Here’s the elation part: OK, I’m about to pop so I’m gonna share it here! Karey Bresenhan and her cousin Nancy O’Bryant are two of the four founders of Festival (also known as Mecca to quilters, and located in Houston), along with their late mothers. One of their enviable jobs is to purchase quilts for the International Quilt Festival Collection. I am honored and humbled that they have selected The Tide is Hire to be in that collection!

Elated doesn’t begin to cover it….how about rocketing past Saturn with Neptune rapidly coming into view? This is the first (and I will certainly work hard to assure it is not the last) major sale for me, and I am so thrilled that Karey and Nancy thought so highly of my work. I will strive to live up to their confidence in me, and am itching to get back to the studio. I can still scarcely believe that my work will join that of so many famous quilters, but I’ve even printed out the e-mail so I can keep checking it to make sure the words haven’t changed LOL!

And in another bit of disbelief…or…..

entering the Twilight Zone:

I am now, officially as of 9:17 p.m. EST, the mother of a teenager. Yep, that’s my thirteen year old boy! Love him to bits, too! His first words this morning were “that’s the coolest balloon I’ve ever seen” (well, after “I don’t feel good can I stay home today” because he was actually running a bit of a fever):

And he was thrilled with his gifts from the three of us: three classic rock CD’s including Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Led Zeppelin IV, and a Van Halen CD that Eli knew Joshua wanted. Way cool! And this evening, we celebrated the fact that he doesn’t feel sick any more with his favorite thing for his birthday: pumpkin pie!

And here he is, risking lighting his head on fire with all that hair hanging over the candles:

And Paul decided to have a little pie under his whipped cream!

With all its ups and downs, I wouldn’t trade a nanosecond of the past thirteen years with Joshua and then Eli. They make life wonderful!

This year has been a good one…in addition to the dyeing workshop with Carol Soderlund, I got to attend Festival with Marie, my bestest buddy who still lives in Washington state. Here we are on preview night at her Garden of “A” quilt, a combination of blocks from the Dear Jane and Dear Hannah books by Brenda Papadakis. Marie designed the original setting on this huge quilt, and it was juried into the “In Full Bloom” exhibit, her first time ever being juried into Houston. I’m thrilled beyond belief and so proud of her. The first time we went to Houston, 3 years ago, was when we did our first journal quilts and I got juried in for the first time. It’s fun to take turns!

As always, Festival was HUGE, inspiring, overwhelming, led to sore feet and back, and the determination to try harder and do better than ever. For this first post, I’ve shared Marie’s first quilt in Houston already, and here is my quilt The Tide is Hire in the Viking Exhibit,

As a dyed-in-the-cloth art quilter, but with roots firmly planted in traditional quilting, I was surprised that my all-time favorite quilt of the show was La Avena Romantica, by M. Mizuno of Japan.

and here is the “blurb” sheet on this quilt:

Usually I am drawn to bright, clear colors and loose, free style. But I just loved this highly structured, muted piece. The tiny grains on the barley stalks are individually appliqued…each one the size of a pencil eraser! The white circles around the sheaf of barley are embroidered, and it looked like the whole piece was made of fine woolens (though the information says it is all cotton). Here are two details shots:

In the coming days I’ll share more of my favorite things from Festival, including the awesome journal quilts and book. In the meantime, if you’d like to see more, click on the ruby slippers at the Quilts, Inc., website here or click here to go directly to Festival coverage. I’m proud that both my Viking entry and one of my journal quilts are featured on the webcast. To see the Viking entry, click on the link at the top of the page for Husqvarna Viking Gallery (it’s alphabetical order so I’m on the last screen), and for the February 2006 journal quilt click on the Journal Quilts 2006 link–on the second page of images.

The color series continued throughout the summer. For my July Journal, I took a picture of my son playing his guitar. I used my favorite method: size picture on the computer screen and trace! Although his left hand seems distorted it atualy looked just like that in the photo. This is an analogous warm scheme: orange-red-warm tan on black. It is bound with cloth on the sides, and the edges top and bottom are finished with a couched black chenille yarn.

The August journal is my favorite of the entire series. When we were in Sarasota after our Disney cruise, visiting Paul’s aunt and uncle, the hotel we were in had an outdoor pond with koi. The one with the fluttery fins and tail enchanted me. I swapped pond-scum green of the pond for the complement of red-orange: turquoise! ZING! I love the way this turned out so much, using the fused sheers and the layered background, that I want to make a huge, oversized quilt with koi….larger than life size…what revelling in joyful color!

The last journal, for September, is the “Y” trees. This is a shaded (darkened) secondary triadic colors: purple-green-orange. The fabricds are my hand-dyeds except for the two smaller trunks and the orange slivers. Since there was a lighter, sun-doing-down spot on the sky, I highlighted / backlit the trees from that side with the orange. Then I “ghosted” in more trees in the intermediate spaces. This journal is a study for a larger quilt, and both are based on…ge this! The backs of the chairs in the Lumiere Dining Room on the Disney Cruise Ship Magic! Very art deco, turned into landscape…. almost a cathedral of the Nightwood……the branches of the trees like the flying buttresses on Gothic Cathedrals….

I’m now home from Festival in Houston, which was WONDERFUL. I filled a 1 Gig memory card, but alas have only about that much space left on my hard drive so this is going to be interesting… I’ll post about it as soon as I can get the computer to work (hah!). And I need sleep….went out today only to go to the post office, and forgot the thing I needed to mail at home. Yep, sleep. In the meantime…..

April: After looking at the January non-achromatic quilt for three months, I decided I needed to do it right. So, I made a second attempt at doing achromatic, or black-white-gray. This time, I got it. I took a close up photo of the rushing water at Camden Falls, where the Megunticook River spills into Camden Harbor. The river is actually fairly small, a large stream in some ways, and the falls aren’t that huge, either, but they sure are beautiful. I used every single black or gray fabric I had (which is obviously not a lot). Even at that, I ended up using a deep navy/forest batik and some others that stretch the achromatic scheme.

May: When I was visiting my mom in California, I took more photos of birds of paradise and other flowers in the grounds near where she lives. She had never seen a digital camera, or a photo processing program. I had Paul’s laptop with me, so I showed her how I could take a walk, come in, upload photos, adn then tweak them in Photoshop. I liked this particular tweak so much, it became the May journal. This is basically a primary triadic combination: red (fucshia), yellow and blue (turquoise).

May:

June: I have been mulling over some ideas about patterns and designs, so decided to do a contemporary twist on the traditional Moon Over the Mountain block. The combination here is complementary: purple and yellow. Or, if you’d prefer, split complementary: pale yellow and deep dark purple and its neighbors on the color wheel, including deep navy.

June:

Hi all…uploading this post from Festival in Houston! If you click here, you can go to the Quilts Inc website and take a loot by clicking on the Ruby Slippers. I’ll post lots more when I get home… until then…..

At LONG last, I can share the journal quilts for this year, since Festival is now officially open! Remember that tutorial series I did a while back on color? Well, I wanted to continue the color studies with a more “art-y” set of journals. For my first attempt, I wanted to do achromatic, meaning no color or black-white-gray. Obviously, I didn’t quite manage. Doing no color is very hard for me, so this ended up being a wintery monochromatic of sorts…white, pale blues, grays, a bit of taupe:

January:

In February, I decided that I’d do a bird of paradise, which happens to be a perfect split complementary. The flower itself if the complementary pair of orange and blue, while the stalk and leave are green with slivers of red.

February:

Deborah, one of the Frayed Edges, moved to Dallas in February. The rest of us had hoped to have a farewell gift for her. Ahem. Things slid due to the holidays and life and hecticness in general. So she got a house-warming gift in May! We made journal sized quilts and hung them from a piece of driftwood (to see more about this, click here). This month’s piece is what I call “natural” colors. If I were to head to the color wheel, I guess I’d call this analogous colors..green and blue are next to each other on the color wheel.

March:

The January and February journals are two of five (the others are from previous years) that were included in the Creative Quilting: The Journal Quilt Project book, which is now available here. Yippeee!