Hi all… at 2 pm east coast time today, the SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Associates) annual fundraising auction began here and here.  If you’d like to help support SAQA by bidding, or just would like to see and enjoy the stunning small (most are 12×12 inches)  art quilts, surf over to the SAQA site.  The price begins at $750, then is reduced this week in increments…does one risk waiting too long for a lower price and losing a gem?  If I were independently wealthy….

SAQA is a non-profit organization whose mission is to promote the art quilt through education, exhibitions, professional development and documentation.  Their quarterly journal has become one of my favorite “magazines” because it not only profiles great art quilters, but also addresses issues of interest to us from creative blocks to marketing.   Anyway, Martha Sielman, the SAQA president (and also the curator behind the two wonderful Masters Art Quilt books from Lark–click on the links for more info for Volume 1 and Volume 2) invited us to be virtual curators ourselves and pick some of our favorites as an online show.

La Mere de la Tranquilite by Genevieve Attinger, above, is one of my favorites.  The Title translates literally to the Mother of Tranquility, but is also a play on the French for the Sea of Tranquility on the moon.  Stunning!

Mary Pal’s study of Jane Goodall is stunning in its simplicity and its complexity.

Composition XIII, by Deidre Adams, is another favorite.  Though I generally prefer representational art, I am one who is thrilled by the quilting line, and this piece thrills.  One of these days I hope I’ll muster the courage to quilt something, then paint it!

Kate Themel’s GottaHavaCuppa is another joyous celebration of line and stitch…and steam!

In next week’s auction (there are three sessions), Terri Stegmiller’s quilt charms me:

A Little Bird Told Me, by Terri Stegmiller

Which quilts are your favorites?  I’ll try to post again in the next two weeks with more of my favorites… so many quilts, no lottery win (yet)!

SAQA is the Studio Art Quilt Associates, a non-profit group to promote art quilting with members around the world.    There are regional groups, including one for New England.  Those of us in sparsely populated Maine –the state population is about 1.3 million, the same as San Antonio, Texas or San Diego, California!–live far enough from the majority of the regional group members in Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire and Vermont, that we don’t often get to the meetings.  So Sarah Carpenter, Beth Berman and Wen Redmond had an idea an made it happen:  SAQA-Maine retreat weekend in Searsport, Maine the weekend of Sept. 18th!

Beth VERY generously hosted much of the meeting in her home and new studio.  Other meetings were at the hotel just a mile or two up the road and a nearby church (the evening show and tell…alas it was part of the event I couldn’t attend). I forgot to take pictures of the first part which was meeting, at Beth’s house, or when the workshops began.  Various regional members offered to do demos or mini-workshops, and oh was it fun!  Valerie Poitier’s talk on perspective (my right brain was confuddled but I did get it eventually!), as was Wen Redmond’s demo on making thermofax screens and printing with them.  At least  I finally remembered to take the camera out during my mono-printing session with Margaret Sheehan.  I sure hope she comes back and does a two-day workshop near enough for me to take…talk about utter playtime! You can visit Margaret’s blog here and see some of the sheers featured below in the photo at the top…wow!

Here are the pics from that session:

Valerie Poitier looks stunning in Margaret Sheehan's sheer artcloth (also seen in the first photo of this blogpost)

Margaret S's red sheer mono-printed cloth---I LOVE that bird's nest design

And holding the red sheer up with the light from the open doorway behind...

I think this falls into the category of “Be Still my beating heart” and “I wanna do that NOW!”

Margaret explains some of the techniques used on this cloth

This piece of Margaret's shows how she used freezer paper resists when mono-printing

Yet another heavenly sheer--the synthetic sheers come from JoAnns mostly, the prom dress section, and obviously are vastly improved with paint

A different red sheer with sunswirls

Margaret showed us how to use heavy mil plastic drop-cloth, textile paint and common tools for surface design; notice the whisk.....

Transferring the mono-print (paint on plastic) onto the cloth is a tactile experience

In the upper left corner, Margaret pulls away the plastic with spiral she has just printed onto the cloth

The table I worked at! My stuff is on the near side and in the center

A closer look...here on my blue/green I used too much paint and lost definition. It is a learning process!

Even my paint tray was pretty!

one of my classmate's circle design...ooooh! I'm pretty sure she used an Afro/Hair pick for those marks

Drat I wish I could remember how she told me she made those marks....you can see this is addicting!

Again..I forget how shemade those purple marks, but I love them!

As you might gather, for a 2-hour session that was about an hour of demo and an hour hands-on, we the students really were inspired and went to town with our scraps.  Thanks SO MUCH to Margaret for sharing her time, technique and paints!   Next year we REALLY need to chip in to cover expenses for supplies…. Margaret, if you see this send me your snail mail address and I’ll either send you a fiver or a bit of hand-dyed as thanks!

Some days are just perfect, and this month’s Frayed Edges was just that.

Birthday cupcakes from Kathy

My birthday is around about now, and Kate and Kath were amazing!  We met at Kate’s home, a quintessential New England Cape home that is WELL over a hundred fifty years old if it is a day!  It has, of course, been updated, and the skylights and double-paned windows make is so sunny and homey! On the way down, I decided to go via route 24, which runs along the western bank of the Kennebec river, so I turned west onto Route 17 to head towards Augusta.  At that point I turned the GPS on to head to Kate’s home.  It told me to turn before I got to my usual spot, so I thought “Why not?”  OH MY GOODNESS!   The sad part is I was driving and couldn’t take pictures at the same time, but I think I drove through the most beautiful non-coastal part of Maine I have seen yet.  Autumn is just beginning, with flashes of scarlet and gold….small Maine towns, white steeples, babbling brooks, blueberry barrens glowing crimson and auburn and russet….oh my!

This was the table that greeted us:

Kathy arrived before I did, and Kate’s lovely autumn setting (notice her felted-sweater napkin rings, complete with acorns made with real acorn caps and felted wool balls?) was so welcoming!

Kate has these incredible hand-made dishes and silverware that she takes out for our special days.  I just love the cheerful sunflowers:

Kate's place setting...so lovely!

Then we filled them with a new squash and sausage soup, accompanied by salad and some awesome sourdough bread I bought at the Market Basket in Rockport (I really did NOT need to learn that their breads are SO good):

Those goodies you see on the left are birthday prezzies….  Kate UTTERLY indulged me with a Pashmina scarf/shawl in my all-time favorite turquoise/teal/aqua, and Kath bought hand-made chocolates given on a one-of-a-kind pottery spoon rest, accompanied by the adorable Egbert (  made by Kathy and christened on the spot).  What a perfect funny bird!

And here we are, beak-to-beak:

Sarah and Egbert, getting acquainted

He just makes me smile!  He is now on my dining table where I work at my laptop and keeps me in good humor!

We ate lunch a bit early so we could play with paint; a couple weekends earlier Kath and I had attended the SAQA-Maine weekend (more on that in a future post), and I shared a couple techniques I learned.

Playing with paint

What could be more perfect:  wonderful friends, food, art, friends, fabric and ideas and warmth, glorious Maine, friends…. I am so truly blessed!  As you can see…. the cupcakes were delectable with Kathy’s made-by-her ganache (talk about melt in your mouth heavenly):

With this blogpost, we will end the series on how I made the quilt of my son playing guitar.  I had fun with the quilting, too.  Here’s the bucket and bag of threads I used for the quilting:

And here is the completed quilt; notice that the proportions have changed a little.  The finished size for the exhibit is 36 inches wide by 48 inches long, so I needed to remove some extra, especially in the length.  If the quilt hadn’t been in this exhibit, I might have let it go a little longer, but I think in terms of design and composition it is still fine the way it is.

While I was mulling over how to quilt the walls, there was yet another discussion on either QuiltArt or SAQA (or both?) about the line between traditional and art quilting.  As usual there were those who want nothing to do with traditional quilting.  I, however, am proud of our traditional roots and proud of this as an art form that began with women’s work.  As someone recently said to me, Quilt is NOT a four-letter word!

This discussion led me to the idea of using traditional feathered vines for the background quilting.  As you can see from this next photo, though I chose a thread I thought would show up on the background, it was too subtle.  I decided to echo-quilt around the feathered vines, then pencilled in the resulting space/channel to define the outlines of the vines with Prismacolor Pencil (which I later covered with a combination of a textile-friendly varnish and water to seal it to prevent it from rubbing off).

Here is a wider-angled shot of the wall area showing the feathered vines…I just love them!

This shows the quilted quilt with the threads distributed over the top where they were used:

Here are two close-ups of the quilting of Joshua’s face and torso:

I love the backs of my quilts, the line drawing look, so took this (alas blurry) photo–you can see the feathered vines clearly on this semi-solid background fabric, and that the entire quilt is stitched 1/4″ apart or close… a lot of thread!

And to end where we began, but arrayed nicely, all those beautiful threads ( all but one of them Superior Threads):

PS–I am reminded by the comments to add that Joshua –hallelujah!– actually likes the quilt!  Given how picky teenagers are, especially of pictures of themselves, I am so thrilled that he of all people likes it.  Hugs to my firstborn!  Now…. what will the years bring that I can do another quilt, this time of secondborn son?

I received quite the lovely e-mail a few days ago from Vou Best of the Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA) about the piece pictured above.  It said:

“Congratulations!  Your piece in “Meet the Artist: SAQA 20th Anniversary Trunk Show” has been chosen to be one of the 55 pieces archived in the permanent collection of the International Quilt Study Center at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln.  It will be available to researchers and students as a record of the art quilt in 2009.

“Sandra Sider selected the works for the IQSC collection.  “One of the best parts of the 2009 SAQA conference was the three hours I spent in my hotel room, with the 20th Anniversary Trunk Show spread out over beds, tables, chairs, and floor.  What an explosion of creative energy! My curatorial task was to select approximately fifty pieces that would be donated in 2010 as a SAQA collection to the International Quilt Study Center. This collection documents the various techniques, processes, materials, and artistic styles in quilt art during the early 21st century, and the SAQA Board envisions these quilts as research tools, far into the future.  Your quilt was selected because it represents a particularly distinctive or original approach. Congratulations! Sandra Sider SAQA Vice President.”

“During the past year, many people have viewed the Trunk Shows in venues across the United States and in several other countries.  They have been shown at SAQA Regional meetings, to Quilt Guilds, in Gallery shows, at IQF receptions, and I’m sure to neighbors and friends wherever the trunks have visited. Everywhere they’ve traveled, they have received an overwhelmingly positive reaction.

“The SAQA Exhibition committee and I wish to thank you for supporting this endeavor during our 20th Anniversary year. Each and every piece represents the outstanding artistic quality present in the membership of SAQA today.

Vou Best

SAQA’s 2oth Anniversary Trunk Show Curator”

To say that I am thrilled is a serious understatement!  When I saw the names on the rest of the list, here…wow!  I am humbled, pleased and utterly astonished to be in such good company!