Gyleen Fitgerald and Colourful Stitches

Are you familiar with Gyleen Fitzgerald of Colourful Stitches?  She was the guest speaker at the local guild meeting this week.  Gyleen is a scrappy quilter who uses color, pattern and texture to create contemporary versions of traditional quilts. An engineer by profession, she considers herself a technician and has created tools to simplify construction.  She is an author and national teacher who has appeared on The Quilt Show and Lifetime TV.

Gyleen is a wonderful "script-free" speaker.  Her lecture blended information on color and moving from traditional to modern.  Here are some of the quilts she shared.

In this pyramid quilt, the large diamonds are pieced with 4 smaller contrasting diamonds.  She showed us an earlier version where the diamonds were still pieced but more monochromatic. That one had a much more traditional look.

 This one is an original variation of the shoo-fly block, and done in grays with a spark of yellow gives it a very modern look.

From her Bricks, Cobblestones and Pebbles book, this is actually a color study to show how colors affect each other.  The blocks in opposite corners use the same fabrics, but the center squares and rectangles are different thus making the whole block look different.

Gyleen seldom uses solids, so the challenge for her here was to incorporate the appearance of texture in the solid fabrics.  The striped background contributes to that effort. 

Another twist on a traditional block, Gyleen added corner triangles to the knot blocks that create the squares in the center of the knots. It also uses color to move the eye around the quilt.

Gyleen is well known for her pineapple quilts and ruler tool.  This is a modern take on the traditional version where parts of the pineapple disappear into the white.

We're sure her workshops are every bit as informative and fun as her lectures!

More Lancaster Quilts

There were many outstanding quilts in the Lancaster AQS show last week.  In addition to the prize winners shown Monday, here are some additional quilts that stood out.

Holding Onto Hope is by Amy Cavaness of Marseilles, IL.  The lovely soft colors almost make this look like a painting.

Beautiful Autumn by Mariko Miwas of Musashino, Tokyo, Japan.  The autumn scene in the circle is made up of teeny tiny pieces and lots and lots of stitching - just incredible!

Fractal is by Claudia Pfeil of Krefeld, Germany.  It looks incredibly complex.

There was a SAQA special exhibit (Studio Art Quilt Associates) called Korean Quilts Now.  The Korean SAQA group was founded in 2010 and the exhibit features a variety of art quilt techniques that they have studied over the last few years.  Above is Where I Live by Misik Kim.

Memory is by Jang Dong Boon.

Far Away is by Aeran Kim.  Lovely soft colors and depth.

Back to the main quilt show, Andrea Brokenshire of Round Rock, TX, made My Rhodie which received a 1st place ribbon in the Wall Quilt category.

Dialogue is by Rachel Derstine of Schwenksville, PA.

Sherrie Grob of Murphysboro, IL, created Angle Management.

David Cutting Stumps by Mary Haukom of Colorado Springs, CO, is an excellent example of using value to create depth.

We hope you've enjoyed this mini quilt show!

AQS Lancaster Show

When Sue was returning to Virginia from Pennsylvania last week, she was able to fit in a stop at the Lancaster Quilt Show put on by the American Quilters Society.  This was the first time she's attended this show.  It is on a smaller scale than the Mancuso shows like Mid-Atlantic, but worth the visit. 

There were exceptional quilts in the show; some of the winners were also winners at Mid-Atlantic, but with completely different quilts.  There are some busy quilters out there!  It was also interesting to see a proportionately larger number of international quilts - several from Japan,  South Korea, Germany and Australia.  It was also a venue that included the Cherrywood Van Gogh exhibit which Sue was especially eager to see.  Here are pictures of some of the winners and some Van Gogh favorites.

Pear Drops by Cheryl Kerestes of Wyoming, PA, won 3rd place in the large quilt category.

Janet Stone of Overland Park, Kansas, made Garden Variety Sampler. which is another in her series of alphabet quilts.  It won for Best Stationary Machine Workmanship.

The Best of Show prize went to Pat Holly of Ann Arbor, MI, for Turkish Treasures.

Taking the Unmapped Road is by Margaret Solomon Gunn of Gorham, ME, and won for Best Movable Machine Workmanship.

In the wall quilt category, Three Thieving Crows by Gayle Pulley of Eatonville, WA, won for Best Original Design.

Roots and Branches by Christina McCann of Depoe Bay, OR, won Best Wall Quilt.

Caryl Bryer Fallert-Gentry's work is recognizable anywhere.  Celebration #2 won for Best Use of Color.  Caryl is from Port Townsend, WA.

This shot of some of the Van Gogh quilts is about a third of the total in the collection.  Here is a selection of favorites.

Top row artists, left to right: Enid Weichelsbaum, Miyuki Humphries, Lesly-Clair Greenburg
Middle row artists, left to right:  Margaret Vachon, Ricki Selva, Angie Gohn
Bottom row artists, left to right:  Linda Nelson Johnson, Sally Wright, Bonnie Duhon
You can see more of the Cherrywood Van Gogh challenge quilts here.

Be sure to click on the pictures to enlarge them for a closer look.  In all cases, the quilting adds incredible texture and dimension that is not apparent in these photos.

Class Collages

In our Print and Collage class, we provided some guidance on using the students' printed fabrics to create a collage.  While some chose to continue printing a stash of fabrics, others went on to play with their fabrics to come up with an arrangement that they could tweak at home, as well as add stitching and other embellishments.  Sue explained her process of starting with either a color story or theme/focal point and auditioning stash pieces to come up with a pleasing composition, while keeping the elements and principles of design in mind.

Here she's working with analogous colors (blue & green), with the dark blue providing the contrasting pop of color.

Mary auditions fabrics for her collage, and finds that sometimes just changing the position or width of a piece of fabric can make a big difference.

Jane likewise auditions fabrics to provide balance to her composition.

Barbara had a great piece of batik (the turquoise on the right) in several colors that was a perfect complement to the mum screen printed in white. Here she's playing with various elements for her collage.

Etta used her leaf screen in 3 sizes with an organza overlay to create her composition.  Isn't this a great leaf design?

Here's a look at our extensive collection of screens that the students had to work with.  We look forward to seeing pictures of their completed collages!

Print and Collage Class Pics

Last Saturday we taught our Thermofax screen printing class at Artistic Artifacts, this time with a twist to create a collage from the fabrics printed in class.  This was a learning adventure for both us and our students as we endeavored to incorporate a small project into this one day class.  Typically, we teach all we know about screen printing and allow the students to create as much printed fabric as they can in a day's time. But sometimes students are not sure what to do with the fabric once they've created it, so we decided to add an exercise in creating a 12 inch collage from the printed fabrics, incorporating elements and principles of design.  We feel this new version of the class was successful, but may need a few tweaks.  First and foremost, we allowed our students the flexibility to determine if they wanted to work on the collage aspect, or just preferred to create more fabrics to add to their stash.  At any rate, we all had a good time and a positive learning experience!

Student are busy creating a printed fabric stash.

Mel's primary art endeavor is painting on silk with thickened dye.  She chose to add Thermofax printing to some of those pieces.

Michelle works more with paper and journaling than fabric, so she chose to add additional layers to some previously printed papers she brought with her.

Etta is hard at work printing with some of our screens, as well as others she had us create from some of her original drawings.

Here's a print of one of her originals.

Jennifer took the approach of creating a landscape-type effect with the screens she chose to use.

Beth is practicing her technique.

On our demo piece, we added some butterflies to a batik that had some smaller butterflies on it.  Some are done with paint, some with discharge (DeColourant) which takes color out, and some with foil to add sparkle.

Elizabeth shares some color info with Mel and Jennifer.  Come back tomorrow for a look at some of their collages in progress.

MAQF Favorites from Elizabeth

Elizabeth fell in love with the prize winning quilt by Janet Stone called ABC Frippery.  It was stunning and the maroon hand-dyed velveteen used in the background gave it a texture and depth to bar none.  Here is the entire quilt along with a few close up photos.  Be sure to click to enlarge and see the fabulous quilting.

Another highlight was part of the Peninsula Piecemakers Quilt Guild Challenge "Not Your Grandmother's Quilt".  Rhonda Gianturco made a quilt "Tat's Not My Grandmother's Dresden I" which incorporated needle tatting in each block and is a tribute to both her grandmothers, one who sewed and one who tatted with a shuttle.