BOOK REVIEWS:

Karey Bresenhan’s book Creative Quilting: the Journal Quilt Project, (available here) came out about this time last year, and I intended to blog about it then, but life got away from me (what a surprise). Even if I didn’t have five (!!!) journals–small art quilts– in this book, I would recommend this 272-page tome heartily. I think this book will become a benchmark publication of where art quilting is in the earliest years of the 21st century. It is truly a remarkable, inspiring, and educational book that belongs on the shelf of every person who loves art quilts, whether they make art quilts or not.

So what is a journal quilt? The idea was to explore something each month–instead of writing in a paper journal, to document the month in cloth and thread and fiber and whatever, while also keeping a brief written narrative. The finished pieces were to be the size of a U.S. piece of copy paper: 8 1/2 x 11 inches, vertical orientation. I joined the QuiltArt list in late 2002 just as the first year’s journals were being sent in to hang in Houston. I signed up in early 2003 as soon as possible to participate the coming year, in part because I figured (happily I was wrong) it would be the only way I would ever have a quilt in Houston. For my January quilt, I wanted to involve my son, then in 3rd grade, since he was sometimes jealous of my quilting time. I asked and received the OK from both Joshua and Karey to use a piece of his second grade artwork as my very first journal:

I cannot believe, now, how many firsts were in that quilt: first time using metallic thread, first time painting on fabric, first time fusing sheers and beading on a quilt! Now, those techniques are standard fodder for me. It is simply not possible to over-state how much doing the journal quilts has contributed to my development as an art quilter. This is the quilt and the project that launched a career! Best of all, it not only made it into the book, but is also included at thumbnail size in the introduction. You should have seen 13-year old Joshua’s eyes grow wide and fill with pride when I got the book and promptly opened it to show him HIS artwork (as interpreted by me)! That look is a gift from him to me that I will treasure forever.

The book is divided into seven chapters:

1. Series
2. Stories
3. Flowers, Plants and Trees
4. Animals and Insects
5. L andscapes and Special Places
6. Faces and Figures
7. Abstract

Some of the most amazing works are those where the artist worked in a series in a given year’s journals. Maria Elkins and Rachelly Roggel’s are the ones that first spring to mind. I don’t think ANYone, in the six year run of this project has better utilized the potential for stretching and development through these quiltlets than Maria. By clicking on her name you can get to her gallery page, and from there view each year of her journals…prepared to be inspired and exhilarated!

The stories are equally amazing, from inspiring to heartbreaking. Some are humorous, like the woman undergoing chemo who left her hair on the sofa, literally (and used a tuft of fake fur on her pictorial version). Others are heartbreaking, documenting loss of loved ones and tragedies both personal and national.

The book is not a project book, but each entry shares the materials and techniques used by the artists. If it can be done to, with or on fabric, I think it was done in one of the journals! If you want to learn how to do a technique, you can go search out classes, technique books or magazines, such as Quilting Arts, that will teach you the how-tos. Creative Quilting is a book to savor and dip into at random, enjoying the journey.

I was honored when Karey opened the section on Plants, Flowers and Trees with three of my journal quilts, including a full page (nearly life-sized) reproduction, above, of this quilt which features one of my photos printed onto cloth and quilted intensively. Also included are my January and February 2006 journals:

2007 is the final year of the Journal Quilt Project. This year, instead of making a different journal each month, Karey asked us to make a single piece 17″ wide by 22″ long (or four pieces of paper together) that used at least three techniques that were featured in journals included in the book. When the International Quilt Festival in Houston opens to the public on November 1, I will be able to share my journal for this year.

Even better, nearly ALL of the 400+ journal quilts in the book will be on display in Houston, in the order in which they appear in the book. I wish I could be there to see them, but will be content that I have had the unbelievable opportunity to learn and grow through this remarkable project.

As I mentioned earlier, we began our five-day workshop with Carol Soderlund working with thickened dyes and resists. As with textile paints, you can apply color to cloth with stamps, paintbrushes, rubbings (put stuff underneath and rub over it to get a relief, like a gravestone or temple rubbing), paint rollers (sometimes textured by wrapping with rubber bands or scored with a knife), mono-printing and more. Carol invited us to bring previously dyed cloth to over dye and print, so I selected a couple of fabrics known to dyers as “dogs.” Bleah. My first dog was a pale peach that was nearly solid and totally boring. I had yards of it. Ick. I tore the cloth into several pieces and started playing.

This first photo shows three of my pieces in progress. On the left is a cloth with Elmer’s blue washable school glue used as a resist (more on the blues and greens in a following blogpost). The bleah peach is in the center, with the first monoprint on it, and a fairly yucky monoprint on the right on white PFD (Prepared For Dyeing) fabric. PFD is cloth that does not have optical brighteners or other chemical treatments on it, so that it is ready to accept dye without “scrubbing” or washing.

The monoprinting was the one technique I hadn’t tried with paints, and I especially liked the visual texture created when you take a print paste mix, a gelatinous mix to which you add dye concentrate or dye powders and a dye activator (the latter added at the last possible moment), smear it on heavy vinyl (think the stuff old biddies used to use to cover and protect the sofa), wait for the goo to separate into blobs, then place a cloth on top. Carefully pat the fabric onto the gel, then lift the cloth off and “batch” it. Batching is when you allow the damp fiber-reactive dye react and form a chemical bond with the cotton cloth, usually for a period of 4-24 hours.

This photo shows four diferent pieces of cloth, all of which began as the same ugly peach (visible at the bottom of the piece on the left):

The one on the far left is my favorite… I love the way the blue print paste mix made a network of fine bubbles. Since I didn’t care about what happened to these fabrics, I think I did about three separate monoprints on this one chunk of fabric. Here’s a close-up:

The darkest piece in the 4-piece photo (the picture above the photo immediately preceeding this sentence) was first rollered with a paint roller wrapped with rubber bands, then dipped in thickened dye. Next I did what Carol calls “black work”, where thickened black dye is put into a squeeze bottle with a fine tip. Since I was tired that day, I opted for the ever-easy and always-usable “tree bark”. Finally, I overdyed the whole thing to make it deep brown. Here is a picture of Carol showing a cheery and bright piece on which she did some black work:

And as always, the “dye rag” often ends up being the best piece of cloth. I made a warms and a cools rag, and this ochre-leaf color will get used!

I’m totally NOT into surface design, but I did have fun, and the next post will show some of the better pieces I made. They are blues and greens for a challenge piece that (eek, gasp, gulp) needs to be DONE by December 1! Fortunately, I have the idea done, the first sketch begun, and the fabric assembled, dyed, etc, so I can do it. So Larkin, if you are reading this, don’t panic. It WILL be ready!

Stay tuned for more pictures from this workshop, but in the next couple of days I have a few other things to share first……

This past weekend I was fortunate to be able to present my trunk show / lecture “With a Dash of Color” to the Amoskeag Quilters Guild, based in/near Manchester, New Hampshire, and teach a machine quilting class on Saturday. Alas, I have very few pictures! The talk is one I have done many times before, but I always have fun and hope to turn on a few lightbulbs for folks. Basically, we all respond to color, but not all of us (me included!) have an intuitive grasp of color. There are a number of ways to put together a color scheme for a quilt, and that’s what I talk about using my quilts as examples. (read to the end for info on that bit above!)

The next day I taught a class on machine quilting and decorative threads, but snafu seemed to be the order of the day (did you all know the origin of the word snafu? I am told it dates to World War 2, or perhaps earlier, and stands for—uh, well, I’m going to clean up the language, but substitute the expletive verb that seems appropriate: Situation Normal All Fouled Up). When I arrived at the venue, the power was out to the entire building! And for a machine class. Fortunately for me and the students, the morning is mostly lecture and there was a good window, so we moved tables and sat by the only natural light and went through the basics. By the time I was nearly done, the power returned!

For the class I tried something new. I had an assortment of Superior Threads re-wound onto bobbins (a service Superior provides for teachers). As a result, I could offer a kit with ten “micro-spools” that included three bobbins of Bottom Line (60wt. poly), and one each of metallic, Glitter (a holographic thread), Brytes (30-wt cotton), King Tut (variegated 35 or 40 wt cotton, forget how heavy), MasterPiece (50wt cotton), Rainbows (variegated 40 wt poly) and a solid 40-wt poly. The kit runs $15, and is seems students were OK with that…the same as buying two spools of “fancy” thread. I offered a choice of either silver or gold–photo above (for the metallics baggie) and warm (pink/red), cool (blues) or earthtone (greens and browns)–photo below, so students could pick one color and one metallic. To my surprise, earth was the most popular! Don’t these threads look like a color feast?

Let me know what you would like in a thread sampler? I’d love to refine this kit!

It must have been a nerve-wracking day for program chair Cary Flanagan (who was in the class…visit her website at Something Sew Fine) and guild president Sue Ann Walker, who were trying on a Saturday morning to find an alternate location…to use immediately! Thanks to both for their efforts!

Above are the two sections of the class….it was held in the cafeteria of an office building. The good news is that the students had PLENTY of table space, but it meant for a bit of “projecting my voice” (i.e. being even louder than I usually am) and getting some exercise getting around to all 18 students. Still, I’ve heard it went well. As always, if there is anything I can improve, I always want to know because I can’t make it better if I don’t know it needs improving!

I met one of the students, Aline, on Friday evening and she told me about this miniature she is working on, which will FINISH at 7×7 inches. She brought in a quarter of it and let me photograph it…that’s what you see at the top of this post. Yes, that is inches on the ruler, Those itty bitty triangles of pink and green are half square triangles…smaller than a 1/4″ finished size. I took one look at it and said “you are FLIPPIN’ INSANE!” and I stand by it LOL! The tiny straight line is a “piece” 1/32 inch thick. I love looking at them, but I could never, EVER be that accurate! Beautifully done, Aline!

Looking at this old mill building, you’d not realize that a glory of color happens inside! This is the home to dye-provisioner Pro Chemical and Dye….known to quilters and dyers as “ProChem.”

Earlier this month I was fortunate to take a second workshop with Carol Soderlund, Color Mixing for Dyers II. This workshop builds on what we learned in part 1, which I took last year. It was fun as several women returned from last year, so it was great to see familiar faces, meet new folks, AND meet Wil Opio Oguta, from the Netherlands, whom I had “met” online through the Fabled Fibers challenge. If you click on Wil’s name, you’ll go to her blog and can see some of her pieces form the workshop, too.

Here’s our “class picture,” with many of us holding something we had made during the five days.  We had folks not only from across the US, but also from Denmark, the Netherlands and France! Carol is in the plum tie-dye shirt in the center, I’m just to the right of her.

I make MANY different pieces, but will share this one with you today; it is a mix of several yellows (ranging from a cool lemon color to a warm, nearly tangerine, plus two reds, a cool fuchsia and a warmer basic mixing red).

Over the next week or so I’ll add several posts with different things I worked on during the workshop. The first two days were focussed on using thickened dyes (print paste mix), doing many techniques that were familiar to me, having used them with paints of various sorts. It was interesting, however, to do them with dye instead (I MUCH prefer the soft hand of fabric after it is dyed compared to even the most supple of paints).

We dyed a fourth “color family” using three new primaries over the course of the whole workshop, then the last three days we worked on layering and overdyeing for specific effects and our own personal projects. As with paint, some blues are warm (think turquoise), some are cool (think glacier blue), some yellows are cool (lemonade), some are warm (sunshine and buttercups). By using primaries with different properties, you can get dramatically different shades of color: a warm yellow, warm red, and shaded/toned blue produce a completely different palette thank a cool yellow, cool red and warm blue. I’ll share a few photos later on of my color swatchbook just to tempt you, but first I have to cut and paste up my swatches from this session!

As usual, it was another wonderful day! Despite the look of autumn all around us, like the photo above which is just a mile or so down the road from Hannah’s house (on the peninsula south of Brunswick / Harpswell), it was a mild and balmy day fit for t-shirts…a last gasp of warm summer air. We had fun sharing, food (of course!), gifts and projects before flying to the winds as kid-duties called us home in the afternoon.

Hannah’s b-day is late September and mine (something like 15-17 years earlier!) in early October both happened since we last met, so we had a double celebration. Deborah sent goodies from Texas, and we exchanged gifts and grins and thank you’s. It is so wonderful to have creative friends!!!! Here is Hannah enjoying some hand-dyed fabric from my recent workshop (I promise, those posts are coming!)… but I had to tell her to keep unrolling to find the socks in the center–she told me she had been lusting after my bright socks and was having a hard time keeping quiet, so it was perfect!

And here is my loot… from Deborah’s lovely sprigs and twigs (and LOVE the way it is mounted! off to find a frame!), to Kate’s damask table cloth (ready to dye, of course, from a small treasure trove of old linens she lucked into recently) and batik, to the Japanese desk Calendar (I LOVE and am so inpsired by Japanese woodblocks) from Kath to Hannah’s happy, crazy, jump-roping girl made from found beach glass (near her home) and beads she bought in China when adopting Nina. The crazy lime hair is perfect for my state of life these days!

I shared my hand-dyes, and Kathy treated us to an in progress visual FEAST. She is making a bed quilt as a commission for some friends, interpreting their vacation photos from over the years. I SO WANT THIS. Aw heck, I want to be Kathy! I want her creativity and vision and color sense and style. But since I can’t have them, I will be more than content to sit and look and learn and enjoy and be thankful she is my friend. She is constructing the quilt in panels and quilting them, then will join them together. Here is one panel:

And another:

And LOOK at this quilting on the back….she’s as nutso as I am about quilting!

SIGH. I also REALLY like the way Kathy combined low-contrast deep-dark batiks in squares for setting the “photos.” Will keep that in mind for the future…. plus it’s a great excuse to buy more batiks… grin!

For lunch, we had calzones made by Bart the wonderful (aka Hannah’s hubby), one tomato-y and sausage and veggies, the other spinach and riccotta (which I’m going to try to duplicate tonight), followed by a true Maine treat: Whoopie Pie. However, this may be the largest whoopie pie on the planet, found and brought by Kathy:

The “cookie” is a dense chocolate cake, the filling is more like frosting, and it is super rich. Oprah loves these, and her endorsement sent the maker from a mom making whoopie pies at home and then commercially for her friends from local to stratosphere / nationwide. Another Maine mom makes good! So we indulged. Here are the birthday girls with Kathy (Hannah on the left, Kathy plus Whoopie Pie, and me in a shirt I dyed at the workshop).

After our visit to the Botanical Gardens last month, we stopped at On Board Fabrics in Edgecomb and all purchased canvas to make floor cloths or something similar. In a nutshell, you buy heavy canvas, paint it, goop on (Mod-Podge, fusible, glue, whatever) fabric, then polyurethane the daylights out of it. Finally, hem the edges, put non-skid stuff on the back, and have a colorful floor. Well, I figured in my house that’s one more thing to collect or trap cat or dog hair, so mine will be washable placemats (a surprise for the family for Christmas, unless Joshua reads my blog while internet surfing at school when he is supposed to be studying….ahem, sport!). Kate was better prepared than the rest of us and got the most done. Here is a blank green-painted canvas to make a runner, plus that glorious mango color runner on top of it, with some Kaffe Fassett prints on top. Isn’t that enough to just make you smile when you look down at your floor?

Finally, on the way home, I actually got stopped for a train (!!!!) at the edge of the Wiscasset bridge and had the chance to snap this picture of the ready-for winter tree and the still-summery screaming blue sky: