Well, I promised I would blog about the Artist’s Reception and take pictures.  So I remembered to take a picture of the food table (so boring it isn’t here), and as I was packing up I realized I hadn’t taken a single photo as I was busy talking with people, being the gracious hostess and…..I forgot.  But I CAN share the one photo we did get (thank you Terri Tooley!) plus the others I took not-during-the-reception.  And just for Patricia W, at long last a detail photo of the peony (OK, I was gonna share it anyway, but Patricia has asked and I’m happy to share now)!   Thank you so much to everyone who came on Thursday, has been, has visited virtually here and on Facebook, and will get here later this month.  For all the Library photos, if you click on them you can see them larger.

Click on the image to view larger! I’m standing in the doorway to the Picker Room and got it all!

When I finally realized I had forgotten to take pictures, friend and fellow wrestling mom Terri Tooley was still there.  She stepped in to take a photo…Paul said, “this isn’t going to be shared is it?” to which I replied, of course it is!  So here is a RARE photo of Paul, and he’s even smiling!

Husband and wife, flanking their sons (in cloth). Both quilts were of the boys at age 16. Joshua is on the left, Eli on the right.

This is the Rogue’s Gallery, also known as the Family wall (and seen above). From left to right you’ve got Pigwidgeon (of the dog walkies photos on Facebook), my hands, Joshua, Eli, me, a family “scrapbook” quilt called the Two of Us which was in the book and exhibit Inspired by the Beatles, the blue orcas quilt, an older painted silk sunset, and the “yoga” quilt. Unofficially, I am also calling this the Dinner@8 wall, since the five large pieces were all made for juried invitational exhibits put on by Leslie Tucker Jenison and Jamie Fingal.  You can learn more about those exhibits and this year’s here.  My best work over the past six to seven years has consistently been for this exhibit, and I’m honored to be a part of it again this year.

The far wall has two small pieces and my newest, the Peony. The center is challenging to hang, since there is a TV behind the quilt that is used a couple times a month, but it is THE most eye-catching spot.

Detail, Peony. I think I need to take more and better detail shots!  I believe I used 12 pinks, a white, and a couple variegated greens in this quilt.

The left wall as you enter is the second most visible spot after over-the-piano/in-front-of-the-tv. I knew I wanted my labyrinth, Descended From the Stars, to anchor that wall. This side of the room is really about my life, and my life in Maine and nature.

Between the entrance and the mini kitchen area, is a cabinet with a bit of wall.

In the case, I put a few of the many books and magazines in which I have been published inside the case, along with my book ThreadWork Unraveled, my DVD workshop, patterns, some class samples and smaller pieces.

So there we are!

Thanks to all who could come in person, and to all who are visiting virtually.   I’m so delighted, relieved it looks good, and pleased.  Thank you to the Camden Public Library and Ken Gross, who is in charge of the exhibits among many other duties, for this opportunity. Thanks go to Jamie Fingal and Leslie Tucker Jenison of Dinner@8 Artists for the opportunity to create works for their fabulous juried exhibits.

And last but decidedly not least and so very important, MANY thanks to the companies whose products I use and who have supported me over the years including  MistyFuse, Janome America and Superior Threads.  I couldn’t do what I do without quality materials and machines!   I appreciate your support and encouragement more than you can know.

You’re invited to the Artist’s Reception for my first solo exhibit, C3:  Color, Cloth, Collage, at the Camden Public Library’s beautiful Picker Room, on Thursday, September 8th, 2016, from 4-6 pm.  There will be light refreshments and I’ll be happy to answer questions about my work.  I hope to see some of you there, and yes, for those of you at the other end of the ether I will post pictures (probably on Friday).

I’d love for anyone in the area to join me this Thursday, September 8, from 4-6 pm

The artwork of Sarah Ann Smith.  Thrilled with how the exhibit looks as you walk in!

And some verbiage about the exhibit and my work. Click to view slightly larger.

The sun in the center of Descended From the Stars

When I left on in my last post about this quilt, I had shared the dyeing process and the stones and lettering.   Next, I fused trees in the four seasons into the corners.  I distorted the shape so the tree canopy served as a frame.  I had thought initially I might need an inner border, perhaps couched yarn or stitching of some sort, but the shape of the tree worked so well I didn’t need anything extra.   As I did with the stones, I cut out leaves, LOTS of leaves, separating the colors into the ice cube tray so I could place them carefully.

Detail, upper left corner, Spring Tree of Life.  Each of the leaves is free-motion stitched with several rounds of thread on each leaf.  The nice part about doing this at the top stage is that I could use the scissors on my Janome 15000.  I didn’t have to bury thread tails!

Detail, top right, Summer Tree of Life.

Detail of the lower right corner, showing the autumn tree of life.

Detail of the lower left corner, with the winter tree kissed by snow.

I did the stitching around the stones and on the trees, including the leaves, at the top stage with stabilizer underneath.  (See my post here to learn more about my current article for Machine Quilting Unlimited on the Fourth Layer–stabilizer– for densely thread painted quilts.)  I removed the stabilizer everywhere except for under the center because I knew I would want to quilt that area more densely than the rest of the quilt.

Here I have begun quilting.  You can see the custom-dyed cotton duck on the back.  The use of heavier cloth helps keep the quilt flat and stable; it also helps minimize shrinkage.  The final piece had to be 40 x 40 inches, and I wanted to have a balanced amount of blue on both sides of the lettering, so I needed to control the shrinkage that happens with dense quilting.

Next,

Superior Threads (Thank you Bob and Heather Purcell!) has come out with some tone-on-tone variegated threads.   I have been pestering Bob for YEARS to make threads like these as I prefer blendy to contrasty.  I ordered up all of the new earth-tone blendy variegateds in the Fantastico line and used them.  I began with a light green blend in the first row around the sun, switched to another in the next to rings, and then a third in the fourth ring that you see here.  If you look at the left, you can see how I snuck some of the current thread color into the next ring to get even more color blending.

Then, I had to decide what threads to use in the dark areas.  My sewing tables (two back to back) are each 24 inches, so I have a nice, HUGE flat surface to support the quilt as I work.

Choosing thread:  dark, pine-y green and deep blue.

With all the manipulation, I realized that some of the ink had rubbed off, despite being REALLY careful to heat set it according to directions.  I wrote immediately to friends Judy Coates Perez and Susan Brubaker Knapp to seek guidance.  Judy had only used the regular colors, not the metallics.  And Susan had an article in the just-out issue of Quilting Arts about lettering, including these inks!  She too discovered that the metallics seem to “shed” a bit.

After quiting, some of the bling had rubbed off my quilt, so I had to do it AGAIN!  You can see where I have inked over the letters and what is left to re-do.

After re-inking and heat setting, I tested on my scrap cloth several products to seal the ink including GAC 900 (a textile medium that one adds to paint), a UV Coating, matte gel medium, and Krylon Spray Fixative which says it is acid-free, archival and safe on fabric.  Only the Krylon didn’t leave tell-tale signs that it had been used.  So I carefully masked off the rest of the quilt, leaving only the lettering area exposed and sprayed the Krylon on it (stinky!) in hopes that will help prevent the mica flakes in the gold ink from coming off.

I was nearly done, except that I didn’t really care for the multiple layers of thread I had used stitching the sun.  Picking it out did NOT appeal to me.  So I trekked down to Clementine fabrics in Rockland and bought some perle cotton in the right color.

I wasn’t happy with the way the stitching looked, so I couched perle cotton on top of the outline of the sun. MUCH better! You can see the difference in this half-way-through shot.

At last, it was nearly DONE!  Time for facings, sleeve and label.

The back side of the quilt. By dyeing the back to correspond with the front, the quilting design shows up on the back as it does on the front.

And I couldn’t resist the temptation to place a moon behind the sun as my label.  One more time with the dip pen!

The End–the label is on, the sleeve is done, the facings are stitched!

(c)Sarah Ann Smith 2015; quote (c) Mirza Khan, used with permission

This quilt will be for sale–another reason I opted to not include a lot of personal details in the quilt.   As I said before, I am happy!

Thanks to Bill Reker, the Traveling Exhibit Coordinator, for forwarding these images of the SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Associates) exhibit Food for Thought on display in Australia, and thanks to the person who sent him the pictures.  The exhibit was on display in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.  The AQC, Australian Quilt Convention (Conference?) is held in a building of breathtaking beauty.  I’ve decided that whenever I finally in this life ever get to Australia, I have to go during AQC just so I can see this building!

My “tomatoes” quilt, Insalata, on display at the AQC. LOVE that it is facing the center in a prime spot, and love the black walls on which the works are displayed.

Here’s another shot of the overall exhibit:

Don’t you just want to BE in this space? Insalata and other works in the Food for Thought exhibit are visible at the far end.

And one more…some day I really must get to Australia and New Zealand!

The best shots, for me, of my quilts when traveling are “neighborhood” shots–not just *my* quilt, since I already know what it looks like, but ones that show the context. Even better, when someone likes my work enough to get up and look at it closely–like the lady taking a detail photo! Woot!

That great Whooshing sound is, once again, time evaporating…which is most appropriate because the WHEE is about an exhibit called “A Matter of Time.”  Curated by Brenda Gael Smith of Copacabana, Australia, it is going to be as wonderful as her previous exhibit (that I was also most fortunate to be in) called Living Colour Textiles.

A detail of my quilt, Milkweed No. 2. To see the blog for the exhibit, visit http://www.amatteroftimetextiles.com

Brenda has given a sneak peek in her blogpost, here.  I’ve been fortunate to see a draft of the catalog for this exhibit, and I am fascinated and inspired by the many interpretations on the theme.  I wish I could post myself off to Australia to see it in person.  The exhibit will debut at the Stitches & Craft Show in Sydney: 3-6 March 2016.  Sigh……

In the meantime, I have been insanely busy with good and sad.  For the past 18 months or so I’ve been working on a granny quilt for Joshua’s sweetie’s mom.  Ashley’s gramma died rather young (all things considered), so Ashley’s mom asked if I would make a lap quilt of her clothes.  Of course I said yes!  Then I discovered it was all turtlenecks, sweatshirts and fleece.  Oh.  My.  I’ll blog about that in a couple days.

This past week, my dear tiger tabby cat, Tyger Dumpster Smith, finally succumbed to what had been ailing him for the past year or two.

Tyger, a shadow of his former sleek and handsome self, in his last minutes on earth

You might wonder about his name.  When I was very little, about 3-4, I stayed for several months with my gramma and mom.  Down the street lived an orange tabby named Tiger, which I pronounced Tigah.  I always wanted a tiger cat.  In October 2000, I got my chance.  We were living on San Juan Island.  At the time we wanted to be adopted by another cat, the on-island shelter couldn’t adopt out cats due to a kitty-flu amongst their animals, so I went to the Skagit Valley animal shelter on the mainland.   Someone had rescued him two days previously; he was found tied up inside a plastic bag, under a tarp, in a dumpster (there is a special place in hell for the person who put him there).  Well, obviously he selected me.   The spelling of Tyger comes from the William Blake poem

And his middle name reminds us how lucky we all were that someone heard his tiny kitten squeaks and rescued him. He purred until his very last, calm breath.  Sniff.  Now I need another tissue.

Last scritchesSo it was a sad week last week.  

Tyger’s collar

And in the meantime, I’ve been doing our taxes early so we could get all of Eli’s financial aid applications in (which followed getting in all of his college applications).  The system is better than when I applied–you do it online and most schools used a standardized form so you don’t have to write 70,000 different things, but it is still a beast and a burden to do.

Those lovely chores were completed this morning!  UGH!

So….drum roll….I got to mess with my weekly photo challenge and work on some designs for thermofax screens for a couple new art quilts.  At long LAST!   So I’ll share more as I can.  For now, please do visit A Matter of Time Textiles blog and enjoy!