on these small pieces or putting on too many pricey beads which might bring up the cost, but I'm giving it the old college try. I am enjoying just putting together wonderful fabrics and covering them with intricate quilting. Hopefully someone else will find them worthy of hanging on their wall or giving as a gift. Wish me luck!

Here are a few small pieces I made this week:

I recently put in an entry to a show entitled "Art Meets Science" sponsored by SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Associates). I submitted three pieces I felt had strong scientific themes to them, and now I am waiting to hear whether or not any of them will be accepted. This is another traveling show and starts out in Birgminham, England at the Festival of Quilts and hits some other really good shows as well. I would really love to get into this one. One of the pieces has a centerpiece that is painted using a blue glue resist and was created to look like blood cells, although the coloration is green and blue (artistic license!). It is called "Sangre Azul" which means "Blue Blood" in Spanish. The term "Blue Blood" refers to the light skinned aristocratic Spaniards (as opposed to the dark-skinned Moors), and how the blood appears blue under their light skin. I wasn't able to verbalize this in my artist's statement as it doesn't connect the piece to science necessarily (and I could only use 25 words), but I thought it was interesting.

Tomorrow we are having a brunch for my parents who recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. My sister and I both love to cook for parties like this and usually get rather carried away, but I tried to keep control of myself this time. I will be putting a ham in the crockpot in the middle of the night, but other than that the preparation has been and will be fairly easy. I am doing a couple of new recipes, so that is always risky, but I usually have pretty good luck in selecting good recipes. And if not, the Boca Negra (Black Mouth), which is an (almost) flourless chocolate cake with white chocolate cream, will leave everyone with a giddy, happy feeling! It's the best! (I've made it several times and it always comes out reallllllly good!)

My pieces came back from the Pacific International Quilt Festival (PIQF) this week and the comments from the judges were very complimentary. I didn't win any awards, but they didn't have any negative comments either. I had a very nice e-mail from a woman from Seattle who went to the show and admired my pieces there. She proceeded to check out my website and blog and then let me know how much she enjoyed them. That positive feedback sure was nice. All the pictures I have seen posted on the web from PIQF don’t' show any work that is like mine with lots of beading (including fringe), although that is sometimes difficult to see in pictures. I'm going to try to enter these two pieces in some of the art quilt shows coming up this next year.

I took my son in today to get the nasal mist of the H1N1 vaccine and was able to get it for myself as well. Since it is free and I would feel awful if he got sick and I didn't do this, it was well worth the effort. A family from our church has a very sick boy with this flu, and I would never want to go through the agony they are dealing with. I think there is way too much "scare" about this flu, but when it comes to my son, I lean towards "better safe than sorry"!

This week I'm planning to get several new small pieces completed. I'm hoping that my husband gets his deer that he is hunting for, but not until at least Thursday so I have the beginning of the week to hibernate in my studio!

New Website and Work-in-Progress

2009-09-13T22:34:00.006-06:00

Please visit my new website at www.heidizielinski.com and let me know if you have any difficulties with it or have any suggestions. My husband created it for me and this is his first foray into website design. We are working the kinks out and trying to perfect the details. We wanted to get it out there as soon as possible, so hopefully it is maneuverable and attractive.

Below is a piece as it was a week ago on my design wall with just some fabric choices and a rough idea of shapes and placement.

Now here is the piece as it is right now after I have cut and machine appliqued all the fabric in place and am in the process of determining bead placement. It is not yet quilted, but definitely looks better than the previous pic (doesn't it??!!). Sorry about the dark picture, it is in my sewing room on the floor as that is how I have to audition the beads on it. I'm thinking about quilting most of it in black threads (metallic, sliver, rayon, etc.).

I just found out that two of my pieces were accepted into the Pacific International Quilt Festival in Santa Clara, California which is near San Francisco. It is my understanding that this show usually has a lot of innovative quilts so I guess mine will fit in well. The two that will be going are "Twilight" and "From Winter We Emerge" which are both pieces with lots of beading, and they are two of my favorite ones. Please wish them a safe journey as I am still gun shy after losing my small auction donation quilt in the US mail (although these will be shipped UPS!)

The Yellowstone Quilt Fest in Cody, Wyoming happened over the weekend, so the SAQA Fibrations exhibit (that my piece entitled "In A Heartbeat" is traveling with) was probably taken down . That show will now travel to the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum in Colorado for a longer exhibit there. I am anxiously awaiting pictures from the show in Cody to see how the quilts were exhibited and what the other 47 pieces in the show are like!

I took a few of my smaller (translate: lower priced) pieces into a small co-op gallery in Hamilton, Montana to see if they would be interested in displaying some of them. I haven't heard back from them yet as the artist/members need to look at them and then they will let me know. At the end of this month my mom and I will be traveling up to Kalispell, Montana for their quilt show and stopping in Big Fork to visit a gallery there and show them my work. Last time I spoke with them they didn't have room for another artist, so I'll just try again. Hoping that showing them my pieces in person will endear them to my work and they won't be able to resist!

A friend of mine gave me a small mixed media piece using some silk fibers and asked me to create a quilt around it so that it could be used as a demo for our next TARTS (textile arts) program. The piece turned out really nice and we both like it. Below is a picture of the center mixed media piece that my friend made, minus the red beads which I added. The completed quilt is at In Good Company right now so I can't show you pictures of it yet. In the meantime you can imagine what could be done with this little gem! My son has started first grade and I am looking forward to a week of working in my studio uninterrupted. Summer was fun and I love my little boy, but I can't say I'm not glad that school has begun!

I'm ready to spray baste the work in progress at the beginning of this post and then to begin quilting on it, so I will try to include another in-progress picture before posting the completed piece.

Spray Paint on Fabric and Blue Glue Resist

2009-08-28T22:40:00.004-06:00

This week we had the second meeting of the art discussion group that I recently organized. We met at a member's beautiful home and had a wonderful time visiting, sharing and doing an interesting fabric project. The project involved spraying spray paint onto water in a tub and then laying a piece of fabric over it to pick up the paint. We used many different paints including metallics. The results were varied and definitely interesting. Sometimes the paint kind of bubbled up and didn't adhere to the fabric and then tended to flake off. On other pieces the paint was thinner and seems to be pretty well adhered to the fabric. One suggestion was to overlay black netting to help contain the paint, although there might still be some flaking. The colors and patterns were wonderful. The movement of the water causes wonderful swirls and motion in the pattern of paint. This is an easy project and with some very usable results.

A recent project for my textile arts class was to use Elmer's Blue Gel glue to draw on fabric creating a resist. Let it dry and then use thinned fabric paints to paint between the lines however you wish. Let that dry and then heat set it using a press cloth to protect your iron and pressing surface. Then let it soak and occasionally agitate it in warm/hot water to dissolve the water soluble glue (I had to kind of rub and run hot water over it to get the residue off completely). The pieces I created came out really beautiful and I have already finished (quilted) two pieces which I really like. I don't have pictures at this time, but will post them soon---check back!

Please check out www.saqa.com and view the auction quilts that will up for sale starting September 10. This is a reverse auction so they start at a high price and it goes down each day, with a low of $75 on the last day. There are some beautiful pieces by extremely and talented, and some well-known, fiber artists. My donation never did show up and appears to have been eaten by the U.S. mail service. It was a lovely little piece so I am rather sad to not have it included in the auction to help raise money for this organization. This group works to promote fiber art as an art form throughout the world through it's continuous exhibitions and publications and any other means of promotion. I have sent off my piece entitled "In A Heartbeat" to travel with the Fibrations exhibition starting September 11 in Cody, Wyoming at the Yellowstone Quilt Fest. I am honored to be included.

Belated Quilt Show Pictures

2009-08-13T23:05:00.009-06:00

Earlier this summer I had promised some pictures from our quilt show at the end of June and I finally remembered and got some of them formatted to show here. These are all from the Art Quilt and Landscape/Pictorial Quilt categories at the Bitterroot Quilter's Guild show. We had a wonderful display of art quilts in both categories and I was impressed with the quality and variety of these pieces. I was honored to received the first place ribbon in the Art Quilts and 3rd in the Landscape/Pictorial category. I apologize for the quality of the pictures as my digital camera isn't the best, but you can get an idea of the wonderful display we had. Enjoy!

Great Blue Heron piece is done by Mickey Frissell, my mom.

Geisha is hand appliqued onto the background by Jaime Grant. Color in my picture does not do it justice---it is a beautiful background and wonderful workmanship as is the norm for Jaime!

Summer vs Studio

2009-08-06T22:49:00.001-06:00

I don't know how many other quilters are gardeners, but I suspect that many are as we all have an affinity for color, and many of us are inspired by nature. It is difficult to balance studio time and time to maintain and enjoy gardens, yard, and the great outdoors. Throw in a six-year old and you've got a real limited amount of time for working on quilts! I have the additional problem of having my sewing room on the northwest corner of the house where it gets a very hot afternoon sun on two sides and becomes rather warm until the sun goes down. All this to say that I have done little or no fiber art creating in the last couple of weeks. Gardens full of weeds forced me to give them attention and now at least the vegie gardens look very tidy---but as you gardeners will know, that won't last long!!

We've been lucky enough to have thunderstorms with rain in recent days (that ought help those weed out!). What a blessing here in Montana where it is usually quite hot and dry in August. I am enjoying the cooler air and not having to water the gardens as frequently. There have been some forest fires in the area and the evening skies with the smoke makes for some very inspiring sunsets. In case you haven't experienced this phenomenon where you live, the skies turn very red near the sun and shades of pink all the away around and to the east. Not sure if the full moon will be visible tonight with the overcast skies, but if it clears a bit, it might be beautiful sight in the red tinted skies of the evening. Can you imagine it……???

What I have done in my studio in recent days is supervise my young son in making a small quilted wall hanging he wants to enter into the Ravalli County Fair this year. He has decided on two rail fence and two log cabin blocks and is working on pressing fabric and cutting the strips out. We should be ready to sew and this year I'm thinking of letting him try to do that by himself instead of sitting on my lap. He has very good coordination if I can just keep him focused and paying close attention to what he is doing. Six year olds tend to be easily distracted!

Still no sign of my 12"x12" SAQA auction donation quilt. It is sad to know that it is gone and not know that at least someone is enjoying it on their wall somewhere. I regret that I didn't send it in earlier so that maybe I would have had time to create another one to donate by the deadline. Next time I will definitely use UPS where I can track my package.

This weekend we picked over 7 quarts of huckleberries in one morning. I made a pie, but froze most of them. My son contributes very little to what actually comes home in the buckets, but he sure enjoys eating them. I hurried home so that I could get to our local bead shop, The Beaded Pony, to see what the bead traders had for sale. They had five tables of strings of various kinds of beads and I bought more than I should have. I got a couple of beautiful strands of stones and some shell beads. They had much more that I would have been happy to take home, but you gotta stop somewhere!

Tomorrow I will be helping to judge the Stevensville Creamery Picnic Kiddie Parade. Not quite sure what that means, but they need some help and I'm sure it will be fun. The Creamery Picnic is a yearly festival and is usually a very fun event. They have a larger parade on Saturday and then lots of activities going on in the park and downtown. I'm hoping to stop at the local library for their book sale where I usually pick up some good stuff for a bargain.

Rusting Fabric; Lost Quilt; Fiber Art Group

2009-07-29T22:45:00.009-06:00

Here are some pictures of the fabric stamps I created (discussed in previous post) and the pieces I used them in. One of the quilts is completed and the other I am in the process of quilting. I used various paints including Lumiere, PRObrite textile paints, and inexpensive acrylic paint. The stamps are made from foam sheets cut up and attached to plexiglass, and art erasers that are carved. I understand that the erasers are available in larger sizes and I plan to look for some of those. This size was quite small and limited the complexity of the stamp design. Both stamps worked well though and were very easy to create. The foam sheets are really easy to draw a design on, cut it out, and then use E6000 adhesive to glue it to the piece of plexiglass. A clean, fun, easy project to use to create your own piece of fabric unique to you, and then use that fabric to create an absolutely original fiber art piece!

A week ago my sister was visiting for a couple of days and my mom encouraged us to do some fabric rusting. Some pieces came out and some didn't but I think there is definitely some usable fabric. Here's a picture of a piece of Osnaburg that we wrapped around a rusty tow chain and left for 24 hours in a black plastic garbage bag on the deck. The smaller piece is handmade Thai silk and I believe I wrapped it around some steel wool and metal shavings. Both of these pieces are definitely good additions to my stash.

Last picture. Here is a very rough beginning for a piece. I wanted to start with a black background for this one. Here I have chosen numerous fabrics to go together and arranged them somewhat. I had recently purchased the two strands of beads and they will definitely be a part of this piece as I love how they look. It is difficult to show people a piece at this stage as no one has the vision of what it can become like I do. Doesn't look like much at this point, right? Don't worry---it's going to be great. I can tell! Watch for progress on this piece…

On Monday, I got together with a small group of fiber artists and shared some art, some techniques, some ideas, and some enthusiasm. It was nice to talk with other women who are as interested and intrigued by all things fiber art as I am. We all have different ways of working and certainly the pieces we produce are all different (original!), but still we all have an enthusiasm for learning more and finding out about what others are doing and maybe picking and choosing the things that might work for us. The group includes artists doing realistic pictorial, abstract, multimedia, and mixed technique work, but mostly with a base of quilted fiber. There also all stages or levels of knowledge about working with fiber within this group---some are rather new to it and others have years of experience to share. But each person has a fine grasp on art in whatever form they produce it, and everyone in the group creates work that inspires me and gives me an even greater appreciation of the range of possibilities in this realm of fiber art.

I recently wrote about the small quilt (12"x12") that I shipped off to the Studio Art Quilt Associates online auction and posted a picture of it. Unfortunately, the piece never arrived at the SAQA destination and appears to be lost in the mail, or possibly stolen out of the mail. I have been in touch with the Executive Director of SAQA and she is keeping an eye out for it in case it does happen to show up by some small miracle, but I'm not very optimistic about that possibility. It was nice to find out that it was her husband who purchased my piece from the auction last year for his new office, and that she enjoys the piece when she sees it hanging there. It is always a morale booster to find out that someone (particularly someone who isn't your friend or relative!) really enjoys your work and believes it to be art worthy of hanging on their wall. And if they still enjoy it a year down the road, that is even more encouraging! I was really looking forward to contributing to the organization in this way again this year and am disappointed that my work will not be posted with all the other wonderful pieces that are on the website, but I guess I'll have to deal with it! Please do visit the site at www.saqa.com and view the online auction pieces that are posted there. There are many truly wonderful works. The auction begins in September.

The dry, hot weather here has created a truly ravenous and destructive population of grasshoppers that are eating their way through my gardens. A few of my perennials are stripped bare and will likely die, and the vegetable garden in the backyard has been cleared of any green beans, most cucumbers, and most of the winter squash plants that were coming along nicely. Hardly motivates me to go pull the weeds that are ever increasing in those gardens! The last few days has brought some thunder showers but the moisture has not seemed to effect the grasshopper population. Every time you walk outside they are popping and bouncing around all over the place. And I have a six year old who thinks they are really cool and has collected and regularly feeds at least a dozen of them in a little terrarium in his room!

Boy is the summer going fast! Soon our County Fair will be here signaling the end of the summer. My son will start First Grade and I'll spend more time in my studio and less outdoors. It's a transition I look forward to with mixed emotions. I love the quiet, uninterrupted time in the studio, but time spent with my son is precious and fleeting. I think he has grown half a foot since this Spring and none of his pants fit (thank goodness for shorts in the summer!). Tomorrow we are going bowling with a friend and her grandson and I'm going to cherish the outing. Watching the two well-behaved and charming young men (6 and 7 yrs old) is fun and makes me smile. They are so enthusiastic about everything. Give me some of that!!

Making Fabric Stamps

2009-07-17T23:19:00.002-06:00

I am currently working on two pieces for my next textile arts class. The project this month involves creating and using stamps on fabric. The kit included a fabric marker to be used with the stamps, but I didn't think it worked real well with the stamps, so I used mostly paint for my pieces. One kind of stamp we made was by drawing a design on and then carving it out on a small rectangular eraser. The other was using craft foam (foamie sheets) by drawing out a design, cutting it out, and adhering it to a small square of Plexiglas using E6000 craft adhesive.

I used fabric paint (Lumiere, plain old craft acrylic, and PRObrite textile paints) to stamp onto some fabric and then used those as feature fabrics in my pieces. One piece I have quilted using a lot of the pattern of one of the stamps as a quilting design. Then I added some beads and it's done. The second piece is made with some very bright fabrics and bold prints. I have just started quilting it and so far I like how it is going. It is a really good one for using some of my beautiful threads. I'm using black in the bobbin which shows up vividly on the lime green backing. So far I have used mostly YLI threads, both solid and variegated, and they stitch beautifully.

One of my pieces has been accepted into a juried show of small fiber art pieces sponsored by Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA) called "Fibrations". The show juror was Katie Pasquini Masopust who is a very well-known art quilter. The quilt is "In A Heartbeat", which is a piece that has pinweaving on it, and it will be traveling with this exhibit from this September through July, 2010. The venues include the Yellowstone Quilt Fest in Cody, WY, The Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum in Golden, CO, and two large quilt shows in New Jersey and Virginia. There are 48 quilts in the show with some very exciting artists on the list so I believe it will be a good show. It is exciting to have been accepted into the first SAQA show I have attempted to enter.

My sister is visiting this weekend (actually visiting my parents who live nearby), and my sister, my mom and I are planning to do some fabric rusting tomorrow. I have gathered up some rusty nails, washers, etc. and some potentially rustable fabrics and I'm ready to give it a try. My mom has done this process before and used some of the fabrics in some really great art pieces, so I'm anxious to see what we can come up with. My sister works full time and doesn't get into her workroom as much as she'd like, but I'm sure she'll be able to use these fabrics in her work, whether that is the clothing she makes or a great art quilt. She makes a lot of neat pieces of clothing and I think she can use the rusted fabric with the kind of fabrics she likes to use, and do something beautiful with it. She's always picking up great silks, rayons, wools, etc. either online or wherever, so her stash (or "fabric collection" in the current lingo!), is full of texture and rich color. She's made me some jackets and tops that are the most sophisticated items in my closet and really fun to wear--which I do whenever I get the chance!

I just finished reading a Nicholas Sparks novel, "The Rescue", and really enjoyed it. If you like well written romantic stories (I had a good cry!), these are for you. He's written lots of books and I guess he's very well known---I'm not one who keeps up with the New York Times best sellers so what do I know! A friend passed a bunch of them on to me that she needed to get rid of so I thank her!

Thanks for visiting! Come back again!

The Show is over---and life goes on...

2009-07-04T19:18:00.013-06:00

Our quilt show is over and it was a great success. It was a beautiful display with a good variety of quality workmanship. I was fortunate enough to get three ribbons and many, many compliments on my work. I was most proud of the first place ribbon in the Art Quilts category. There many beautiful quilts submitted so I was honored to get that ribbon. It was on the piece that I had made for the Beaded Pony bead contest earlier this spring. I didn't sell anything, but I made a couple of contacts that might lead somewhere eventually. It was definitely a worthwhile activity and I enjoyed participating in it.

Here is a picture of the monochromatic quilt I created for the guild's Challenge, and for which I won 2nd place. It is approximately 10"x14".

"Imagine What's Beyond..." - $90.00
The leaves were done by sandwiching Timtex heavyweight stabilizer between fabric and stitching the leaf shapes and veins, then adding beading to some. I used a green marker to eliminate the white Timtex that showed on the edges after they were cut out. The center arched "window" I cut out after I had heavily quilted and satin stitched around the shape to make sure it was well stabilized. Then I sewed the bias strips that form the lattice to the back and added a piece of very light green organza behind it. I strung a mixture of beads in with the dangling leaves so they all kind of sway when you move the piece (or if the wind is blowing as it was when we took this picture!). I was very happy with how the piece turned out. I have had one inquiry as to whether or not it is for sale (of course it is!), but haven't heard back as to whether they want it or not. Let me know if you are interested...!

I just sent in my contribution to the SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Associates) silent auction which is a 12"x12" piece. Here is a picture of it along with a picture of the piece I submitted last year (which sold at the tail end of the auction).

You can see all of the donated auction pieces (all 12x12) at www.saqa.com. The reverse auction begins on September 10th with all pieces starting at $750.00 and going down eventually to $75.00 at the end of the auction. My piece will not be posted out there until after they take a picture of it on July 8 so look for it shortly after that. There are many wonderful quilts and some done by some very famous quilters so be sure to take a look!

Quilt Show in Progress...

2009-06-27T22:04:00.006-06:00

We are in the midst of the Bitterroot Quilter's Guild's show and what a wonderful display of quilts it is. I was really pleased to see how many people entered art quilts in the show this year. They are having a silent auction and I donated two wall hangings for that:

Hopefully the guild will make some money with the auction since everything is donated. The bidding quite often gets interesting at the end of the show so I'll be keeping an eye on it tomorrow afternoon!

I worked at the show all day today and will be working tomorrow for most of the show and then meeting a friend to walk around and view it a bit. Ribbons for Viewer's Choice and the Challenge quilt winners will be posted so I look forward to seeing who the winners are. There are some wonderful vendors to visit and I already bought some fabric and, of course, some beads! This is always one of the best shows in the area (this year is no exception!) and I'm proud to be part of it.

I have to get the picture of my challenge quilt from my dad so I can post it here for you. Will try to get that up in the next couple of days. They indicated that it one a ribbon but I don't know quite what yet. I don't know exactly how they judged them but I think there are several ribbons being awarded. It was a very fun challenge to participate in. Some of the other pieces are really wonderful and I'll try to get some pictures of them tomorrow to post here with permission!

Have to get some rest now so I'm ready to go for a long shift at the show tomorrow. Come back soon for more pics!

2009-06-24T23:49:00.003-06:00

This blog had its 1000th visitor today!!!

Thank you for coming to my site. I hope you enjoy my musings and pictures. I will post some more pictures soon of my Studio Art Quilt Associates on-line auction donation quilt (12"x12") as well as some pictures from my guild's quilt show this weekend. After this weekend I will also post the pictures of the monochromatic Challenge quilt I did for the show.

Come back and visit soon!!

Finishing is a Good Thing!

2009-06-16T23:37:00.008-06:00

I wanted to get a new post out there for you to read, so I apologize for no quilt pictures at this time. Will try to get some on here in the next few days though!

Here is a picture of a Calypso Orchid or Lady Slipper, being posed for the camera by my son. We were camping and there were lots of wildflowers in bloom.

I just finished a wall hanging that is heavily quilted and has quite a bit of beading on it and I finally feel like I have a free moment. I needed to finish it in order to get it into our quilt show next weekend so I am happy to have met that deadline. I still need to put a sleeve on it (in case it should happen to sell!), but other than that it is a wonderful testament to having a vision and sticking to it. This piece is called "Twilight" and has a large arch over a landscape. The sky and water are cut from a beautiful hand-dyed piece of fabric I bought last year in Seattle. The landscape goes outside the boundary of the arch on the sides, and in the borders it is just a quilted image. It is probably hard to envision, and I am not planning to post pictures of it here until sometime down the road as I hope to try to enter it in a show or two (after our local quilt show). Some shows do not want entries to have been displayed on the internet or even in another national/regional venue so I'm keeping it under wraps for now. Sorry to tempt you then pull it away!!

I also finished the challenge piece I have been working on for this quilt show. I received one piece of fabric and had to make a quilt smaller than 144 square inches. This piece came out very nice and I will be proud to show it. Much better than the piece I made for the last challenge I was involved in at the In Good Company textile arts show in February. That one was pink and rather cluttered with STUFF. This one is more in my comfort zone with color (can't even tell you that!), and since there weren't any limitations on what you could do it came rather easily to me. They will be judging the pieces and they are supposed to be anonymous so I'll have to put pics here after the show! Since the pieces are all monochromatic and there were numerous different colors of the challenge fabric, I believe the display of work will be wonderful. I'll try to get some pictures of them to show you. Stay tuned…

I sure wish someone would make a comment here as I'm not sure if it is working or if you just don't have anything to say??? I haven't had a comment in months! If you have difficulty posting a comment, would you mind e-mailing me at heidizfiberintoart@yahoo.com to let me know what problems you encounter? Maybe I have something set wrong….? I'm rather new to this, but I did get some comments when I first started the blog.

My gardens are just bursting with color right now. Huge orange poppies are blooming with big purple iris among them---what a sight. In the morning light the blue flax are like neon blue and just seem to glow. Unfortunately recent rains have encouraged lots of weeds and I really need to get out there and take care of some of them in my multiple garden areas. Probably should tackle the vegie garden first to make sure the seedlings aren't choked out! My perennial hill is really sad as the weeds are now marching over the top and inching down the front side. I recently cut down some aspen trees we had planted next to this garden because they were sending out runners everywhere (nasty things!). The trees are gone but the runners are still abundant. We've read that you just have to keep cutting them down and without leaves they will eventually die. How long "eventually" is we really don't know!

Bank Exhibit Ending/Bitterroot Quilt Show Ahead

2009-05-26T22:49:00.005-06:00

This is the final week of my exhibit at the Rocky Mountain Bank here in Stevensville. On Monday morning I will take my pieces down and the Stevensville Art & Sculpture Society (SASS) will hang a show that includes pieces from numerous local artists that belong to SASS. I will be dropping off two small pieces for them to hang which have not been shown previously. I encourage anyone in the area to stop by and take a look at my exhibit, as well as the new exhibit which will hang for the months of June and July. There will be an artist's reception on First Friday, June 5. I don't know the exact times for that yet, but I believe it is rather early in the evening. There will likely be an interesting mix of art mediums for this exhibit.

I have been working on the monochromatic challenge piece I have to get done for the Bitterroot Quilter's Guild show the last weekend in June. The pieces have to be a maximum of 144 square inches so they will be rather small. I was lucky to choose a color that I find motivating and easy to work with, and of course I have a substantial amount of it in my stash to choose from. People tell me that they can spot my quilts now as I seem to have developed a certain style, although I don't know if I or anyone else can quite define it. Hopefully there will be other art quilters/embellishers who do the challenge so that my piece won't stick out too much like a sore thumb! It is always fun to see what other people do when all are given the same parameters to make a quilt. I'm always excited to see the display and amazed at the variety and imagination of quilters.

I'm also hoping to get another quilt done for the show in June. I am quilting it right now and then will likely do some beading on it. Due to the colors and the mood they create, I have named this piece "Twilight". I think it will be a beautiful piece when it is done. Hopefully I can get there...!

I have sent in my entry for the Houston quilt show (International Quilt Festival) which is a juried show. I won't hear for at least a month and the show isn't until this fall. I sent in digital images of two of my quilts. I'm working on entries for three other shows which have deadlines fast approaching. We'll see if I get those done and sent in time! One of them is a Studio Art Quilts Associates (SAQA) sponsored show called "Fibrations" and I really would like to be in one of their shows. They travel around to various venues including galleries and national quilt shows so the pieces are gone for quite some time. It would be really good exposure to get into one of those shows. They seem to sponsor several shows a year so I will start entering them as they come up. Many of them have specific themes which I find a difficult thing to do as my art just seems to evolve and I have a hard time making myself do something that I'm not necessarily inspired to do.

School will be out here in Stevensville on Friday, June 5, so my son will be home and my life will change a bit for the next few months. Hopefully he and I will get along and have a good time, but I know there will be lots of time outs and occasional yelling. He's a good kid but he's in a phase where he thinks he can ignore me when I tell him to do something, or even tell me "no"! That will change. I know he doesn't want to spend the summer sitting in the corner. Our challenge is to try not to watch too much TV every day. When I want/need to quilt, he usually turns on the TV to keep him company which I completely understand. Unfortunately, he will watch too much and sit there all day if I let him. We'll have to come up with a schedule I guess. It will be as hard for me as it is for him!!

We're taking care of my parents Springer Spaniel, Maggie (she's the color of a magpie), and she is doing very well. She is used to having a dog door and all the freedom that goes with it, but she has adapted well to this situation. She just loves having a six year old boy to play with. I think they are about the same mental age so it works out great!

Pneumonia Slows You Up!

2009-04-26T21:50:00.010-06:00

I should soon be getting my quilt back that hung this weekend in the Denver National Quilt Festival. An acquaintance from the Quiltart listserv, Jan Koehn, was nice enough to take some pictures of it for me and e-mail them to me. Thank you, Jan!

I completed my piece for the bead contest and entered it with one other piece (“Purple and Pleated”), but unfortunately did not place in the competition. The three pieces that won are truly beadwork that is totally covered with beads, as opposed to my fiber art pieces that are embellished with beadwork allowing the fabric to show through. I don't currently plan to change my style of work, so maybe I'll have to think about whether I should participate in the bead competition next year. I enjoyed putting a lot of beads on my piece and felt that there was a good deal of beadwork on it, but I guess the judges just didn't think there was enough. I believe my piece turned out very well and I may try to enter it into some other type of exhibit/show in the near future.

This piece is entitled: "Spring Thaw IV: From Winter We Emerge" and is for sale for $450.00. It will be hanging at The Beaded Pony until May 9.

I did not make it to the First Friday event at which the beaded pieces were displayed and the shop had all their beads on sale because I was home trying to recover from a recently diagnosed bought of pneumonia. I am still having a good bit of discomfort breathing and I think the recovery to full health will be rather slow, but hopefully I will be able to get out and about soon. I had a bad cold prior to this and it felt like the bad congestion I had in my head just dropped overnight into my chest. Never had this before, never want it again!

I am currently working on three pieces. One is the old brown tree with the dangling leaves which has been set aside for a while after attempting to quilt it and finding it rather boring and not knowing what to do to perk it up. It's waiting for some inspiration. I am also working on my challenge pieces for the upcoming Bitterroot Quilt Guild show the last weekend of June. This is a monochromatic piece that is rather small. Can't say much more than that as it is supposed to be an anonymous entry that will be voted on. The third piece is a landscape with a window type arch and it is done in blues and tans. I am currently quilting it and it is going rather nicely. This little illness has slowed the work down, but I hope to get back to it in the very near future.

I also need to start on something using this month's TARTs project which is glitter, glitter glue, and a product that consists of beads emersed in glue that you can use to embellish. I don't know what I plan to do with it, but should not be a difficult project to work out. I'll likely do a small piece this time.

Unfortunately, my pneumonia interfered with attending my final bead class which was very disappointing. I was looking forward to learning how to surround a “cabochon” with beads. A cabochon is stone that has a flat side that allows it to lay flush on the surface of the quilt. Then you can encase the edges of it with beadwork using small beads to hold it and enhance it. I really enjoyed interacting with the other students in that class as they are all enthusiastic and artistic individuals who have a lot to share and love learning and sharing ideas and their work. It is so stimulating to be with like-minded people every week. I always look forward with great anticipation to my TARTs (textile arts) classes every month, but they go so quickly and are over before I know it. I have been tossing around the idea of creating a group of interested artists who could get together every month and share what were doing, critique, discuss ideas, and just interact and enjoy the company of other artists. I'd really like some critique of my work as I never hear from anyone what they don't like about my work. It would be helpful to know this as I feel I could grow more from that. We'll see if that idea ever goes anywhere.

I'm trying to decide what contest or exhibition I should attempt to enter next. There is always something coming up! I need to contact some area galleries to see if there is any interest as well. After the Bitterroot Quilt Show in June I have no other venues for my work lined up so I better get busy!

2009-04-24T23:25:00.004-06:00

I'm currently working diligently on my entry for The Beaded Pony's bead contest. Above are some rather poor pics of the work in progress from my design wall. It is going well but I'm having the usual dilemma about when to stop embellishing. I don't want to overdo the beading as I usually choose to "embellish" the fabric rather than "encrust" it with beading. I really appreciate the work of other artists who do this in their work, but in my work I like to let the fabric and quilting be strong parts of the piece. I do have to do a good amount of beading if I hope to place in the contest though---it is a BEAD contest after all! Last year I did not do enough beading on my piece so I'm hoping that this year's entry will do better.

I'm hoping to hang a couple of my other beaded pieces but they won't be in the contest, just for sale. They contain some beads that are not from the Beaded Pony so are ineligible for the competition. I'd say a large percentage of my bead inventory is from there, but naturally I do make occasional purchases elsewhere when I find something unusual.

Tomorrow we are taking my son to the circus as we have done the past couple of years. It is a fun family outing and he really enjoys it--as do I!

Easter Weekend

2009-04-11T22:43:00.002-06:00

Here is a picture of some of the things hanging on my design wall (I never seem to have enough space to hang the pieces I'm working on without moving stuff out of the way!). When I acquire a new embellishment, fabric, piece of trim, or whatever that seems particularly inspiring, I often hang it on my wall hoping that it will trigger an idea or become part of something I'm working on. Sometimes they are pieces to precious to put away in a drawer or a box until I have had time to admire them for a few months. Other times I am thinking they might work in a piece that I am thinking of or working on.

Inspiration comes from so many sources. I am quite often inspired by things that I see in my yard or around my home, but many times it is a piece of fabric that the creation of a piece will revolve around. This time of year the flowers start blooming and plants start sprouting and budding. I find this inspiring for art and life. I don't often get philosophical and I don't do art with "deep meaning", but spring sure is an awe-inspiring time of year for me. I'm willing to get out of my studio and dig in the dirt to clean up my gardens and uncover those sprouting perennials that will soon be filling my gardens with colorful blossoms and attracting hummingbirds, butterflies and bees. I'm sure I will be moved to create some fiber art that reflects this new life and growth.

Actually I need to move on that thought as the theme for the Beaded Pony's bead contest is "Springing into new life" and the pieces are due at the end of this month. I entered one of my pieces last year and got third place in the flatwork category. This year I'd like to move up to at least second place, but we'll have to see what I can get done in the next couple of weeks. Could have done better last year if I had more beading on my piece so I will attempt to remedy that. I also have to make sure I use beads from the Beaded Pony so hopefully I can determine that from my stash of beads. Regardless of how that turns out, I will hang a couple of my beaded pieces there for the week that the shop is displaying beaded art along with the contest entries at the beginning of May (I can't find the postcard with the exact info right now, but I will try to post it here when I do!).

We took my son to the huge Easter egg hunt at The University of Montana campus today and we had a great time. He got a sackful of loot and really enjoyed the whole event. Tomorrow he is going to go turkey hunting early in the morning with his dad, allowing me some time to hide his Easter treats outside so he can have another hunt at home (please don't rain!). Then in the afternoon we will go up to his grandparents house where he will likely do some more hunting! What fun. He and I have done treasure hunts for as long as I can remember. Early on I would draw pictures on pieces of paper leading him from one location to another around the house and he was very good at figuring them out, although I am no artist when it comes to drawing. Now he can read words so the clues can be riddles and hints which is much more fun.

Happy Easter!

Solo Show at Bank is Up; Camping in a Snowstorm

2009-04-05T22:36:00.001-06:00

My mother helped me hang 14 of my quilts at the Rocky Mountain Bank in Stevensville on Wednesday. They will be on display, and for sale, for the months of April and May. Then on Thursday I received a notice in the mail that one of my quilts, "Twist of Lime, Pinch of Purple" was accepted into the Denver National Quilt Festival. It is a juried show which means I had to send in digital images of my entries and knowledgeable jurors determine which entries they will include in the show. That show will be April 30 through May 3. This quilt is an innovative piece using a traditional block (log cabin) as a base. I believe it will make a better statement hanging in this show than the two pieces they accepted last year. It is much bolder and more colorful. Now I have to go through the agonizing process of determining how to ship the quilt so it doesn't arrive there with folds and curling corners!

We went camping last weekend to Freezout Lake and had a great time except for having to stay an additional (and very chilly) night because of a snow storm. There were probably 100,000 snow geese and more people than we have ever encountered in the nine years we have been going up there. We explored the area as is our usual activity for this trip, seeing such sites as Benton Lake Refuge, some Indian teepee rings, and of course the camels next to the highway in Fairfield (two humpers). We had a wide range of weather conditions and it was more wintery than any other year has been, but we were able to enjoy ourselves and it was a good trip. My son who is six had a great time and just loves camping in the trailer. Luckily for him he climbs into his sleeping bag and turns on his personal body furnace and stays warm all night---even without socks! I had two pairs of socks on and was still cold all night.

Today I started working on a challenge piece that I need to finish for the Bitterroot Quilt Guild show in June. It is to be a monochromatic piece and each of the participants was given a piece of fabric that we have to use in the piece. Luckily the color of my fabric has inspired an idea and I'm hoping it will turn out interesting. The quilts have to be rather small (maximum of 144 sq. inches) so that will be a challenge for me. No pics of this one as it is supposed to be anonymous.

My son entered a watercolor painting in the Montana Junior Duck Stamp competition so we went to the award ceremony yesterday at the Lee Metcalf Wildlife Refuge here in Stevensville. I was impressed with the whole event, although much of it was outside in their amphitheatre and it was very cold. They treated the kids really well and I think all had a great time. They got very nice prizes and ribbons. Michael received an honorable mention which is what all the kids who didn't get 1st, 2nd or 3rd get. He was at the bottom of the age range so he has years to get better. We were very proud of his effort and the quality of work he does. If we can just get him to keep working at it and practicing I think he will be very competitive down the road. I asked him if he likes painting and he said he really likes his lesson with his grandpa every week, but he doesn't like practicing at home. I guess we'll have to work on making that more fun and not a chore! His prizes from the contest included some new painting supplies, so maybe that will help motivate him--this week anyways!

I have discovered a magazine that I had never heard of before (it is only a couple of years old) which focuses on home machine quilting and is very good. It has been coming out quarterly but I understand that now they will be combining it with their longarm quilting magazine and publishing it every other month (I think they have shared articles in the past anyways). The magazine is called Machine Quilting Unlimited and I think it has some of the best articles about quilting that I have seen. It is not on any of our newsstands around here, but the website is www.mqumag.com. I ordered all of the back issues and have thoroughly enjoyed them. Very informative, in-depth articles with lots of good pictures. If you do your own quilting it is definitely a worthwhile read. As one who does all my own quilting on a Pfaff machine, I highly recommend it.

By the way, at the bottom of this page I always have a photo of one of my quilts and I change it every once in a while, so scroll down and take a look!

Air Dry Clay and Freezeout Lake Trip

2009-03-24T23:32:00.008-06:00

Some crocuses blooming on my otherwise rather brown and dry perennial hill in the backyard. I can see them from my sewing room window.

I've got about 4 projects in the works right now and having fun going between them as I'm inspired for each next step. I never used to be able to work on more than one project and it caused a lot of down time because if I didn't know what to do next I didn't do anything. Now I usually can think of something to do for one of the projects and I've even completed a couple this last week! I'll have some new things to hang in my two month show at the Rocky Mountain Bank in downtown Stevensville. I'll be hanging that show next Wednesday and am looking forward to seeing how it is received in my home town.

Our project for our textile arts group (TARTS) this month was air dry clay that you can push into rubber molds and make very lightweight molded objects to attached to art quilts. My mold had sun motifs and I molded and then painted three of them to use on a piece. Painting them was very fun as it makes them look like stone. One of them I rubbed on some antique gold Rub'n Buff with my finger and it highlights the raised parts of the motif very nicely. This was a fun, easy project and once I got the hang of getting enough baby powder into the mold to prevent sticking, I really enjoyed working with it. I intend to get some more of the air dry clay which is made by Crayola. I finished two other small pieces this week each using one of the clay suns.

I finished another piece last week which has some cutouts, reverse applique (hand work), machine applique, some beading, and some nice quilting. First picture is some fabrics and fibers I auditioned for the piece. Did not use any of the fibers. The second picture is the auditioning of beads for the piece.

I was really happy with how the quilting came out in the center section around the purple leaves (the reverse applique). It reminds me of tooled leather. Hopefully you can see the detail in the picture.

This weekend we are going to take our trailer up to Freezeout Lake (near Great Falls, Montana) for our yearly outing to see the Snow Geese that migrate through there. There are about 50,000 of them right now and hopefully the numbers will stay up for the weekend. They are fascinating to see in such huge numbers and sleeping in the trailer with them flying overhead most of the night is a neat experience. It is usually cold and windy so we spend most of the daylight hours driving around the area exploring whatever there is to see. I will be taking my sewing machine in for a yearly checkup to the dealer that is in Carter, Montana. They are nice enough to do the cleaning/maintenance during the time we are up there camping, usually getting it all done while I do some shopping in their great quilt shop, The Quilted Hen. I plan to hit the Choteau quilt shop (newly relocated) as well.

Back in the Swing of Things!

2009-03-05T21:57:00.003-07:00

I'm quilting on my brown tree quilt and it is going slowly and somewhat painfully. I'm not really liking what is happening. That frustration led me today to start a brand new little piece since I really want to do something that I can get DONE. I have it almost all piece together but it still needs a little something. I usually hang them on my design wall and then as I come and go or even just turn away and back again, I sometimes will see what is needed or what is bothering me about it. Sometimes I fold up pieces of fabrics that I think might add something and pin them up there in some fashion to see if they work. This is when my stash gets really messy as I'm pulling things out and not always folding them up neatly to put back where they should go!

A few days ago I had someone in the fabric store ask me what I was planning to make with the fabric I was buying. I always find this interesting because I rarely have anything in mind when I buy fabric. I just add it to my stash. If it is something really lovely I might hang it up on the side of my design wall so I can see if it inspires anything. When I plan to make something I will usually start with a key fabric and then pull other things out that might go with it. I like to choose unlikely pairings quite often and really shake it up. I think that's why some of my pieces have been successful and created lots of interest. Unusual fabric combinations are fun to challenge yourself with and make them work. Sometimes I also like to use the organic lines of a scrap or remnant piece as it is to create unusual lines in a piece. I did that with a piece of scrap suede that I had which was oddly shaped and I just used it as it was as the focal point of a piece. Easier to do with things like suede, felt, felted wool and fleece which all have edges that don't ravel, but cotton can work too. I usually stitch my raw edge pieces with a narrow zigzag using clear polyester thread.

In a few weeks I'll be getting my quilts ready to exhibit at the local bank, Rocky Mountain Bank, on Main Street in Stevensville. They will be there for all of April and May. I am still debating about how many and what quilts to take there, but I'm leaning towards mostly smaller pieces. Hopefully I will have a few new pieces for those who have already seen what I had in the gallery in January and in the textile arts show in Hamilton in February. I think everything will be for sale and I hope to have some lower priced pieces that might sell better in this economy than my larger pieces.

I'm watching the Celtic Women on PBS and getting quite distracted as I try to type this! I particularly like the Irish and Celtic songs as opposed to when they sing American tunes. Although I have to say that "You Raise Me Up" is good no matter who sings it.

The piece I am working on is calling me to move along with it, so I will go be creative and get back to you....

New Venues for my Quilts

2009-02-09T22:36:00.005-07:00

(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????

Stamping Project

2009-01-19T23:30:00.014-07:00

After a week of lost time being sick and feeling rather uncreative, I am back at it and enthusiastically working on several pieces. I just finished a small piece for my TARTS (Textile Arts) group using stamping. They gave us sticky back strips of insulation that I cut up and stuck to a piece of cardboard. They also gave us a piece of moldable foam that you can heat with a heat gun and then press onto a textured object (rubber stamp, metal object, etc.) to make a negative image stamp. I molded the foam on a fatigue mat that has about 1" holes in it, then on some rocks on my back patio area, and on a piece of plastic mesh. The rock stamp was rather interesting and organic enough to be very useful. I used brown, rust, and cranberry PRObrite pearl textile paints. I had just gotten a couple of new rubber stamps so I printed a few things with those directly on the fabric as well (pine needles and multi-squares). They will both be very useful for future projects. I was at first reluctant to cover up a nice piece of hand-dye, but the stamping was very fun and after I gave up on the bright red they gave us in our project kit, I had a lot of fun using my own paints to do the stamping. I did use the bright red on the project I completed and it worked well there, but that and the red mesh stamping was enough of that color for me!

Plastic Mesh:

Fatigue Mat:

Loose rocks in backyard patio area:

Commercial stamps:

The group of women that I get together with every Tuesday morning decided to take a small road trip to Missoula last Friday to see my fiber art exhibit at The Whooping Crones Gallery and I went with them. There were 9 of us and we had a great time. The gallery wasn't open when we got to Missoula so we stopped at a fabric shop called Selvedge Studio which has great unique fabrics and I bought a couple of pieces. Then we went to the gallery and everyone got a chance to see my quilts hanging with the nice lighting and all in one place. We went to lunch then hit a quilt shop on our way out of town where I bought a few more pieces of fabric, but I got small pieces so I kept it very reasonable on this trip! All in all it was a very nice day and I enjoyed the company of my friends immensely. They are a great group of women and I appreciate that they include me in the group and encourage my efforts in this rather offbeat method of quilting that I do!

I am doing the base quilting for my textile arts group challenge piece and then I will be attaching the various elements to it and finishing with possibly some embroidery or beading. I only have a few more weeks to complete it so I'll have to see what I can get done. It will be in the 2nd annual TARTS fiber art show, An Affair of the heART, in Hamilton, Montana over the Valentine's Day weekend, and they will be voted on for prizes. I'm not sure mine is going to be worthy of a prize, but it will be interesting nonetheless. I have figured out how to use all of the elements they gave us without making it look to cluttered I think.

I finally pieced together a backing for the brown tree piece I was working on numerous posts ago, and I am ready to layer it and get to the quilting. I think as soon as I get the challenge piece together that will be my next effort. I think it will be a fun one to quilt, although as usual I probably won't know what to quilt on it until I choose a thread, put it under the needle and give it a go!

Deadlines to Meet

2009-01-11T22:03:00.001-07:00

I have been trying to meet several deadlines lately and it seems to be a much more difficult way for me to work than if I am just inspired to do something. I did throw in one project that was just an inspired piece and I have completed a portion of it. I did a small 4"x6" piece completely with handwork, and I will be mounting it on a stretched canvas if I can figure out how to do that so it looks good---a new style for me. I had picked up a couple of inexpensive canvases with this in mind and this piece seemed to call for that type of finish.

I just finished making two 5"x5" pieces at the request of a guild member who is doing the program for our guild meeting this month on using recycled/repurposed materials in quilting. I used scraps, buttons from my days of sewing clothes, objects found in nature, old silk threads that I had received from a friend when her mother died, and a piece of jewelry. It was fun to challenge myself to not use anything new. I even pieced together batting scraps!

The piece I am working on for our textile arts (TARTs) group challenge has gone through somewhat of a metamorphosis since it was just not getting anywhere. I changed the background fabric, trimmed up some of the pieces I had planned to overlay onto it, and did some painting on some of the objects. I am having a hard time working in all of the 25 items we were given without having it appear busy and chaotic. It is definitely better now and when I walk into my workroom it catches my eye and definitely has some potential now. Before I just plain didn't like it. I went with a much bolder background which definitely kicks up the interest level of the piece. My goal is to try to use all but one item on the front of the quilt. There are a couple of items that are making this difficult, but if I can just get myself to use smaller amounts of things and cut things up it will all work out. When you only have one of something it makes you a little bit nervous to whack into them!

I also need to work on my project for my next textile arts monthly meeting which is next week. We are to use a stamping technique this time and I have done some of the stamping and chosen some fabrics to create a piece, but so far nothing has come together for me. I think this will be a small one since I have so much going on right now. I'm thinking of using a juvenile cowboy print I have with the same red as the paint I used to stamp, so it might be of a bit different style then what I have been creating recently. My design wall is just not big enough to hold all these simultaneous projects. Of course if I got all of the extraneous "stuff" off it and out from in front of it maybe I could use more of it!

Looking forward to stopping into the gallery this week and seeing if there has been any interest in my pieces this past week.

Pink Challenge Piece and Gallery Reception

2009-01-03T20:50:00.004-07:00

As I sit at the computer the sky above is blue and the sun is shining in the window. After several days of snow it is really nice to see and feel the sun.

I'm working on a challenge piece for a fiber art show in February. It has a lot of pink in it and that is not one of my frequently used colors so thus begins the "challenge". We received a bag of stuff and are required to use everything in the bag in some way. I'm trying to be somewhat imaginative in how I use things and not make a piece that is too busy or too crowded with stuff. I think the key is to not add too much other stuff and try to repeat things in different parts of the quilt. That gives some balance to the piece instead of just having one of each thing scattered all over. There are some rather unique objects in the bag such as poker chips, cupcake liners with hearts on them, a piece of screen, paperclips, and a tea bag. You can use the pieces in any way you want. That leaves it open for using an item to stamp paint onto the fabric or paint over it or cut it up or cover it with fabric or…. whatever! I am enjoying the process and hopefully I can come up with something that will be up to snuff with what I know will be a group of beautiful, creative pieces from the other participants. Can't show any pictures, as I want to keep it under cover!

Had my gallery opening last night and I think it went very well. There was a steady stream of people coming and going for most of the three hours. After 7:30 it dropped off completely so we left a little early. I was pleased to see quite a few people that my mom and I had invited, and they seemed to enjoy the show. I had a great time answering questions and talking about my work. Of course the compliments are a great ego boost and a good motivator for me! Hopefully the gallery will continue to have traffic from the many people that I have notified about the show. The goal is ultimately to sell my work, but just having people come and see it who would not usually see it is really a fulfilling thing. The pieces look great in the gallery and the owner did a wonderful job of hanging them so they are featured very nicely. There are fourteen pieces. I feel so fortunate to have this opportunity to show my work.

Happy New Year!

2008-12-31T22:04:00.003-07:00

I have already heard some fireworks outside although it is only 10:00pm here!
I guess they want to go to bed!

Well, my quilts are now hanging in a gallery and hopefully some of the First Night Missoula participants will stop in and see them. I do not know yet which of my quilts she has chosen to hang or how many, but I look forward to seeing them on Friday evening at the reception. I always wish I could be a fly on the wall when my quilts are displayed somewhere so I could know what people think of them. I guess I just have to settle for what they will tell me in person or what the gallery owner might pass along to me. Hopefully many of the people I have contacted will stop in and visit the gallery. I sent postcards or e-mailed to every I could think of that might be interested in seeing some art quilts. Now it is up to the weather to cooperate and allow some of them to get there!

No pictures this post as I am working on a challenge piece for an art quilt show in February and I don't want to share it until it hangs in the show. Sorry! The good thing is a text post loads faster!

Happy New Year Everyone!

Merry Christmas!

2008-12-24T23:03:00.007-07:00

I've been quilting a piece that is a rather unusual color scheme for me but it seems to be working out pretty well. I used some squares of hand-dyed fabric that we were given for a certain project a few months ago, but I had saved them to use in something else. They went well with a print fabric I had so this is what became of them. I did a lot of free motion quilting and some thread painting, and now I am in the process of putting a spray of embellishment across the piece. All the embellishment is from a pearl necklace I had that broke and I had saved all the pearls, plastic "crystals", and hardware to use someday. You never know when these things will be just the right spark for a quilt. I really like what they are doing for this piece. I will have a scattering of more embellishment to the left and above and to the right below the current path of beading. Hopefully the pearls will stay secure on here even though they tend to stick out a bit and will likely get bumped around. I have been starting to think about what to bind it with but haven't completely decided yet. Usually I have to actually fold up pieces of fabric and put them behind the piece on my design board with just a bit sticking out to see what will enhance it as a binding. Sometimes that means something that contrasts or brings out a highlight in the piece and sometimes it means a fabric that will blend with the piece and not create a hard edge. I'm not even sure with this one so I'll have to do some trials. I always enjoy that part of the process as it is just playing around with my fabric stash. I might try numerous different fabrics with it before I decide on the right one. The finishing touch of a binding is important to the entire piece so I always choose carefully.

I'm almost done with another piece that is more in my color scheme. It started with a hand-embroidered and beaded square that I wanted to incorporate into something that had a nature feel to it using a color scheme of green, copper and blue. I decided to balance the handwork square with a second square of embroidery and beading and then I chose evergreen trees and a body of water to complete the "scene". I am not sure how I will finish off the water and I am in the process of embellishing the trees by couching mohair yarn onto them. I may add some kind of copper highlighting somewhere but I haven't decided if it might be with paint or bead. I think a copper binding with short stretches of green in it might be a nice finish.

I'm getting very excited about my upcoming show at the Whooping Crones Gallery and have been making sure all my sleeves are secure and they are ready to hang. A week from today I'll take them all up to Missoula and see which ones will be hung for the opening on January 2. There will be a "First Friday" opening reception from 5pm to 8pm. I don't know how many people will be out and about that soon after New Year's, but I'm looking forward to being there and seeing my quilts displayed, and maybe talking to people about them. It is so fun to share my work with people and answer questions about the process and the inspirations for them.

My six-year old son is on his Christmas break from full-day Kindergarten and I haven't gotten used to having him around so much again. We are already bumping heads a bit, but all in all he's a good, fun kid and we like to do things together. We have had a wonderful Christmas, but he has already had some moments of "boredom" where he just can't figure out what to do with himself (even when surrounded by numerous new toys!). He's loving all the snow we have and he and his dad have built a rather sturdy snow fort in the front yard.

I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and truly a Happy New Year!

Winter Blues

2008-12-11T22:54:00.000-07:00

I had an entire day to work on quilts and managed to find umpteen ways not to. I swept the kitchen, did some on-line Christmas shopping, paid bills, organized finances, made some muffins, and now I'm writing this! Sometimes it is difficult for me to get into the creative process especially when I'm not sure what the next step is supposed to be. Right now I am quilting a piece and finding the quilting I'm doing rather boring. I haven't come up with a way to punch it up, so as a result it is just sitting at my sewing machine waiting for me to get back to it. In the meantime I should pick up something else, but procrastination has won out.

I did start a new pin-weaving project a couple of days ago that is turning out nicely, and will likely become a focus point of a future piece. It is multicolor with lots of rusty/brown tones. This time I am making the lines off kilter rather than all straight across as I did the first time. I will probably press this one onto some fusible interfacing to help keep it stable for whatever I decide to incorporate it into. The next pin-weaving I do will probably have either beads or some sort of surface texture like loops or tufts or knots or something. I'm also thinking of sticking to 2 or 3 color families rather than the multi-color thing I am doing now. I'm thinking black, white or cream, and one bright color. I really like the two pieces I did that had that kind of color scheme (one using red, one bright blue). It is very bold and graphic and I think the softness of the woven fibers would be great in a graphic, angular piece. I think incorporating beads into it would be really interesting. I have some really neat black ones… I really enjoy the process of the pinweaving and find it relaxing. I love the way it develops as you add wonderful fibers and colors. I think it is a technique that will stay in my repertoire. Thank you In Good Company for the inspiration!

It is supposed to get very cold here this weekend and I am NOT looking forward to that. It has been relatively dry with very little snow so far this winter and I rather like it that way. I know we need the snow in the mountains so that we have a good water supply next spring, but I'd just as soon it stay up there on the mountains. It looks pretty there and I don't have to drive through it! I really like the changing seasons of Montana, but I definitely prefer spring and fall to winter. We had a beautiful autumn this year and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Now, as evident in my last post, I am already looking forward to spring and the end of winter, even though it has barely begun. Maybe I need to do another winter quilt that reflects the beauty that there is in the snowy whiteness of the Montana landscape and the crisp cold air of January. My piece, "Winter Blues", has been to two juried shows so obviously I have some appreciation for the season and can put it into my work.

Is it Spring yet?

2008-12-05T13:33:00.005-07:00

I've just been sending out some letters and business cards to contacts that I have hopes of convincing to purchase some of my work. I am very enthusiastic about marketing my work, but I am somewhat disappointed in the timing of this recession to coincide with my effort. Hopefully the nesting trend that I've been hearing about will make people want to beautify their "nests" and maybe purchase fiber art to do that. I think it is a very warm and welcoming type of art to have on your wall and I hope that it becomes more accepted as wall art for decorating and enjoying in your home.

I finally put a name on the small wholecloth free motion piece I finished and it will be number 3 in my first "series" of work. I am calling it "Spring Thaw III - Seedlings Arise". After sitting for a couple of days while I stared at it and tried to decide what it was to be called, it occurred to me in a very clear way that it was another Spring Thaw piece. I tend to love those muddy colors and making them beautiful with thread and embellishment. What is Spring but a wet muddy mess morphing into blooming color? Oh what a melancholy thought to have in the short cold days of December!

I don't think that this piece is done justice in the pictures, but you get the idea. Unfortunately there is a reflection off the top glass bead that I find distracting. These were taken in my work room. Hopefully the pictures my dad took with his better quality camera have turned out better than these, but I haven't gotten those from him yet. Here are some details of the quilting:

I have been watching Chickadees, Downy Woodpeckers, Mourning Doves and various other small birds flitting around my yard and bird feeders this morning. As I am watching them my eye falls on a dark shadow in the long grass--a neighborhood cat skulking and bright-eyed as he/she also watches the activity. True to my usual response to this situation, I get up and quietly open the front door and then burst out yelling and waving my arms to scare the bejeebers out of the cat and send it flying down the path, under the fence and out of sight into the neighbors yard. Luckily I know that the neighbors are at work, but I always return to the house a little bit worried that someone might have spotted my crazed behavior not realizing the purpose of it. Oh well! I don't want to feel guilt about luring birds to my yard with bird feeders and food and then allow wandering felines to pick them off! I risk my reputation as a sane person to protect their welfare. I'll never get the vision out of my head of one time many years ago when we were all sitting on our deck enjoying the day and spotted a hummingbird hovering over the garden. All of a sudden a well-camouflaged cat leapt out of the foliage into the air grabbing the bird and swiftly exited the scene while we all sat with our mouths hanging open. So tragic, yet oddly it makes me smile whenever I remember it. That cat was poetry in motion and has created a vivid a picture in my mind. Not going to happen if I can make a fool of myself spooking the cat before it can grab birds in my yard! Now I've probably created a picture in your mind…!

It's not even Christmas and I'm already thinking SPRING!

Wholecloth Piece with Free Motion Quilting

2008-12-01T22:21:00.005-07:00

I have been quilting a small wholecloth piece that may or may not be attached to a larger piece when it is finished. I'm doing some thread painting on it and enjoying the process. I seem to have a need to work on small pieces right now since the larger ones just get me all clogged up and bogged down. Free motion quilting with just random ideas flowing is so freeing and fun. I change threads quite often and enjoy using shiny rayons and metallics as well as more muted variegated threads which still add great color and highlight. Seeing how they stitch out in the different lines and shapes I decide to quilt is always a fun experience. And it is almost always beautiful in the end and worth the time and effort.

There are several art quilt competitions/shows coming up that I have some interest in trying to get one of my pieces into. There is one with a Rock and Roll theme, one that requires the portrayal of something "fresh picked" whether fruit, vegetable or flower, and one that must represent humor in some guise. Of course I have had not had any specific ideas for any of them even though I have been mulling them over for some time now. I have put some fabrics together for a rock and roll inspired piece but they have not told me what to do with them!

The 12"x12" piece, Birds of a Feather, that I donated to the SAQA on-line auction has sold and I am very happy about that. Someone in Connecticut purchased it and I really hope they enjoy the piece.

******
Okay, it's later in the day now and I have finished quilting the small wholecloth piece. It is lovely and I am going to bind it and attach it to another wholecloth piece that is simply a raw silk with minimal quilting to act as a framework. I put four cutouts on the smaller piece and they will each have a bead centered in them. Pics to come...

Two Down, Still Struggling

2008-11-25T14:56:00.001-07:00

I just finished putting sleeves on two new pieces and wondering to myself whether or not they are completely done. The thing about getting into embellishing your work is that you can continue to add stuff and add stuff and add stuff. When is enough enough you might ask? I usually just hang the piece up and look at it for awhile. If I like it every time I walk by or glance at it, then it is done. If it nags at me that something isn't quite right then I start to consider what can be couched, beaded, or painted/stamped on top of it. Yes, my quilts talk to me. I listen to them to find out what they want to be and I try to take them there. I use my best creative effort to make them something that I would like to see hanging on a wall--or, ultimately, what someone else would like to see hanging on their wall!

I'm still struggling along with my brown tree piece. It is once again up on my design wall after a brief respite. I wasn't having any ideas and was rather stuck so I took it down and finished these other two quilts. Now I am back to trying to determine the next step for the brown tree. I need to highlight the tree somehow as it recedes into the piece a little bit too much. I just haven't determined whether that should be done through threadwork, paint, shivas/pastels, or beading. I'm playing with the paintstiks and pastels but I have not used them before and I haven't ever done much drawing so it is less than convincing to try this on my actual quilt top. Trying them out on some of the brown fabric in order to audition it before trying it on my quilt top helps to see how it might look, but so far I'm not impressed with my technique. I would definitely be more comfortable attempting this through threadwork, but I'm thinking that maybe I need to break out and try something new and challenging. More playing...

My mom and I were talking about how difficult it is when you are working on a piece this size with a good amount of effort already invested in it, to experiment with techniques or ideas that are untested or new to you, or just risky (such as doing cutouts which I have done before but that are definitely a "there's no going back" thing to do!). This piece is currently about 53" tall and 32" wide which is rather large for me. It is much easier to take risks on a smaller piece that you haven't put so much into and that if it doesn't turn out you haven't lost as much time and materials as with this size of a piece. I think I will be doing some smaller pieces in the very near future as this one is monopolizing way too much of my time just sitting there and not telling me what to do with it! It has potential and I love the colors/fabrics. I'm starting to lean towards just layering it and quilt it already, then decide how to embellish further. Sometimes the quilting just flows out and helps to complete the piece. It will stay up on the wall today for further pondering and tomorrow I will decide whether to embellish or quilt. Speak to me!

Pin Weaving and Gallery Opportunity

2008-11-19T12:12:00.011-07:00

I am involved in a monthly textile arts group that inspires me (and many others!) to learn and use different techniques using different materials and processes that I may or may not have used before. Every month we get a packet of materials for accomplishing this and are shown some examples and given some ideas of what do to and how to do it. Then we are sent away to experiment and hopefully return the next month with a sample of how we used the technique/materials in a project. The exchange of ideas and the different ways that each person uses the packet is inspiring and motivating. I just love this effort and truly thank the women of In Good Company of Hamilton, Montana for sponsoring it. It is called "TARTS" (Textile Arts) and in February we will be having our 2nd Annual show and sale called "An Affair of the heART" over the Valentine's Day weekend. You can check out the blog that reviews the projects for the TARTS classes at
http://ingoodcompanytarts.blogspot.com.

The project we worked on this month and shared yesterday was Pin Weaving using a foam core board and pins to hold the warp and a tongue depressor to hold the warp threads apart for weaving.
It is a great way to use all of those fun and funky yarns and trim pieces that you just had to buy but don't know what to do with! I particularly like the fuzzy, hairy, and slubby yarns for great texture and combining them with silk ribbon---beautiful! We also did weaving of two (or more) different fabrics cut into strips which creates a very usable piece for backgrounds or whatever. I haven't done anything yet with the piece I made from fabric strips, but my effort at pin weaving became part of a somewhat sophisticated looking wall hanging with couched fibers and beads.

I used the couched yarns and ribbon to echo the lines of the pin weaving. I spent a long time with the piece up on my design wall trying to determine placement of the beads. I use long quilting pins to try to pin the beads up so I can stand back and evaluate it. I have a hard time laying the piece on a table or the floor to evaluate this since the perspective is not quite right. I have done that and stood on a chair to try to evaluate, but if I can pin them on my design wall it seems to work better for me. I must have moved them around 30 times before I was happy with the balance and design. I started with the red beads and some other beads that I did not end up using. I had just purchased the bone beads this weekend and I thought they worked well for the piece.

Last week my mom and I made a trip into Missoula (1/2 hour north of us) to visit a couple of galleries and hopefully make some appointments to show them some of my work. The first place we stopped was Whooping Crones Gallery and the owner said she had time and wondered if I had brought any with me. Being rather an optimistic person and always wanting to be prepared for an opportunity, I had conveniently placed a number of my works in the back of my car. I brought them in and she was very interested and will be showing several of them in her gallery for the month of January! I was so excited at this positive reception of my work and her interest in having fiber works in her gallery. Currently there is a show hanging in the Gallery for the month of November and December of works done by members of the Surface Design Association which are wonderful and worth seeing. I am honored to follow them and have my work shown in a gallery that is displaying fiber art in such a respectful and professional way.
If you are in the area, please visit the gallery at 508 E. Broadway (across from the Children's Theatre building). I believe my works will be hanging from First Friday until the end of January.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot! Check out the Studio Art Quilt Associates auction on www.saqa.com. I have donated a piece on page 2b that is up for auction right now called "Birds of a Feather" (see it at the bottom of my blog), but there are many other wonderful pieces. This is a reverse auction where the pieces start at $750 and go down each day until they get to $75.

Trunk Show and Thread Program

2008-11-11T11:29:00.003-07:00

This week I had my first trunk show for a small group of quilters (about 35) in the nearby city of Missoula, Montana. I showed just over 30 of my early and current art quilts and talked a little bit about the techniques and development of them. My mother graciously assisted me by holding up the quilts and walking them around the semi-circle so everyone could see the quilting and embellishment on them. It appeared that they really enjoyed them and they had some great questions for me. I felt very good about the experience and would look forward to doing it for other groups in the future.

Tonight I will be half of the program for our local quilt group talking to them about using threads and other fibers to enhance and embellish quilts. I'm certainly no thread expert, but I have tried many things and experimented so hopefully I have some hints and tips that might be useful to other quilters. The other half of the program is a woman who does a lot of beading. I have only recently started beading on my quilts so don't feel qualified yet to give advice in that area, but I'm looking forward to seeing what she has to say and show! I'm planning to show a few of my quilts that illustrate how I have used various threads and other ways of using fibers such as couching, thread painting, hand embroidery, and sashiko stitching.

With these two activities so close together I haven't been very creative in my studio this past week. I get very distracted by having to be prepared for something and just seem to get blocked creatively. I'm hoping once tonight is a thing of the past I will be able to return to my brown tree quilt and maybe even get it layered and start quilting. I'm still thinking some cutouts might be in the plan…

My husband came home last night from hunting out of town with two mule deer does and a buck in the truck so today we are cutting and wrapping venison for the freezer. I have a short break here while he trims and cuts some steaks for me to wrap, but I'm sure he'll be calling me at any moment to get back to work!

Halloween

2008-11-01T21:21:00.011-06:00

My six year old was decked out as a street sign last night which was so simple to make and such a hit! He wore a knit hat with the sign on it, gray sweat pants and sweat shirt, gray gloves, gray socks. He was a little embarrassed (six year olds usually go in for superheroes), but all the good comments made him a bit more proud of what mom had made him into. I can remember a particularly embarrassing costume that I wore in grade school. It was probably due to reminding my mom the day before that I needed a costume so I had to wear whatever she came up with. It was the Emperor's New Clothes and I had on long underwear and a purple cape. I would rather have been a street sign!

Usually my goal with my son's costumes is to make them comfortable so he won't mind wearing them all evening and cute enough that we get some good pictures for the scrapbook. In past years he has been dressed as Ferdinand the Bull (from a popular children's story) and a bottle of ketchup (very cute). This year's was definitely the easiest.

Now to change the subject, I thought I would show you some of my recent finished art pieces so you can see more of what kind of work I do. Sometimes the works in progress are so rough you can't see where they are going or how they might end up and I'd like to let you know that they do eventually turn into something!

The first one arose from experimenting with melting synthetic fabrics with a heat tool and is called "It's A Scorcher". Various fabric scraps of different times from lame to acrylic felt were layered and then covered with organza. I stitched the layers to hold them together, then I randomly melted areas with the heat tool. I sliced the piece in three units and attached it to a background then embellished with twisted wire, long bugle beads and couched yarn. The picture is not the greatest mostly I think because of the bright oranges in the fabric, but you get the idea.

The second piece is called "Out My Window" and in it I used some photo transfers on silk (left) and organza (right) portraying some cottonwood trees in my backyard. I embellished with some beads, a touch of embroidery, and stamping. I love the boldness of this quilt created by using just three colors. It was made for our local quilt show that was in July with the theme of "In My Backyard". Didn't win any ribbons, but I like it.

I have a few quilts done more recently that my dad just helped me take pictures of and I'll try to get a couple of those up here for you to see once I get them onto my computer. It would be nice to get some comments on my work and please let me know what you would like to see or hear about. But even if you don't wish to comment, please do visit again!

New Piece on the Design Wall

2008-10-26T09:24:00.008-06:00

I started on a new piece and it is going well I think. I really like the colors, although the fabric I used for the tree might be a bit dark. I'll work with it though because I don't like the fusing and cutting out so I'd rather not do it again. Quilting and beading can improve a myriad of problems and design flaws!

This piece will have some leaves dangling from the tree branches on strings of seed beads and I think one will also dangle from the moon. That decision will be finalized later after I get the background together and the tree on. I'm trying to decide how much, if any, of the background to actually piece together versus my usual method of machine appliquing the fabrics onto a backing fabric. I'm thinking possibly a combination of the two might work.

Note that this piece is cropped somewhat so that you don't see the clutter on my design wall and around the piece. The red moon is actually set into the quilt surface a bit more than it appears.

My original sketch of this design has curved background pieces simulating a landscape and another sketch idea has the hills strip pieced from the various fabrics and then cut out and appliqued to the piece so each layer of the landscape has multiple fabrics in it. With the fabrics I'm using I think the strip pieced option might be too busy. I'm leaning toward the current straight line background right now but trying to decide whether to curve them like hills before I attach them. It's not stitched down yet so I can still change my mind!

I definitely work much quicker on a piece when I can somewhat visualize the end result as I can on this one. Since I know I want to have dangling leaves and some beading I can see in my mind how it might look when it is done. At this stage it is quite simplistic, but by the end with the embellishment and quilting I think it will be a very intriguing and wonderful piece. More to come….!

Thread Class and Next Project

2008-10-24T21:46:00.005-06:00

Yesterday I attended a workshop on threadwork and had a good time playing around all day. We did couching, thread painting, calligraphy with thread, and other techniques. It was good to create samples of all of these options for future reference when I can't think of what to do for a piece. One technique that created some interesting results was using highly contrasting threads in the bobbin and top and then increasing the top tension to around 6 to cause the bobbin thread to come up and create an interesting look on surface of the fabric. I used a black fabric, red upper thread and green in the bobbin. The spiral design I made looked very similar to a strawberry (red with little green dots for seeds)! The flower below was done over a very simplified crayon drawing. The tree is just a little postcard done freehand/freemotion.

I'm ready to begin something new and continue to ignore the large tulip piece for a while. I'm thinking of taking it down so I don't have to look at it for a while and then coming back to it later. Maybe in the meantime an idea will come to me. It happens. I'll hope for the best. At least I'll be able to move on and be a little productive!

My mom is also a quilter and obviously where I get any talent I might have and certainly my inspiration. We have both purchased some of the same fabric and are challenging ourselves to create pieces featuring it. Hers is well on its way but so far mine is nothing but a pile of fabrics. I love the fabrics I've chosen but nothing has come to me as how to use them. I think I'll have to go back through my sketch/idea notebook and see if I come across anything in there that triggers a design. Keeping that notebook has been a valuable resource for me and lets me never forget an idea no matter how incomplete a thought it might be or how unattainable it might seem at the time. You never know where the next great artwork idea will come from and sometimes they blossom from what you thought you'd probably never see come to fruition. So I write everything down. And sometimes it works for me. Serendipity.

Well, sitting at the computer never gets anything onto the design wall so I guess I'll end this here. More soon…

Recent Works

2008-10-21T23:40:00.000-06:00

This is my first post and I'm new to blogging, so bear with me! I want you to see what I'm doing in the fiber art world so keep reading!

I've been stymied by one piece I'm working on (see above) and now I have some prior commitments to attend to outside the studio, so I guess it will remain undone on my design wall until I can be inspired to return to it. It is a bold and colorful quilt that is much different than my usual---although I'm not sure I have a "usual" style! It is also larger than most of my recent pieces and it seems to be a difficult size for me. It is hard sometimes for me to show people my works in progress as they are quite rough compared to what they will eventually become. Unfortunately I don't have a clear vision of this one and how it will look, but you can get an idea of the lines and bold color. I definitely have some work in front of me to tie this together and balance it out. It will come, it will come....!

I have just finished a piece (picture of it below before it was completely done) that is based on the log cabin pattern but has modern twist to the piecing and color. I love how the colors (purple and lime) play in this one and I'm really happy with how the embellishments worked out. It was a stubborn quilt when it came to actually quilting it and I had to put it aside for several weeks. My machine kept skipping stitches and breaking the thread constantly. I finally picked it up again last week and zipped right along with the quilting with very few problems, even using metallic threads. I had planned to enter it in a show but that deadline passed and I guess it just wasn't meant to be. It just did not want to be done for that one! I'm sure something else will come along for it. I will be showing it at a trunk show on November 5 along with many of my other art pieces.

My goal these days is to sell my quilts so I'm trying to get them out there for everyone to see and let people know about what I am doing. I'll try to get some more pictures onto my blog so you can see the work I've been doing. Right now I need to get ready for my quilt guild meeting tomorrow night so come back again later to see what I'm up to!