Well….. medicine in the US can do many wonderful things, but taking into consideration the patient as a feeling, sentient single entity, and his family, is not one of them. Yesterday the doc said if all goes well he could have surgery Weds. and go home Thursday. Today he actually LOOKED at the incisions and said they would have to do skin grafts, meaning MORE days in the hospital and not home Thursday. Sigh. I’m sick of the ortho guys not taking to the plastics guys not talking to trauma not talking to rehab … or if they ARE communicating to each other, failing to communicate that to us.

Anyway, I’m tired, and that is part of my grumpiness! I hope to have time to blog about Maine Quilts, this past weekend (I got a 90 minute window of opportunity to visit! YEAH!), and Kate and I hang the Frayed Edges show at the Camden Public Library…. if you put Frayed Edges into the search box, it will bring up posts about our mini-group; the most recent is your invite to come to the show! Gotta run….chores to do before heading back up to Bangor, Cheers, Sarah

Here’s a press release I sent out for our group show this August. Thought I’d insert a little quilty content into the medical reports. Joshua continues to improve, albeit slowly. He had another unit of blood today to combat the anemia, but he is getting stronger every day. Today he ate more than he has, tho not enough. One day at a time. And thanks again for ALL the many good wishes.

The Frayed Edges will have a show of textile and mixed media art at the Jean Picker Room of the Camden Public Library from August 2 through 29, located at Main Street and Atlantic Avenue in downtown Camden, Maine. Meet the artists at a reception on Saturday, August 11th, from 1 to 4 pm, in the Picker Room. For library hours and directions, visit the library website here .

The show will feature a selection of works on the theme of “Home,” a collaborative piece entitled “Five Artists-Five Views”, and selected other works. For the collaborative piece, each artist contributed a photo, then all five artists made a small piece based on that photograph. The resulting twenty-five small works are displayed in a unified grid. This piece illustrates for the viewer how each artist’s style reveals itself through five different interpretations, and how differently each person can “see” a single photo. Here’s the poster Deborah did up for us:

The Frayed Edges are a group of five women who live (or lived) in Maine and met through Art Quilts Maine, a part of the statewide Pine Tree Quilt Guild (www.mainequilts.org): Hannah Beattie of Brunswick, Deborah Boschert of Dallas, Texas (formerly of Topsham), Kate Cutko of Bowdoinham, Kathy Daniels of China Village, and Sarah Ann Smith of Camden. They are professional artists who sell their work from their websites, have won awards and been juried into national level shows, have been published as a group in the top art quilting magazine, Quilting Arts, and have projects in the forthcoming Quilting with Beads by Lark Books.

Some of the work in this show is available for purchase; please contact the artists directly. For questions, please contact Sarah at sarah@sarahannsmith.com .

I mentioned in an earlier post about our mini-group, the Frayed Edges, that we are having a group show in the Picker Room at the Camden Public Library (there is month-long show each month ranging from vintage lithographs and etchings to contemporary oils to art photography and more). We wanted to do a single group project, but one that our hectic lives would be able to absorb. We each contributed a photo, and each of us made a small project based on the five photos. I offered a photo I took last summer at the Ringling Museum, in Sarasota:

This photo and one Kathy took, of a brilliant orange beach umbrella, sand, sea and sky, are the two 5″ wide by 7″ tall pieces. The other three photos are also 7 inches tall, but 10 inches wide. That way when we hang them, each row will be of five 10″-tall pieces. So, here are mine, starting with mine:

And here is the one I did from the photo Deborah contributed (photo was taken by her husband Jeff in Central America):

Then I tried an abstract (actually, I did this one first, but love the way it turned out!). I fused up Kathy’s umbrella, then sliced it up into pieces and put it back together:

Hannah’s Flower was a challenge, so I think I’ll save that one for my next post, and show the first attempt, how I saved the first effort, and my second much more successful effort at the 7×10 size. That leaves Kate’s St. Michael’s church in Kiev. Kate’s daughter is adopted from the Ukraine, and she took these photos on the adoption trip. The domes and colors are spectacular in the original photo. All of us honed in on the domes immediately, but in very different ways. I decided to try my hand at foiling with beads:

I found the link to a fascinating post on Joanie San Chirico’s blog, which sent me to Edward Winkleman’s blog. Who you might ask? Honestly, I’m not sure, but it is a fascinating breakdown on the expenses faced by an art gallery. As he and Joanie rightly noted, many people (emerging artists included) are surprised that a gallery’s cut is 50 percent of the sales price, and only 50 percent (60 if you’re lucky, like me! living in not-really-rural Camden) to the artist. Why? well, Winkelman’s explanation is worth reading: click here to open it up in a new window.

When I worked for an interior designer on San Juan Island, Wash. (that was a whole ‘nother set of nightmares, but I learned a TON about high-end home dec sewing, interior design, and business), the designer used to quote the adage that “the cost of doing business is one-third.” That apparently applies across a lot of industries. As well, wholesale in many industries, including quilting, is fifty percent of suggested retail.

So, despite our math-phobias, let’s do the math. If you take a yard of fabric at $10 per yard, you can guesstimate that the wholesale cost was $5 per yard plus shipping/freight/delivery charges. The cost of doing business is 1/3, or $3.33 (one third of $10), which covers rent, utilities, insurance, wages, cash register receipt paper, fees charged by credit card companies, and so on. Then, if like Maine-ly Sewing, the shop is nice and gives you a ten percent discount because you are a member of a guild, that is another dollar.

If you’ve been doing the arithmetic, that is 5 + 3.33 + 1 = 9.33. That leaves all of 67 cents of “profit” for the shopowner. No wonder quilt shop owners and other shop owners work so hard and have such a long road to staying in business.

For me, I’m thrilled to have my sales at Ducktrap Bay Trading Co., a gallery here in Camden, Maine. I may not make a lot (close to minimum wage) when a journal quilt sells, but it SELLS. Which it would not do otherwise (like sitting in storage on my spare bed). The owner and staff work hard (without being pushy or intrusive) to sell all the works (last time I was in a new staff member wanted to ask me about my work and inspiration so he would have more to tell customers!), and pay their bills, so they deserve their cut, too.

And I won’t grump about the price of things in stores as much……especially not quilt stores!

As usual we had a wonderful meeting, tho it was a bit hectic with summer, kids underfoot and Kate having to arrange last minute kid-care (and for all of us, kids come first!). We sat out on the back porch, where I for the most part forgot to take pictures. Ok, just checked the files. I forgot to take a lot of pictures!

For our group show at the Camden Public Library (opens Aug. 2nd thru the 30th, Artists’ Reception on Saturday the 11th from 1-4 pm), we wanted to do a group project. We came up with the idea of a grid. Each of the five of us would contribute one photo (we all tossed several into the pile, then collectively picked one from each person). Then each of us would make one small piece based on that photo. In the end we will have a grid where each column is a different person’s “take” on that photo, and each row will be one person’s version of the five photos.

Deborah and I both managed to finish…hoooray! AND Deborah gets bonus points for not only finishing, but getting them done in time to mail to me for this month’s meeting! She is also the only one to decide to use some consistent themes, to make the five pieces a series. She did so by printing parts of the photos onto sheer fabric, then using a green print fabric underneath on at least a couple of them, and her “signature” writing on the quilts also. The photo above is Deborah’s work…3 of the 5 pieces.

The pieces are all 7 inches tall, the “horizontals” are 10 inches across, the small ones 5 inches across. We laid them out on my table (OK…plywood on planter pots with a Bolivian cloth on top…sorry about the visual clashing of the stripes and the quilted pieces). Deborah’s are the top row, mine are next, then Kates, and Hannah’s, and Kathy forgot hers at home! Kath and I will get everything organized for hanging in about two weeks. I’ll take better pics of mine and share them in a few days, and I promise they will have a more pleasing background!