Yes, I am alive. Yes, I have been working like a madwoman. Yes, family life happens (and means you don’t get to blog). Yes, I have been teaching. Yes, I have been quilting!

Earlier this week I came across a post on the quiltart list by Sonja Lee, and a link to her blog, Art Textilian, with her contribution to the World Beach Project. WOWIE ZOWIE! Instant inspiration! The Beach project is sponsored by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England, and a collaboration with artist Sue Lawty. Immediately I wanted to participate, despite the bone-shattering cold this week

So on Friday at sunset when it was about 12 degrees Fahrenheit (minus temps in Celcius) with a nice breeze blowing to make it feel chillier, Eli and I went to town to buy Pigwidgeon (the pug)  a birthday present (a new bed), go to the post office, and just before dark (well, as dark was happening at 5 pm) make our piece on the beach. The photo above is of the beach below the library and amphitheatre park. You can see the schooners wrapped for winter and the ice (yes, ice) on the beach at low tide at sunset.

I guess I didn’t read the instructions too well, because the project is supposed to be made of stone, and ours is made of mussel shells, a few rocks, and tumbled, broken bits of brick (so it is totally New England!). When I asked Eli at breakfast if he wanted to do this with me, he asked if we could make the yin and yang if we could find white and black stones, so of course I said yes. Well, he didn’t remember what it was called, but I knew he meant yin-yang. When we got to the beach, he decided red and blue of brick and mussels would be better.

Anyway, I don’t know if our project will make the V&A website since it isn’t exactly mostly rock, but we had fun anyway. It got so dark in the 20 minutes or so that we were freezing our fingertips (some of the shells were frozen to the sand and we had to scrabble to pry them loose!), so I had to photoshop / lighten this last picture so you can actually see both the harbor and our project.

Wowie zowie…. OK… I am so excited that I can’t believe it and had to share before I explode…….Art quilter makes good! I have two projects in Lark Books’ forthcoming book “Creative Quilting with Beads.” I was trying to track down how Quilt Divas, the local quilt shop in Rockland, Maine, can order it at wholesale (we’ll do a book signing and class), so I was on the phone with Lark’s customer service. While speaking to the rep, I remembered Amazon has had a lot of other list-members’ books online before publication date / available for pre-order, so I looked up this book……

MY PROJECT IS ON THE COVER!!!!! At least, the cover that is on the Amazon listing. We’ll hope that it stays the same… I can’t BELIEVE IT……. Me?????!!!!!!! I know that sometimes covers change, but still…… I’ll have to wait until publication to share my own pics of the notebooks and other projects from the Frayed Edges that are included (Lark has first publication rights, including even little old blogdom.)

Anyway, yes, I will have the book available for sale on my website when it is out mid-May-ish (release date is nominally May 6th, but we know those dates slide in both directions). I won’t be able to come close to offering the price Amazon can (it’ll be list price), but I can offer signatures! Eight of the 25 projects are by my mini-group the Frayed Edges, so thought I’d ask them to sign a bunch of copies so folks can have signatures from Kate Cutko, Kathy Daniels and me. (Of the five of us, 4 have projects in the book…3 of the 4 of us with projects in this book; Hannah was right in the middle of selling her house, moving and traveling to adopt a daughter in China at submission deadline, so obviously she was a bit too busy for book projects!) WOOOOHOOOO!

This project is a notebook cover…. I did two versions. This one fits a composition notebook, so it is vertical orientation. The other one is also pomegranates but with lime green and yellow for the table and wall and fits a 6×9 ish (whatever the standard size is) sketchbook / journal with a horizontal format. I chose those two items since they are standard size here in the US and readily available, but it would be easy-peasy to adapt the pattern to other shapes/sizes.

Anyway, I just HAD to share….now I can’t wait more than ever to see the finished book!

So what do you do? If you are me, you quilt. If you are a cat or honorary cat (the pug), you sleep by the woodstove! Hmmm… wonder if they’d make ME and honorary cat and let me join them?

Here’s what I was doing while they were sleeping… I added the pillow backing and bound my “quilt.” This is the extra block from my Nourish quilt. You saw this piece a few days ago unquilted…. well, I finally got some studio time (what little there was this week), and got this piece quilted in time to share at my Intro to machine quilting class yesterday at Quilt Divas in Rockland. Although I am probably better known (to the small extent that anyone knows who I am) for art quilts, I totally love, Love, LOVE Hawaiian quilts. I am also not one known for liking symmetry, either, but something about them sings to me.

I designed a large-ish quilt (about 68×68) for my book called Nourish the Body, Nourish the Soul, which features Ulu (breadfruit), Taro and Pineapple blocks (the Nourish the Body part), and Bird of Paradise and Plumeria (and I hope heaven smells like that, making the rash assumption I’ll get there)…. I ended up placing the Plumeria block in the center of the big quilt, which meant the other plumeria block was the odd man out. Blocks are 18 inches square, and I added a 3/8″ inner sashing and 3 1/2″ border. If you click on the photo, you’ll get a larger view. Hope you like!

Well folks, it’s that time again… time to share my teaching schedule for art quilting, applique and machine quilting classes! I’m thrilled to be able to travel more this year, and have longer teaching opportunities, including a four-day workshop—wheee!– in West Virginia in August!

Also, I feel awkward mentioning this, but will do it anyway: I would like to apply to teach for International Quilt Festival (Houston, Chicago and Long Beach). To do so, I need letters of recommendation from students and shop owners. If you would be willing to write a “to whom it may concern” letter and send to me to use, I would be most appreciative. Just let me know and I’ll send you my snail mail address. Thanks (she typed, blushing and squirming). Here goes:

2008

January 19 (tomorrow!), Intro to Machine Quilting at Quilt Divas in Rockland, Maine

January 26 (next Saturday), Intro to Machine Quilting at Maine-ly Sewing in Nobleboro, Maine

February 28 (a Thursday), Hawaiian Applique by Machine, Sarah Johnson Quilts in Belfast, Maine

April 23-26 (Wednesday to Saturday), the HUGE AQS Show in Paducah, Kentucky!!! I’ll be teaching: two machine quilting classes (one all day, one three-hour), a couple machine applique, intro drawing (and seeing!) for quilters — the ABC class I recently tested and blogged about, plus doing the All Star Review (demo-ing a technique) on Saturday afternoon… I’m hoping I haven’t lost my voice by then!

May 23-25, Salon 2008, Montreal, Quebec, Canada! I had to apply for a passport!!!! I’ll be teaching Machine Applique and Fabric Postcards; click here for class info; I’ll be teaching in English, but speak some very rusty French so may be able to help in French and “quilters sign language!”

August 7-9, Images Quilt Festival, Lowell, Massachusetts. I’ll be teaching Intro Machine Quilting, Decorative Stitch Applique and Hawaiian Applique by Machine. The class schedule is here.

August 17-22, Cedar Lakes Craft Center, Ripley, West Virginia. This will be my first time teaching a four-day workshop, and I’m so excited at the chance to work with students and really get deep into the subject! The workshop is titled: “The quilt top is done, now what?” It will be a compilation of my design and machine quilting classes. We’ll start with the “If you can write your ABC’s, you can draw,” move to designing your quilting designs (for hand or machine quilting) and how to draft and mark those designs, then machine quilting. I’ll be skipping the lecture portion of the day-long machine quilting class since the students here tend to be more experienced quilters and we’ll concentrate on fun nearly-no-mark quilting designs and using decorative threads. The 2007 catalog is here, and soon the 2008 catalog will be available (at the same web address I think).

November 15, Coastal Quilters Fiber Holiday Bazaar, Camden, Maine. I’ll have more info on location, etc., closer to the date, but I’ll be selling some small pieces of my work, patterns, and probably the Lark Books “Quilting with Beads” which features 8 designs by the Frayed Edges!

November 19th (Wednesday, TENTATIVE), BeadDesigners International, near Boston. I’ll be doing a lecture and possibly a workshop (the latter may be in spring 2009) about beading on fabric, my inspiration sources and trunk show.

2009!

March 18-19 (Wednesday and Thursday), 2009: Farmington Valley Quilters Guild, Connecticut! More details as we get closer. There will be a lecture on Wednesday and workshop Thursday. If you live somewhere within a few hours of here and would like me to teach before or after, let me know!

In three short months, I’ll be packing to head to my first MAJOR teaching venue: the AQS show in Paducah, Kentucky (it is amazing how quilters instantly know what you mean when you say Paducah, but mention it to the average soul on the street and you have to tell them it’s in Kentucky!). I will be teaching a whole bunch of things, including a class I had –until yesterday– never taught! EEEK! So the Coastal Quilters, my local guild chapter, came to the rescue. I offered to teach the class for free if they would be my guinea pigs…er…. ummm…. test-run for the class (picture above…but I blurred the faces because I forgot to ask each one for the OK to share pics)!

The class members were WONDERFUL, and I came away with several outstanding suggestions for improvements, learned that I needed to show how-to-steps on one project, and also decided I need to add one more exercise (meaning I have to delete something else) that pulls together everything we did in the class (and thanks to mulling it over with Roxanne by e-mail afterwards, have figured out how to do that!). All this is complicated by the fact that I function/teach better in a six hour format, and AQS prefers to offer 3 hour classes!

I started the class with a plug for a book that I consider nothing short of being able to work near miracles: The New Drawing on the Right Hand Side of the Brain and its companion workbook (in the picture), both by Betty Edwards–the two together cost less than US$ 24. I worked my way through the book with two friends, Linda C. and Lunnette H-H., when I lived on San Juan Island (before moving to Maine). We were all “OK” at drawing when we started (Lunnette was better than that, tho), but my gosh did I ever learn. Our before and after self-portraits showed dramatic improvement. I figure if *I* can learn on my own like that, anyone can. As a matter of fact, it was so useful I think I’ll do it again later this year. The titles above are hotlinked to the books at Amazon.com.

The class is called “If you can write your ABCs, You can draw”, and I started with a slide show… I need to improve the technical side of things, but as I showed more and more photos, all of a sudden I could see folks engage and start to “See.” As I told them, learning to draw is really about learning to SEE, then reproducing what you actually see (as opposed to what you think you see!). But, you don’t have to be Rembrandt…. you can use “aids.” some of these are the computer and your camera. To create “With These Hands,” I had my friend Marie take a few snaps of my hands…. I held them something like this:

Then I enlarged the photo on my computer, taped tracing paper to the screen (moving it as necessary) and traced the outlines and major contour lines (light, medium and dark areas). THEN I could transfer those lines to my cloth and create this:

One of the most fun exercises (and alas one which will be eliminated due to time constraints, at least from the 3 hour version of this class), was making paper snowflakes to learn to “draw” with scissors, and to look at the concept of negative space:

Then, a real keeper of an exercise is the “Expanded Square” from the book Notan: The Dark-Light Principle of Design by Marlys Mayfield and Dorr Bothwell (click on the title to see the book listed on Amazon–where it costs mere pennies…way worth it!). This exercise teaches you not only about negative space, but also about balance, rhythm, and possibilities of simple changes. In the book, the authors want you to use spendy black art paper to cut the shapes and glue it to white. Being thrifty (aka cheap) I had folks cut out of common white copy paper and glue it to black construction paper…it works! Here are Betty’s and Prudy’s being-glued examples:

And here are some of the class pieces:

I learned this week that a crafts center in Ripley, West Virginia, wants to hire me (?!!!!! WOOOOHOOO) to teach a 4-day workshop, so I think I’ll combine this class, my quilting design, a bit of machine quilting, and edge-finish classes into a “The top is done…what next?” class! Zippedy do DAH! In a couple days I’ll post my upcoming schedule of classes…. stay tuned! Cheers, Sarah the swamped