A Wedding in Italy

A flash of inspiration birthed this quilt.  It celebrates the wedding of two of my daughter's super super good friends.  

They married last fall with a destination wedding in Italy, a gorgeous setting.  This quilt is my rendition of a photo taken on The Day.  

Favorite Quotes # 10 - Simple Things

"Some of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted."
- Neil deGrasse Tyson

Nature's Perspective - 1989 - 107" x 81"

I heard this line in the midst of a long, rambling interview I was watching online.  I backed up over the spot and wrote it right down.

I would expand the concept to all art, not just poetry!  Certainly for me, this has been a theme to my art making, though I have never realized it or expressed it so clearly.

I love experiencing art as a way to see more clearly.  I think art is truly art at its best when artist and viewer meet at that place of clarity and inner knowing, a place where they recognize and acknowledge each others' humanity and each others' spirits.  That to me is a great definition of beauty.

And these meetings are not predictable.  I like that I will never really know how and which of my quilts will impact which viewers.  Sending a particular message is not the reason I make quilts, that's for sure.

The image for Nature's Perspective came to me while driving home through Wisconsin farmland at dusk.  I felt like I was almost flying over the landscape, and the land was like a billowy quilt, tacked down at the corners by the farm building and the occasional trees.

But the most meaningful comment I had on this quilt was from our friend Jon.  He said it perfectly represents a vision that had always intrigued him - that the sky is so smooth and uniform while the earth below is so varied and dimensional.  Sure 'nough, he's right!  But that concept had never entered my mind while designing the quilt.  That conversation taught me a lot about art.

Actually, I get a bit perturbed about writers who try to define what "Art" is in discussions about whether art needs to be beautiful, or needs to have social commentary, or needs to be shocking and cutting edge, or needs to be created in a perceptible series that experiments around a theme (as I was told in a quilt design workshop years ago), or needs to be in fine art media, and so on and on and on.

In my world, Art is what someone is drawn to create, and Art is what gives someone else a satisfying experience.

Details about how the quilt was made:
The sky is half a Sunburst pattern.
The farms are Prairie Queen and Corn and Beans blocks.
The farm buildings are black felt.  The glowing windows and the trees are embroidered.

Due to the perspective, there are no two templates exactly alike.  My husband the engineer helped with the drawing and figuring.  Every template was numbered and marked for right side and top.  It was quite a serious undertaking!  I have never made such a large and complex art quilt before, and have no plans to do so again!

Favorite Quotes #6 - It's The Little Things

I've been caught up in a book by Elizabeth Goudge called "The Bird in the Tree".

It's a rather slow moving story - one that in the book group we had with homeschooling teens and their parents would have elicited the oft-heard comment, "But nothing happened."  So far, and I'm a third of the way into it, it's much more of a character study with lovely, lovely poetic descriptions of Nature and Life.  And I always love a good tale told in poetic language.

Here are a few noteworthy quotes, about art, and therefore about Life ......

What the Birds See

"What the Birds See"

This is my latest quilt in the Something from Nothing series.  The series is based on a pile of decorator fabric samples.  Part of the challenge I have given myself is to make the design of the quilt related in some way to the design on the fabrics.  You can read more about the series here.

For this quilt, my goal was to use lots of the large floral prints and make a happy garden quilt.  I was wondering about what to use or make up for a garden design, and my friend Julie suggested that I reproduce a part of the Chicago Botanic Garden, and have the quilt ready to display at the big Fine Art of Fiber show that is held there every fall.  Perfect!  Thanks, Julie!

Favorite Quotes #2 - Why Make Art?

"Oh, it's outrageous to consider creating art, isn't it? But life is short. And intense. And we need art to inspire and amuse us."
by Lisa Halpern, in "insight: the cornish magazine", 2010.  Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle

This is a brand new favorite quote, not one of my old stand-bys, found last night while musing over college promo materials before chucking them in the recycle bin.

Deer Creek Fen quilt at home

My zoologist friend visited me in June and picked up the landscape quilt I made for her.  It is a portrait of the fen where she does her fieldwork.

The quilt is now happily hanging in its new home.  My friend just sent photos, and here they are.  I am so happy to see it in situ.  The colors really work well with the rest of the room, I think.  And my friend can work at her desk and dream about being out in the kayak - gliding through the grasses and visiting the bog buckmoths, the turtles, frogs, and dragonflies, all the while watched over by the deer and hawk.  Yea!!

The complete story of this quilt's creation starts here with her photos and fabric selection and creating the landscape, and continues with creating the animals, more detailing and adding the borders are here and here, and finally, photos of the completed quilt.  I'm really grateful to my friend for the inspiration to create such a detailed and exciting quilt.

It's Done!

It's done!  It's done!  The fen quilt is all finished!

It will be hanging this coming weekend at the Fine Art of Fiber show at the Botanic Garden up in Glencoe:  http://www.fineartoffiber.org/.  That's what I needed, a deadline, and now it's done.  Nothing like a deadline to make things happen.

In celebration of this great event, here is a tour of my rendition of the landscape and the creatures who dwell there. I am so happy!

Back to the Fen

In the home stretch now!

I've completed (I think....) the final detailing and embroidering on the bog quilt.  Here's the scoop:

I did, indeed, make another kayak, so that it is long enough to extend across the border.  This is the third and hopefully, hopefully final attempt at the kayak!  I managed to salvage the grey bits this time, and reattach them to the new kayak body.  But I did need to embroider the detailing on them again.  I also, added a black cord and attachments.

Fen Quilt Update

Recent developments at the fen:

My friend asked if I could make the kayak smoother.  I've been interfacing everything with a super-light interfacing, just for a bit of substance in handling and to help secure the tiny tips of the shapes, but it didn't really give the charmeuse much more stiffness.  This is nice for a blouse of course, but didn't help the illusion of being a fiberglass kayak.  So, I took off the kayak and make another with a very heavy interfacing.

Animals of the Fen

As promised, here come the animals to populate the fen quilt.  

My friend, as I said earlier, specified particular species of each animal.  It wasn't hard to find photos of each via google.  I also found info on each animal's size, so I could reproduce them somewhat in scale.  

I put each photo into Illustrator (I imagine any program would work somewhat the same, but I'm nowheres near a computer expert).  I drew a box the size I wanted the animal to be, and scaled the photo accordingly.  Then I printed them out, traced each onto paper, pinned them on the quilt, and checked it out with my friend.  I posted a photo of the quilt with paper animals in place in a previous post.

When the sizing was all set, I used the tracings as patterns to cut the fabrics for the basis of each animal.  Again, the fabrics were all stabilized with iron-on interfacing before I cut.  I stitched the animals in place, using a zig-zag with invisible thread.

Quilting in the Fen

My current art quilt project is a major one.  I've been working on this quilt for longer than I'd like to admit.  So this rather lengthy, photo-filled post will serve to bring you up to date with an overview of the steps I've taken so far.  This is a very condensed version of the process.  There were many detailed decision points and adjustments along the way, of course.

A friend of mine from college days, who is a zoologist, asked me to create a quilt depicting the fen in upstate New York where she does her fieldwork.  She sent me many photos that she has taken there.  Here's the overview shot that became the basis for the quilt.  In it, you will see three bog buckmoths, one of the creatures she studies there.