More Festival Quilts



This pink ribbon winner (honorable mention) had all sorts of charming
farm animals.  See the close-up of the dog below!

A friend expressed that she didn't care for animal portraits rendered in fabric.  I think she said that no cloth portrait could do justice to an animal.  Well, I hope to dissuade her with these animals in quilts that I particularly liked at the recent International Quilt Festival!

I thought the dog was particularly well-done.

I was most impressed with this cat, because NOTHING is quite as hard to render in
fabric as a black animal! 

And now my favorite--a well-deserved blue ribbon winner!

Easy Christmas Stockings!

My new quilting bee met at my house this week, and Rita showed us how to make Christmas stockings.  I mentioned this to a quilting and blogging friend, and she suggested I post the directions.  So here goes!  Thanks to Rita for the clear directions.  And I believe she got them herself from yet another person!

I use the larger rotary cutter
for the long straight edges of the
stocking and then switch to
the smaller one for the curved
edges.

I don't know how I can duplicate the pattern here on this blog, but it is easy enough to draw off a stocking pattern.  Ours is 16" long from the top cuff area to the lowest part of the foot; the cuff area is 8" wide; and from toe to heel measures 11".  You can get 2 stockings, front and back, from 1/2 yard of fabric, if the fabric doesn't have a directional print.  You need a bit more for 2 if the print is directional, as my snowman fabric is in the demonstration photos below.  For the lining, you need the same amount.

Cutting:  Cut 2 from the lining fabric, 1 front, and 1 back (these can be different fabrics or the same, as my snowman stocking is).  Also cut one cuff 16" x 8".  And cut one loop 8" x 2 1/2".  I used the lining fabric for the cuff on the snowman stocking. 

Sewing:



Here the lining and the
stocking fabrics have just been cut
out.



1.  Stack the front and back right sides together and the lining right sides together.

2.  Stack and pin all 4 layers together.  Sew from cuff edge to cuff edge.  I used a seam that was a bit over 1/4", to make sure I got all 4 layers included in the seam.

Sewing around the stocking

3.  Reach into the stocking between the lining fabric and turn the stocking so that the lining is on the outside.



4.  Fold the loop in half lengthwise and press.  Then fold the raw edges into the fold line and press.  Put these pressed edges together and edge stitch.

Pinning the loop to the stocking, with
lining on the outside

5.  Pin the hanging loop at the heel edge seam, raw edge placed at cuff raw edge.  I put my loop to the side of the seam, opposite where the seam allowance is, to reduce bulk.

Seam on the cuff pressed open

6.  Sew the short edge cuff seam and press open.  You will have a tube.  Turn and fold so that the seam is on the inside. 

Pinning the cuff to the stocking lining;
stocking front and back still
on the inside.

7.   Place the cuff over the stocking (still with the lining on the outside) and pull it down so that all raw edges are even.  Pin the edges together.

8.  Sew around the top of the stocking.  I always reinforce the area where the loop is with another line of stitches. 

Sewing the cuff on

7.  Turn the stocking ride side out and turn the cuff down.  Voila!  Your stocking is finished!

Festival, Part One: Some Portrait Quilts

The International Quilt Festival in Houston every fall is the largest quilt exhibition in the world, and it is Houston's largest convention.  Since I began quilting in earnest in 1998, I've attended almost every year.  Sometimes taking classes, but often not--often just feasting my eyes on the hundreds of quilts.

This year I attended with friend Carolyn from Dallas.  We spent two days and one evening at the Festival, not only viewing the quilts, but also shopping. 

It is difficult to do so, but I've tried to narrow down the hundreds of pictures I took to some of my favorite ones.  Some are traditional, some are art quilts.  All are inspiring!  Because I'd like to comment on the quilts, I've decided to break my remarks about Festival 2010 into several different postings.  Today's post focuses on portrait quilts.





This quilt, a blue ribbon winning quilt in the "Group Quilt" category,

is an outstanding example of using fabrics creatively to depict the
shadings of a face.  These 10 women from Australia each did
self-portraits, with the daunting challenge of using
Kaffe Fassett-designed fabrics,
 not flesh-colored, plain, ones! 
A close-up will demonstrate how successfully these
quilters met the challenge!



A close-up from the group quilt.  Click to enlarge to better appreciate the unusual
choice of fabrics, yet the creative way this portrait "works"!

A close-up of the book
reading girl, showing
how artfully this quilt
artist has depicted the shading
on the girl's face with appliqued
fabrics of different values.

  This quilt appealed to me also because of my own love of reading and my memories of how, as a young girl, I would get lost in a book, as this lovely young girl is--so lost that the horses from
her book are literally leaping from its pages!  Another thing I love about this quilt is the way the artist has used traditional quilt blocks, skewed, yes, but still traditional, to depict the sky and in the green quilt (or is it green grass?) below the girl.  Most definitely this quilt and a few others I'll discuss later was in my "top 10" or maybe "top 5" favorites!

Here's a close-up of another portrait quilt.  This is a
lovely example of another way to render portraits in fabric--this beautiful
young woman's face has been painted with fabric paint.

Here's the painted quilt, which is called "The Solace of Persephone."

Art from Nature--Nature as Art

Here Bob is looking inside--a photo which
gives you some perspective on
how large these are!

Yes, still more art in Central Texas!  Saturday Bob and I went to Cameron Park, the 461 acre park in Waco, one of the largest urban parks in the state.  A generous grant was recently awarded to the City to do much renovation work on this park, which was founded in 1910 on land given by the Cameron family.  During a recent arts festival in town, Patrick Doughterty and many volunteers began work on a series of stick scrulptures, a grouping of vessels in the area of the park known as Pecan Bottoms.  These vessel sculptures are truly amazing!  Yesterday was a beautiful day here at the end of October, a month that tends to be our nicest, weather-wise.  I am including pictures of the sculptures and some select few of various veiws from the park.



Stick Sculpture by Patrick Dougherty in
Cameron Park





A close-up view of how the willow branches are woven together

to form the sculptures

A closer look at the top





\

Lovers Leap--Cameron Park (of course,
there's a legend about two Indian
lovers, forbidden to marry by their
families, who leapt to their death from this cliff.  Wonder
how many locations in the US have such legends
about similar cliffs?)

Looking down the Bosque
toward where our
house is located



The Mouth of the Bosque (in Waco, the Brazos River and the Bosque
come together here.



Art-Filled Morning

I met two friends today to see a special exhibit at Baylor's Mayborn Museum.  The exhibit is called "Sacred Texts, Holy Images" and is an extensive collection of works by Georges Roualt and Marc Chagall.  The Roualts are his Miserere series; the Chagall's, his Bible series.  Words are inadequate to describe either one of these collections.  After about 20 minutes, I realized that to do them justice, I needed to come back and spend much more time than my friends and I had allotted.  In fact, I left the Roualts at that point, having seen perhaps only a fourth of them, and moved to the Chagalls.  Having just been steeped in recent Bat Mitzvah services and activities in our family, I found that these etchings and lithographs resonated powerfully with me.  (Not that the others didn't, but the Roualts were so moving and often disturbing that I felt I needed to be alone to take more time to ponder them.)  The links I've provided are excellent; the one for the Chagalls has a slideshow that includes most, if not all, the ones on display at the Mayborn.  Likewise the link for the Roualts has many of the Miserere series, too.

From the Mayborn we went across the street to the Martin Art Gallery.  Patty had seen a notice of two exhibits there that sounded intriguing.  Well!  What a surprise.  I had not heard of either artist, but all three of us were blown away by them.  One of the artists who had works exhibited was Makoto Fujimura.  His huge, abstract, brilliantly colored works were an anecdote for the black and white etchings and ink paintings in the other museum.  The other artist was Dornith Doherty, who currently lives in Dallas and teachers at North Texas University.  Her works are primarily photographs, but photographs unlike any I've ever seen.  Again, words cannot capture what she produces; only going to her website or Googling images of her works will suffice! 

Of course, photography was not allowed at either museum, so I have no pictures taken by me to display here.  I did, however, scan the brochure from the Martin Museum, which I will add below.  But these small images don't do justice to either artist.  Please click on the links to see much better representations of their works!

Our Halloween Baby: TWO Journal Quilts Honoring Her!

Forty-six years ago this week we were impatiently awaiting the birth of our first child.  She was due on something like October 15, so by this point, she was nearly two weeks overdue.  My mother had come on the due date to help out after we brought the baby home from the hospital, and needless to say, she was getting impatient, too!  Finally on Halloween night, our baby girl Kathy was born.  It was fun for all of our family through the years for her to have a Halloween birthday!  Many, many combination Halloween and birthday parties resulted.  I like to say that all three of our children have "special" birthdays.  Our son and youngest daughter share the same birthday, with Susan arriving on Rob's 5th! 

This year I decided to commemorate both Halloween and Kathy's birthday with a journal quilt.  Actually, the third try has proved to be the charm for this little quilt.  The first one I made, I goofed up by using a damp press cloth while fusing down some ink-jet-printed appliques, and of course, the ink ran and ruined the little quilt.  The second one turned out too"busy" and confusing looking, with just too much going on in such a small space.  But today's worked out just fine!  Actually I used ideas from each of the failures:  the printed words from the first one and the cupcake and little girl witch from the second!

The third journal quilt--my favorite!

After writing this, I checked my emails.  Several friends to whom I sent a picture of my journal quilt #2 seemed to like it!  So I am posting a picture of it, too, for comparison.  I told them that the picture looked better to me than the quilt in person!  I did like what one friend wrote:  Halloween is such a busy, fun-filled holiday, and the "busy" background on this quilt seems to capture that spirit!



The 2nd quilt--first rejected, now included!



Halloween Fabric Postcards

I wrote a post a month or so ago about how to make fabric postcards that didn't need any sewing at all.  I decided today to follow my own directions and do an assembly line production of 4 postcards for my 4 grandkids.  I wish I had timed how long it took me to make these four, but I didn't.  But the task seemed to be done in a jiffy.  I varied my technique a bit, because I had much more fusible fleece than I had Steam-a-Seam sheets.  So I put the fusible fleece on the back of one of the two fabrics on each card, and then I put the Steam a Seam on the back of the other.  (This latter product has the fusible web on both sides.)  Other than that, I followed the steps in my former post.  I still prefer sewn cards.  Of course, I could always go back and top-stitch or blanket-stitch around all edges.  But under the pressure of a deadline and for something quick and easy, these worked out well!
Here are the results:



Here, first, are the fronts--messages written but not yet addressed to the children.  The yellow striped fabric is the same for all four,  but I accidentally stamped the wrong side of one of them--no matter!  (The "beary" pun on Lia's
card refers to the fact that she plans to be Winnie the Pooh for Halloween!)



My favorite one is the purple one, perhaps because I fused a larger motif
onto the rather plain background--a motif cut from the
orange fabric that I used for the two postcards at the right.

Quilts in Our Home

I’ve made between 75 and 100 quilts, ranging in size from three-block table runners to one king-sized quilt, one queen, several double-bed quilts, and many wall hangings and baby quilts.   (I’m not counting my raw-edged journal quilts in this tally). Most of these have been gifts to grandchildren, children, nieces, nephews, great-nieces, friends, etc. But some few of them I made for us. Today was a red letter day, since my last big art quilt, Jubilation, (which has been the subject of several of these posts) was finally hung in our living room, high on the wall in this two-storey room. I am pleased with how it looks!




Picture taken from the upstairs "bridge" that overlooks our living room.



The hand-quilted, whole-cloth quilt in the dining room



Aqua in Abstract

The Stone Arch Bell quilt

Others of my quilts in our house are white quilt in the dining room; a traditional quilt above our bed in the master bedroom; a quilt of my own design that I made for Bob’s 70th birthday in the living room; and the first “art quilt” I made, the Stone Arch quilt in the landing of the stairwell. (This quilt won a red ribbon in the Temple Quilt Show last year.)

My second art quilt, Aqua in Abstract, also a prior subject of a posting, was hung today as well, above the television set (I’m running out of empty walls!) in our bedroom. I’m in the process of slowly—very slowly!—making a king-sized quilt that uses all of the aqua and turquoise fabrics that are in this small quilt, in addition to many others.

The star quilt above our ged

The star quilt in the bedroom is composed of two different star blocks, the Friendship Star and the Sawtooth Star. In these stars, no fabric is used more than once; and every star is different from its fellows. I made this quilt in a class taught by my good friend and quilt-buddy Patty. It won a red ribbon in the Waco Quilt Show one year.

Bob's 70th birthday quilt

Bob’s quilt features stars that are associated with various states in the union significant to our family: Texas, of course, (my birth state and that our daughter Susan), Arkansas (where Bob lived most of his growing-up years), Tennessee (his birth state), Georgia (where our two eldest children were born, Kathy and Rob), Michigan (where two grandsons were born), and California (where our granddaughter and her brother were born).

Ugly Dolls and Embroidery Lessons

Locke's stuffed animals and Ugly Dolls, all ready to
go to sleep with him and me!  (The pink-eared one was
the last doll I made for him, last summer when he
visited us!)



Locke with the latest Ugly Doll



Lia's snail embroidery



As soon as I arrived in California, grandson Locke announced that what he wanted to do with Grandmommy was sew, and with Granddaddy, play baseball.  He certainly did a lot of the latter!  When I asked him what he wanted to sew,he said another Ugly Doll.  So I've worked on one off and on ever since.  This afternoon he and I stuffed the doll, and above he is sitting with the doll.  Not so good of Locke, but a good picture of the doll!

I could tell that Lia felt a bit left out, with my spending so much time on this project with Locke, not to mention all the games we played. So I asked her what she wanted to do with me, all my herself, in my remaining time today. She was most interested in the embroidery that I am doing for my great niece, so she asked for an embroidery lesson. I had her draw a picture of something she'd like to embroider, and she drew a really cute snail. Then she copied it onto a piece of yellow felt, in pencil. I showed her just the simplest stitch, the straight stitch, and off she went. I sat beside her to help her with threading needles and knotting threads, but she put in all but perhaps three of the stitches in the little snail above.

Tonight, with their Dad out of town, Lia is going to sleep with her Mom, and Locke, with me!  I hope I can squeeze in with both Locke and the gigantic menagerie of animals and Ugly Dolls now residing in my bed, as you can see from the picture above!

Lia and her embroidery.

Rogers Gardens and a Soccer Game

One of the hundreds of hanging baskets

An exotic plant, unlike any I've ever seen!

Rogers Gardens is within walking distance of where my daughter and her family live in California.  It is a magical place, the most beautiful gardening center or nursery I've ever seen.  I've visited it for every major holiday--Easter, Christmas, of course, and now Halloween.  Yesterday the two grandchildren, their dad and granddad, and I walked first to a nearby shopping center where we sat outside and ate either fast food Chinese or pizza.  From there we went to Rogers Gardens.  The children were most interested in the over-the-top Halloween exhibit rooms, with every sort of Halloween decor one could imagine.  Every where we went, there were piles of pumpkins of all sizes and varieties, including some that were white and some, almost red or certainly pinkish!  Bob and I walked all through the gardens, marveling at the exotic plants and especially enjoying the most beautiful hanging basket I've ever seen. 

The Christmas decorations are already displayed, too, with several rooms filled to the brim with huge Christmas trees, all thematically decorated.  Locke took me to see the nutcrackers, of course!  I was shocked at some of their prices.  When I said to him, "Well, these make your Target Nutcracker look pretty plain and simple in comparison," he said, "But I'd be afraid to own one that cost THAT much!  I like to PLAY with mine!"  Lia loved the nutcrackers which also had a music box on which they stood; oddly, these were affordable, much less expensive than the "collectable" ones!

Before our Rogers Gardens adventure, we all went to watch Locke play soccer.  Sadly, his team lost for the first time this season, but he played a super game as one of the two main defensive players!

Here are pictures of our Saturday doings:

Lia and Locke at Rogers Gardens

Locke in front of his team sign, at the soccer game

At home, ready for the game!

A nutcracker Alice in Wonderland and the White Rabbit