What a nice way to start the day!  Reading my morning email, sipping my cup, and there’s Quilting Daily from Quilting Arts editor Vivika DeNegre, so I click on it.  It’s about my forthcoming article on the difference a background makes!   You can see it here:

http://www.quiltingdaily.com/blogs/quilting-daily/archive/2013/06/13/choose-backgrounds-for-art-quilts.aspx

Thanks to my friend Pat D. (Waving across the US to Mill Valley, California!) who suggested I submit this article concept.  I’d been sharing with my small, wonderful, essential-to-life online sketching group, trying to decide which background to use for my Tea with Milk quiltlet,

Tea with Milk, published in the recent Quilting Arts Coffee or Tea? Challenge. Of course the answer is tea! From the time I was in grade school, my Irish-American papa fixed me tea for breakfast. Still have my cuppa daily!

which was included in Quilting Arts a couple of issues ago. Pat thought my decision process would make a good article, so I submitted it and …WOOT!… Quilting Arts accepted it.  I’ll share the whole little quilt once the magazine is published.  Until then, here is “Tea with Milk” and an option or two when I made it.

Dark is good for contrast, but this lovely deep blue just looks kinda dead here.

Love the contrast, like a table when you are snug indoors in winter, but that’s not the feel I wanted for this quiltlet.

Love the contrast, but don’t like the vertical: looks like the items are going to slide off a table that has been tilted up!

Love the feel of this breezy aqua, but the cup gets lost along the edges. One option would have been to use this, but then darken the left edge of the cup with thread.

The yellow is so cheerful and “morning”, but the top edge of the white pitcher gets lost, and I didn’t want to darken it with thread. An alternative would be to outline with an ochre just a tiny bit to create an edge.

Getting closer. Good contrast with all three elements, but the value-change in the print distracts from the items.

Hi all! Just wanted to share the good news that Janome has profiled me and my work on their website, here! As many of you know, I sew on a Janome, currently the brilliant Janome 8900.  As their website says, I’m “powered by Janome!”

Powered by Janome

When I began art quilting and using a wide variety of threads, I was frustrated.  I had a top of the line machine, a good one, from one of the major manufacturers, but it was crabby about threads.  That led me to search for “MY perfect machine.”  After a couple years of fruitless searching, I heard about the Janome 6500:  Eureka!

The discovery of the 6500 began what is now a nearly 10 year relationship with Janome America, and I will say yet again how grateful I am for their support over the past decade.  When the 6600 came out, they offered to upgrade me.  I couldn’t believe they could improve on the 6500, which I loved like I hadn’t loved a machine in 20 years.  But they convinced me to try the 6600, and it WAS better.  Each time, they find ways to make small improvements to their machines (the 7700 followed by the 8900) — including by actually listening to customer feedback (what a concept! YEAH!).

So I’d love to invite you to head on over to Janome America and see their post (dated June 7, 2013).  It was a fun email interview and you might learn a couple new things about my thread-filled life!

PS:  I don’t do custom quilting for others, just my own work.

PPS:  my Quilting Arts Workshop DVD (or download) on Fused Collage and Thread-Coloring will be available in mid-September as a download and at the end of September as a DVD.  Watch this space for updates as we approach late summer!

The winner has been chosen using a random number generator at random.org for the free copy of People and Portraits, it’s number 22!  My comment list says it is Anne, so please contact me via the Contact page on this site with your name and address, and Lark will send you a copy.  Congrats and thanks to all.

Martha Sielman and Lark Crafts have done it again:  another wonderful survey of art quilts today, this time with the theme of People and Portraits.

Art Quilt Portfolio: People and Places by Martha Sielman, published by Lark Crafts

The book includes profiles of 21 major artists from around the world and galleries with works by another 120 artists based on themes:

• Happiness
• Contemplation
• Community
• Icons
• Family and Friends
• Work
• Play

There are several ways to approach this book:

• Sit down and devour it at once from cover to cover
• Dip in at random, opening a page to works by people you may or may not know
• Savor a section or an artist at a time
• Grab a favorite beverage, find a comfortable place to sit, and reward yourself with a half hour or hour to read and study the artists you admire
• or all of the above

I started by devouring the book, seeing whose work was in the book, were my favorites there (yes!), whose work had I not seen before?  If you’d like to do the same, read to the end of this post for information on how to win this book, thanks to Lark!

I appreciate the more in depth look we get at each of the featured artists.  Each feature has a one paragraph introduction by Martha, followed by five or six images and writing by the artists (I’m presuming in response to questions from Martha). The commentary covers both technique and substance.   In Bodil Gardner’s section, I enjoyed learning that she includes sheep to add a dash of white to a piece, and that cups are her symbol for women sharing and getting together.  I love reading about Collette Berends’ life and inspiration and also about the wide range of materials used.

There is a very good range of styles and techniques represented as well, ranging from the cartoon-style of Pamela RuBert to Bodil Gardner’s whimsy to Jennifer Day’s and Jenny Bowker’s realistic portraits.  Lastly, this book has the dates the quilts were made. I LOVE THIS because I enjoy looking at the works in chronological order to see the artist’s progression in style, theme and technique.  I do wish they had included the artist’s home country (recognizing that a number of them were inspired by life in other places), and it would have been wonderful if there had been room to include a small photo and bio of each artist, perhaps in the index, but I realize that we all want to see more quilts and there are only so many pages you can squeeze into a book.

From a technical standpoint, almost all the photos are crisp and clear.  The majority show the edges of the quilts; you can tell those because of the drop-shadow used on the page.  Others are clearly cropped to be in a rectangle.  I vastly prefer seeing the entirety of the quilt, not cropped, and wonder at the decision to do this–I wish they hadn’t.  I also wish there were some detail photos:  the first time I flipped through the book quickly, I actually looked to make sure these were all quilts, as I couldn’t see the stitching on many pieces.  This is a function of two things:  the quality of the photograph submitted by the artists and the size of the original quilt (the larger the quilt, the more detail is lost as it is shrunk to fit on a page).  For example, Julie Duschack’s “Monk in the Doorway” is very large, about 4 feet tall by 6 feet wide.  I saw it in Houston and walked as close as I could get to see the stunning quilting on the large black wall; alas, only a portion of this stitching shows on the page:  a detail photo that included part of the stitching would have been wonderful. These are, however, minor quibbles about a book that is well worth adding to your library.

Bottom line:   You’ll love this book!  And I’m thrilled to say that Lark has offered a copy to a reader who comments on this blogpost!  Thank you Lark!  So please leave me a comment.  Tell me what you like to see in portraits, whether your preferences are abstracted, photo-realistic, close-ups, painted or appliqued, tell me what is it that speaks to you when you see an art quilt portrait.  On June 12 I will pick one person at random (I’ll use an online random number generator based on the total number of comments); I’ll need your email to contact you with the good news, which I’ll also post on this post as the last message.

Wow have I been busy, and I’ve woefully neglected my blog!   I’m sorry!  The good news is that a flurry of activity is nearly over.  In the past 8 weeks I have made a quilt for inclusion in a book due out next year, flown from Maine to Colorado to tape a Quilting Arts DVD workshop (more on that here), written and submitted two articles to two different magazines (more on those when they come out), and written a third but still have step-outs and photography to do on that one.  BUT–I am thrilled to share with you that Listen to the Song in The Night has been juried into the this year’s Dinner@8 exhibit, An Exquisite Moment.

Listen to the Song in the Night by Sarah Ann Smith (c) 2013. 24 x 60 inches. Artist dyed silk and cotton, a few commercial batiks (mountains). Free motion quilted, ink with dip-pen, paint.

You can read more about the exhibit, here. Last year I was really stumped.  This year it was a matter of which quilt to make:  childbirth (done discreetly–the mom’s view looking over the sheet over your knees at your newly hatched child in the doctor’s hands), Eli as a 2 year old under the blueberry bush grinning as he munched blueberries, or any of a number of other moments.  But then I remembered the whalesong.  Best of all, not only did hubby Paul, but so did the boys who were about 5 and 9 (or maybe even 4 and 8).  We lived on San Juan Island in Washington state at the time.  Our house  was about 1/3 mile up from the water and faced the Straits of Juan de Fuca with the Olympic mountains on the other side, 17 miles away.  We could see and hear the orcas from our house.  The writing on the quilt tells the story:

Cloaked in the sounds of the rustling breeze, the song drifted through the open window as I readied for bed.  Not believing my ears, I turned out the lights.  Then I began to listen.  It couldn’t be, could it?  The more I listened, the more I believed.  It was the whale song–but above water!  How could that be?  I ran to the living room and told Paul to come outside and listen.  Then we woke our young sons from a sound sleep to hear the song in the night.

We heard the orcas breathe, ripple the water, tail lob, and the thunderous splash of whales breaching.  There were so many of them, and they were singing!  The next day, still in disbelief, I called the Whale Museum researchers.  It was indeed a superpod, a family reunion of the J, K and L pods.  They told me many scientists study the whales for an entire career and never hear them sing above water.  And we four remember standing on the deck in the summer night listening to the orcas sing.

 I knew that I wanted to dye some silk for the water because of the sheen of the sandwashed satin, and found some silk I had dyed for the San Domenico Tableau quilt (here) for Mary’s dress.  I used the matte side for the sky–it’s at the top in this picture.

First round with the dye bath. The big piece on the bottom is silk. The others are cottons except for the very top piece which is a silk I dyed earlier.

Then

More fabrics dyed for the project. The cotton on the right is what I used for the back.

I used the blue on the top left in the photo immediately above, but had overdyed it to be darker and more solid, for the top and bottom panels where I would write the story.  After all, it is hard to make a picture of something you heard but didn’t really see so I though I’d best add some words!   I took some artistic license and added a full moon and lightened the scene just enough to actually make a picture not a large blotch of dark! First, however, I needed to figure out how I was going to write on the cloth.

I knew I wanted to write on the top and bottom panels of blue cotton that I had dyed, but wasn’t sure what method to use.

On the right, you can see assorted lower case “a’s” written with DeColourant (some colored) and assorted tools to apply.  I thinned the thick liquid, but then it ran.  Not the look I wanted. It’s a great product, but not the right one for this purpose.  The top “Disguised” is done in an archivally safe Sakura Jelly Roll pen, but it looks much brighter in the real than in the photo.  It was OK, but the Liquitex Ink! (acrylic ink) in white with the “crow quill” dip pen was perfect.  The variations in pressure as I wrote gave an almost italic look, so that was my choice.

Next I printed out the text at full size to make sure it would fit and to use as a guide.  I was afraid that I would get the word order wrong or space out and misspell something, so I folded the printouts and set them just above the line I was writing, covering up the  previous line so I didn’t confuse myself!  You’ll see my chalk-lines in the photo; I used SewLine by Moda with ceramic chalk lead which erased like a dream when I was done.

Above you can see how I folded the printed paper so I could follow along, line by line.

Next step was to over-paint some batiks for the mountains.  I had a few that worked as is, but most needed to have the batik design muted.

Batik fabric for the mountains. The cloth was over-painted with dark (not sure if I used black, blue or a combination).  In the lower part of the photo you can see how I have already cut some of the mountains. I wanted the foothills and coast to be even darker than higher up, where the moonlight hit the tops of the Olympics.

Next I auditioned various fabrics, two blacks for the whales, a gray (which needed darkening) for the thin strips separating the top and bottom panels from the center.  I free-motion stitched on the black sateen I selected for the whales with just a stabilizer underneath, then cut a slit in the silk (BIG gulp and holding of breath), then tucked the whale into the opening and hand-appliqued them down.

Test-driving fabrics for this and that.

And finally, the quilting. It went fairly quickly, as it was all blues from palest (which appears white but is actually a pale silvery blue) to nearly black on most of the quilt, with just some gray and deep charcoal for the mountains.

Detail shot showing quilting, moon, and white ink dots for the moon glow.

The exhibit will debut at the International Quilt Festival in Long Beach this coming July.  I’m thrilled to be a part of the Dinner@8 exhibit once again, and would like to thank our various sponsors over the years, especially Moore’s Sewing Centers, Havel’s Scissors and Mistyfuse (which I use a lot)!

On the set at Interweave in Loveland, Colorado, to film a Quilting Arts Workshop! (Who me?!!!!)

Can you believe it?  I’ve been to Loveland, Colorado, taped a Quilting Arts DVD Workshop, come home (exhausted but elated) and I can still barely believe it.  Yes, I have been “on the set” filming this week.   Due out in September as both a download and as an actual DVD (which is wonderful for us who live in the boonies with glacial internet), the working title is “Fused Collage and Thread-Coloring,”  a Quilting Arts Workshop from Interweave Press!

The project I used for the workshop is my Tomatoes, Basil and Garlic quilt (No. 1) [there will be 3 versions before I'm done], but the workshop is to teach you how to use your own photo to make an art quilt:

Tomatoes, Basil and Garlic, No. 1, the start of what I will call my Quilting the Good Life series!

My trip to the airport was an omen–a good one–for how the trip was about to go.  I mean, look at the beginnings of sunrise as I crossed the driveway to the garage!

4:25 a.m., Tuesday: leaving for the airport in Owl’s Head (near Rockland, maine) just before dawn

It got even more dramatic just over the ridge heading to the coast, at the intersection of Route 105 (the Camden Road) and High Street in Hope:

Can you believe that sky? Makes me want to get to the dye pots!

The route in was equally stunning. Here, mist rising off the Megunticook River in Camden.

And ten minutes down the coast in Rockland:

And the sunrise over Rockland Harbor, en route to our little airport at Owl’s Head.

I flew Cape Air (maximum of 9 passengers) to Boston, then JetBlue (for the first but not the last time!) to Denver, where I caught the shuttle to Loveland directly to the Interweave studio where I met Helen Gregory and the filming crew.  There we set up my materials, hung the quilts, and went over my plans for filming the next day.  Congrats to Helen on her promotion to Vice President for Content, Interweave and Martha Pullen,  and upcoming move to Colorado!

My DVD will have five segments, so five trays to lay out my supplies which I prepped at home.

And boy did I prep.  I had about a month (shorter than usual I think) between my contract and filming date, so I pretty much did nothing but make step-outs, more step-outs, refine, video (to get used to talking to a camera and to time myself), cut/edit, cut/edit/shorten more, etc.  For a month.  Non-stop.

Make-up, first thing Wednesday!

Interweave has a make-up artist come do you up for camera, as there are special products that make you look right on camera under all those bright lights.  I shoulda shot a picture of me sitting at the table looking at the room…it was FULL of big tripods, cameras, and cables and cords EVERYWHERE.  Miraculously, I did not trip and break anything or anyone!

Reviewing my notes before getting changed for taping.

THANK YOU JANOME-America and Patty WInkelman of Quilter’s Stash in WIndsor, Colorado, for arranging a Janome 8900–the machine I sew on at home–to use along with a Janome sewing table. I’d never used the table and we were all impressed at how sturdy and stable and heavy it is. Of course the 8900 sewed flawlessly!

Then it was time to get changed and start taping.  Then we mostly forgot to take still pictures!  But here are some….

Me on the left, Helen Greghory in the green top, and I think that is Laura (webinars guru) on the right, hidden mostly by one of the cameras. We were getting ready for the concluding segment I can tell by what is on the table.

At the end, I asked to have apicture of four of us: L to R, Laura E. (webinars and more), Helen Gregory (new VP for Content), me, and Lauren our camerawoman extraordinaire. Camera dude Nick was taking the photo, and camera dude Garrett had already run off to another “gotta be there” job. Those lights were bright, but sure make things visible and looking good.

I never saw this view, but either Helen or Lauren kindly took this photo for me, which shows the jib camera shot of the table with my project and quilts on it:

The jib/overhead camera view. If you look in the center just above the right corner of the screen view, you can see the overhead camera.  Also notice in the backgorund it looks like the quilts are on an angle.  They are–that is to offset the perspective angle that happens with the big camera lenses.  Fascinating!

Then it was time to go home.  Early.

Before I arrived, Colorado hit 80 degrees (F). Wednesday, it SNOWED. When I left the hotel at 3:58 a.m. for the shuttle to the Denver Airport, it looked like this! Then by today it was supposed to be back in the 60s–that’s more insane than our weather!

I’ll spare you the tedium of a crowded plane from Denver to Philadelphia, a smaller more crowded plane from Philly to Boston, the utter hopelessness of Logan Airport (UGH UGH UGH), but flying home on Cape Air is always fun.  As we approach the mid-coast, first I’ll spot the Camden Hills:

There are two landmarks visible from the sky from a distance. I was in the seat behind the co-pilot’s seat (which is usually filled with a passenger). The first are the Camden Hills: Battie, Megunticcok, Maidencliff.

Then

The second landmark is the big white tower at Dragon Cement, visible dead ahead in the middle of this photo. I realized on this trip how massively huge the quarry is for this company.

As you near Dragon Cement, we turn right and head for Owl’s Head (Knox County, RKD) airport.  The lights of home!

LOVE being able to snap out all windows of these small planes.  Landing strip is visible just to the right of the bar up the center of the windshield.

Travel was the usual crowded insanity and waiting, but I was home 16 hours later to son, hubby, cats and dog.  Two of the seven are here:

Doggie love is GOOD!

In the past month, I’ve not only prepped this, but THREE articles (more on them when they are close to being published), have a quilt to make in a week, another article to write, then teaching in North Carolina in June and southern California in July, then a quilt to make by August 5.  Then I can collapse a few weeks before school begins (how will Eli be a SOPHOMORE already?) and fall teaching in Massachusetts and at International Quilt Festival in Houston.   So I HOPE to blog more often, but at this rate can’t promise.  I have so much to catch you all up on, pictures from teaching in Florida, Vermont, and Mass….but must be mom, wife, and author first. Stay tuned!