Day 3 Manchester Quilt Show

We spent Friday in Manchester at the World Quilt New England show, one of the Mancuso shows.  This is a smaller show (compared to Mid-Atlantic) but nice in a different way.  It features show entries from quilters around the world, and the quilts are grouped by country.  There is a prize for Best of Country for each group in addition to the usual prize categories.  We found there to be a great mix of techniques in the show quilts.  Rather than just show our favorite quilts, we decided to each choose four that we thought most interesting because of their techniques. 

"Bloom - Remember the Honey Bees" won Best of Country for New Zealand, and is made by Mary Transom.  It has a hand painted background, raw edge applique, collage, couching, stamping, and machine embroidery.  The bees were painted and then machine embroidered.  It is an original design.

"Migrating Birds" was also a Best of Country winner for Israel and it's maker, Rachel Steiner.  The impressive thing about this piece is that it is done with discharge.  It is a whole cloth quilt, meaning it started out as a piece of black fabric that the maker took color out of by using a Q-tip dipped in bleach!  In other words, lots of painstaking work created all those birds!  Discharging black fabric usually results in varying shades of rust or brown.  There is also lots of stitching which helps create the color story.

"Ode to Banksias 7" is by Susan Mathews of Australia.  This quilt is from a series featuring native Australian plants.  We liked the sunny yellow and the fact that the background fabrics are lino printed and hand dyed, and the plant images are screen printed.  Techniques that are right up our alley!  It's fun to see how other people use these techniques.

Raita Sawyer of the United Kingdom created "Tangram Activity".  A tangram is an ancient Chinese puzzle creating a square out of 7 pieces.  The tangram figures are bursting with energy.  It is machine pieced, appliqued and quilted and an original design.

Winning honorable mention in the Innovative category is "Skyscraper Sunflowers" by Kathryn Harmer Fox of South Africa (full image on the left). The base fabric is cotton duck canvas and she has used snippets of many fabrics that are scribble stitched to the background to create her design.  There are also pieces of colored netting incorporated into the work.

"Memories of Scotland" is by Kathleen Matthews of the United Kingdom.  The center panel of this quilt was first painted with acrylic paints.  The bordering pictures are photos printed on fabric.  All are heavily stitched and thread painted.  Below is a collage of some close ups of various parts of the quilt.

"Hundreds and Thousands - Little Green Squares" is by Sue Bax of South Africa.  Sue says she started this quilt in a workshop and was inspired by a green jelly roll of Kaffe Fassett fabrics to which she added many other fabrics.  You have to look at the detail photo (enlarge by clicking) to see how small some of these squares really are!

One of the special exhibits at the show was HERstory Quilts: A Celebration of Strong Women curated by our friend Suzanne Miller Jones.  The quilt above is one of the quilts in the exhibit, "Ruby Bridges", made by Willa Downes.  Willa is also a friend of ours - in fact, we made the thermofax screen she used to print the desk images on her quilt.  It's always fun to see work by a customer, especially when it's hanging in a show!

Quilt Camp Day 2

Thursday, August 16 was our first working day of this year's quilt camp even though we consider it day 2.  After-all, we were playing with thermofax yesterday as we introduced the technique to a group of local quilters.  We went back to our roots of the first quilt camp ten years ago and some of the techniques we did those first few years.  Starting with low water immersion dye we did some half yard pieces in the colors of the rainbow and some fat quarters in similar color palette but from different dyes.  They need to "batch" for 24 hours so you will need to come back to find out how they look.

Elizabeth made a gelatin plate, old style, with Knox Gelatin in a disposable metal tray.  This is how we did it a decade ago before the reusable Gelli Plates came on the market.  Sometimes it is good to return to something organic, so after the fat quarters are dyed she will do some gelatin plate printing.

Sue thermofax printed some fabric she dyed at a previous quilt camp with a new screen and discharge to create these two lovely pieces.

Elizabeth had a white t-shirt and after a soda ash soak the t-shirt was sprinkled with Wisteria and Robin Egg Blue dyes put through a very fine strainer onto the wet fabric.  As the tiny dots of dye started to spread out she then put a layer of ice cubes over the top.  It too will need to batch to help the dye set, time and temperature are the two important factors when batching.

Sue also traced a pattern for a wallet onto the back of cork fabric in preparation for making a sample for an upcoming class.

In this photo you can see both the cork side and the backing side.

Today we will be at the World Quilt Show in Manchester, so check back tomorrow for some photos from the show!

Thermofax Printing with Country Village Quilters

Wednesday afternoon we led a program for the Country Village Quilters in Moultonborough, NH.  Our friend Terri Sontra (Purple Moose Designs) is a member of this guild and asked us to do a technique program for them.  After a short business meeting, we provided background info on thermofax printing, demonstrated the process, and then turned the ladies loose to try their hand.

We had a group of about 18 ladies, and though art quilting and surface design is not their typical form of quilting, they were eager to give it a try.

Sue demos the printing process.

Cleaning screens.

Printing away!  We limited the screens to a north woods theme - pine cones, pine sprigs, ferns.

Some participants had backgrounds in other types of painting so did not hesitate to dive in.

One of the finished pieces.

This was a lovely quilt we saw as part of the guild's show and tell.

We had a good time teaching about printing and the ladies all appeared to enjoy learning something new!

Quilt Camp 2018!

If it's summer, it's time for quilt camp!  For the 9th year, Sue and Elizabeth are at Elizabeth's lake house in New Hampshire for a few weeks of crafting and creativity.  We arrived at the lake around dinner time on Monday after a 2 day trip from Virginia.  We would have gotten here sooner except for making a few stops in New England.  One was at Shelburne Falls, MA, to see the Bridge of Flowers.  Elizabeth had seen it before, but Sue had not.

Built as a trolley bridge in 1908, it connected 2 towns on either side of the Deerfield River, but was abandoned in 1928 when the trolley fell out of use.  In 1929, Antoinette and Walter Burnham had the vision of transforming it into a flower bridge, and the Shelburne Falls Woman's Club led the effort to make it a reality. 

Over 500 varieties of perennials and annuals are planted and tended by volunteers to ensure continuous blooming throughout the seasons.  It is a lovely spot and well worth the 8 mile drive off the interstate.

Another site to see in Shelburne Falls is Salmon Falls, where a section of the river is damned off, exposing granite with "potholes" worn into the rock over time. 

  Some of the potholes are visible in the photo above (the two dark spots in the lower right).

From Massachusetts we drove on into Vermont for a short while before heading east into New Hampshire.  In Keene, NH, we stopped off at New England Fabrics.

This is a large store in an old mill building that is at least half or more home decorating fabrics and an upholstery shop.  They have a nice variety of quilting fabrics as well as fabrics for garment sewing, and more notions similar to a generic sewing store.  After making our purchases we had lunch at a nearby restaurant and then continued on to the lake.

On Tuesday, Sue needed to make a trip to a CVS - the closest was half way around the lake.  Since we were making the drive, we decided a stop off at Keepsake Quilting in Centre Harbor was in order.

Just small purchases here, but it's always fun to stop in and look.  They have recently been bought by the family that owns Pineapple Fabrics, so now there is a Pineapple Fabrics store next door in what used to be a yarn shop.

After returning to the house, we started the process of setting up the garage "studio", which meant cleaning up and organizing a bunch of stuff to reclaim the work space.  Not quite finished, but almost there.

Since the rain seems to have moved on, Sue decided it was time to get back to her morning walk routine.  Here is the view from the dock this morning.

This afternoon we did a program on thermofax printing for a local guild - more on that tomorrow!

SNaP - SAQA Regional Group

Studio Art Quilt Associates is a national group that promotes the art quilt, and has regional groups throughout the country that usually encompass neighboring states.  The regional groups, in turn, have "pods", narrowing down the geography so that members can meet in person.  The Northern Virginia pod, known as "SNaP", meets on the 4th Saturday of the month.  Some meetings feature a member as the "spotlight", others might involve a field trip to a museum.  The July meeting last Saturday featured Lisa Ellis as the spotlight speaker.   Lisa is an art quilter who teaches on the national level, and is also past president of the national SAQA group, as well as director of Sacred Threads, a biennial quilt exhibition with themes of spirituality, healing, joy, peace, inspiration and grief.  She shared a series of quilts she has been working on based on the cathedral window.

Lisa was inspired by some traditional cathedral window quilts made by her grandmother to explore this technique and develop a machine method for creating the traditionally hand sewn windows. 

"Radiance" was made using this method; it debuted at Houston International Quilt Festival in 2016.

"Midnight Blooms" was also shown at IQF in 2016.

"Windows for Yvonne" was made for an exhibit honoring Yvonne Porcella, founder of SAQA, who passed away a few years ago.  This one was made in colors favored by Yvonne and also using her trademark checkerboard fabric.  You can see more of Lisa's quilts on her website; she did share 2 quilts from this series that will appear in Houston this year.

In addition to the spotlight speaker, we also revealed some challenge quilts based on the theme "maker's mark".  The idea was to make a 12" square quilt based on how you make your mark on fabric, whether that be through dyeing/printing your fabric, a particular style you have developed, machine and/or hand stitching, or any other interpretation of mark making.  Seven participants shared their challenge quilts.

Most involved hand stitching as part of the mark making process.  Other techniques include screen printing, leaf pounding, crazy quilting, digitized stitching, embroidery. In the picture above, can you guess which one is Sue's?  If you are a follower of this blog and our thermofax screen business, it shouldn't be too hard!

This one didn't fit in the group photo.  It includes some pieces from a leaf pounding workshop prior to the June meeting.  The next group challenge is due at the end of September and is to be inspired by Gustav Klimt, an Austrian painter of the Vienna Secession movement who was greatly influenced by Japanese art.  Hmmm...time to put the thinking cap on.

To Dye For: Ikats from Central Asia

Over the weekend Sue spent some time museum hopping in DC; one of the exhibits she saw was called "To Dye For: Ikats from Central Asia" at the Sackler Gallery. 

The exhibit features ikat wall hangings and robes made in nineteenth-century Uzbekistan as well as ikat-inspired clothing by Oscar de la Renta.  Ikat designs involve a very complex dyeing technique sometimes called "binding clouds".  The items in the exhibit were overwhelmingly red; other colors included yellow, green and blue, as well as areas left white.  The process involves binding warp threads to create a resist, and multiple dye baths of dyeing and over dyeing to create the complex patterns.

The piece above is an extremely rare 22 foot long strip of velvet, probably produced in Bakhara between 1860 and 1910.

The cloth was created in strips which were sewn together to make hangings to decorate interiors.  Joining the strips would create new designs, and sometimes they were purposely not aligned.

The ikat strips were also used to make robes.  These boldly patterned coats signaled a person's rank in Central Asia. In the display above, the items with arms extended are the Asian items; those with arms down were designed by de la Renta between 1997 and 2013.

If you are in the Washington, DC area, the exhibit runs through July 29, so there's still time to see it.  You can find more information on the Smithsonian's website here.

Small Projects

Last week Sue used some studio time to make a few small projects that have been on the back burner.  First was a zipper pouch that she bought a kit for in June at the Quilters Unlimited quilt show.  The vendor was Bucklebee by Me (bucklebeebags.com) and the pouch is called the Skipjack Zipper Pouch for Washable Paper.

Washable paper (which appears to be the same as Kraft-tex, if you are familiar with that product) is a hybrid-textile product that looks and feels like leather.  The paper is wet and scrunched to give it the crinkled look.  Allow it to air dry before cutting the pieces.

These are the cut pieces.  Sue used a piece of hand dyed/screen printed fabric for the contrast trim and lining.

This is the beginning step of joining the outside bag pieces to the zipper.  The bag is fully lined with the fabric.  This was a fairly quick project. There was a little confusion with some of the directions but overall it seems to be constructed as intended.  The paper is rather stiff when it comes to turning the bag right side out, especially the corners. It helped to wet the bottom edge to soften it in order to get the corners pushed out.

Another thing Sue's had on the project list for a while is to make something using cork fabric.  As a first project, she decided to make this simple wallet which is a free downloadable pattern at Sallie Tomato.

It turns out the cork is very easy to work with and is actually very soft.  This is also an easy project, which took a bit more than 2 hours including cutting out the pattern and fabric.  The inside has 2 slip pockets, 6 card slots, and an ID pocket.   There is no storage for coins, however.

Sue will likely be teaching a class using cork for this project at Artistic Artifacts  in the near future - stay tuned for more information!