A fun thing, and a give-away!

Have you seen these Ricky Tims playing cards? I bought some at Quilters Loft Company, my local quilt shop, where they retail for about $7.


Ricky Tims is well known in the quilting community for his spectacular award-winning quilts, his bigger-than-life personality, and his music. These pretty playing cards feature one of his quilts on the front of each card. The Ace, King, Queen and Jack cards of each suit feature different detail shots of his quilts. Tims, of course, is on the Joker cards, wearing his trademark Stetson.

They'd make a great fun gift or stocking stuffer for your favorite quilter. What quilting-related items do you have on your Christmas/Hanukkah/Al Hijra/Kwanzaa/other holiday wish list this year, quilters? Leave me your response in the comments section for this post. On Dec. 15, I'll pull one name out of a hat, and send the winner the playing cards.

AND THE WINNER IS... MOMID5!!! Please send me your street address, and I'll put the cards in the mail to you. Thanks to everyone for playing! Susan

Twelve by Twelve

The art quilt group Twelve by Twelve has just started revealing the pieces they have created for their latest challenge, which has the theme of mathematics. You can see their work on their blog, http://twelveby12.blogspot.com/

While working on this challenge, the artists ventured into string theory, binary code, tally marks, the history of the abacus, Pythagoras' table, fractals, Fourier Series, phasor vectors, geometry, the Golden Ratio, Fibonacci numbers, Escher, numeral systems, and even "transidental mathamatics and the non-Newtonian nature of ketchup" (Nikki Wheeler)

They also have a website, http://www.twelveby12.org, which shows some of their past challenges on the themes of dandelion, chocolate, community, water, illumination and shelter. You can read profiles of the artists here, too.

Every few months, this group chooses a theme (they take turns picking) and then everyone sets to work. The quality of their art, and the range of styles and interpretations of their themes are amazing. Make sure you check them out!

The “Bacon Bracelet”

I made this bracelet a while ago for my online class on Tyvek that I am in the middle of teaching on Joggles.com, but forgot to post it. I made it from Tyvek beads embossed with a rubber stamp, and because of the colors, my husband refers to it as “the bacon bracelet.” (And, truth be told, he has a bit of a bacon obsession, too…)

It has a magnetic toggle closure, so it is really easy to put on and take off. And of course, it is super light because Tyvek weighs next to nothing.

So thankful!

As Thanksgiving approaches, I am so thankful for all that I have been given. One of the things for which I am grateful is the quilting community… the people I have met through guild meetings, through presentations I've given to quilting groups, and through online groups and online classes and teaching. The internet, and blogging, have introduced me to so many interesting, kind and generous people that I have not (yet) met face to face. I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

In the spirit of the holiday, I am including my recipe for Spicy Pecans. They are easy to make, and are great as an appetizer or sprinkled on a green salad. Or put some in a jar tied with a ribbon for a wonderful holiday hostess gift.



Spicy Pecans
1/3 cup butter, melted
1 Tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1/2 teaspoon hot sauce (such as Tabasco)
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
1 teaspoon salt
1 pound pecan halves

Heat oven to 300 degrees F. Melt butter, add Worcestershire sauce, hot sauce, salt and pepper, and mix well. Place pecans in mixing bowl and pour the liquid on top, then stir to thoroughly coat. Spread onto a cookie sheet or jellyroll pan in a single layer. Bake for 20-30 minutes, stirring and re-spreading every 10 minutes or so. Take out of oven and place on paper towels. When cool, store in an airtight container.

“Varigated” sold!

The 12"-square quilt I made for the Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA) One Foot Square Auction sold today to The Schroder Collection! Hooray, and thank you very much.

There are still some gorgeous quilts available, some by very well-known art quilters. The price goes down by $100 each day at 2 p.m., so they are getting more affordable.

The second group of quilts will go up for auction on Tuesday, Nov. 18. The third group goes up Friday, Nov. 28.

To see my quilt, scroll down a bit to my Nov. 6 post.

Judy’s Tulip Bag

My friend Judy Whitehead just finished making my Tulip Bag pattern, and her bag is absolutely gorgeous. Judy is a talented fabric dyer, art quilter and longarm quilter, and she used all her talents to make a bag that is completely Judy. WOW! To read more about how she made her bag, check out her blog post here.

Veterans Day

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

– John McCrae, 1915
Canadian poet and medical officer in the Boer War and World War I

Today I remember and honor my father-in-law, who served in the U.S. Army, and was part of the Normandy invasion of World War II in 1944, and all those who have served and are serving my country. I think of the terrible sacrifices they and their families have made so that we can live our lives as we do. Of my own father's service in the Marine Corps. And of all the young people of all nations whom we send to war.

The poem above has been interpreted as both pro-war and anti-war by different people. I like the ambiguity, and prefer to think that the poet’s reference to “the foe” refers to war itself. Let it end.

Piecing the LNQ donation quilt

Some of the members of Lake Norman Quilters got together today to start piecing our 2009 donation quilt. This quilt will help pay for our 2009 quilt show.

Many thanks to Liz, Eileen, Michele, Judy, Cathy, Lucinda, Jean, Grace, Alisan, Susan D-L, Mary Jo, Joyce and Cheryl, who worked tirelessly and got a lot done in one day! And to Centre Presbyterian Church for giving us a nice place to work.



Here's Susan D-L piecing nine-patches:



Mary Jo looks like she’s having too much fun:



Eileen helped piece the stars:



Grace and Alisan demonstrate beautiful teamwork cutting long strips for the borders:



Cheryl matches up her pieces before stitching:



Cathy models a lovely boa of strip-pieced units:



Jean was focused on her task:



Liz told us (in no uncertain terms) that she doesn’t “do” triangles, so we put her to work lining up the units to be stitched:

SAQA Auction starts on Monday

A major fundraiser for Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA) begins on Monday, Nov. 10 at 2 p.m. Eastern time. It is the One Foot Square Auction, where you can bid on 12"-square works donated by SAQA members. My piece, “Varigated,” is shown above (and there’s a detail shot at the end of this post).

The pieces are divided into three groups for the auction. The auction for Group I will begin November 10th. My piece is in this group.

Group II will begin November 18th. And Group III will begin November 28th.

This is a reverse auction, with all pieces starting out on the first day at $750. Art quilt collectors usually snap up the pieces by well-known artists very quickly at that price. From there, the price goes down by $100 each day. On Day 2 of each auction (at 2 p.m. Eastern), the price drops to $650. The third day - $550, then $450, $350, $250, $150, and $75 (the lowest bid that will be accepted). Purchase is by credit card only.

So if you want to own a wonderful piece of fiber art and support a great organization at the same time, check it out. Even if you can’t afford to buy, take a look; it is a beautiful gallery of work.

My quilts... at Festival in Houston!

A sweet friend, Sarah Ann Smith, a fabulous art quilter from Camden Maine, just sent me these photos of my quilts hanging at the International Quilt Festival in Houston last week. So nice of her! It is very fun to see how they were hung, who their “neighbors” were. Thanks, Sarah!

Here’s my Journal quilt, “Running Deep,” in the photo below on the left. I can’t make out the artists’ names on the other pieces... if you are reading this and recognize them, write and let me know so I can give them proper credit! (Note: After posting this entry, I got a note from a blog reader who helped me identify the piece to the right of mine. It is by Susan Andrus of Towanda, Pa., and is called "Iris on the Rocks.”)



Here’s my piece “Harbinger’s Hope,” (the bluish one with the nest). To its right is “The Arb House” by Sue Holdaway-Heys of Ann Arbor, Michigan (behind the woman viewer’s head; you can see it better in the next photo), and then “Malian Peace Corps Story” by Charlene Bremer and Patricia Bremer Chell of Champaign, Illinois. I do not have credit information on the pieces to the left of mine.

Election Day is here!

The flag looked so pretty against my maple’s gorgeous golden leaves today. I just got back from voting; there was no line at my polling place, but traffic was brisk.

Time to do the right thing!

It’s Election Day eve, and I hope everyone is getting ready to go out tomorrow and vote (if you haven’t already). To get you in the mood, here is a link to Patchwork Politics, an exhibit of politically themed quilts at last week’s International Quilt Festival.

More Tyvek fun

I’ve spent much of the past week getting my lesson plans together in preparation for teaching a class called “Tyvek: Explorations for the Creative Stitcher” on www.joggles.com. It starts next Wednesday, Nov. 5. In doing so, I decided to create a new piece using melted pieces of Tyvek I had made a while back.

The working title of this piece is “Celtic Crown,” since the pieces are arranged on the background in a rough shape of a crown. I used a piece of fabric I had dyed in diluted Lumiere. It has a wonderful shimmer because of the metallic particles in the paint. After I had stitched down the Tyvek pieces and quilted the background, I added a little more darker blue Lumiere on some of the quilted areas, to add interest. I’ll add a photo of the whole piece once I finish it.


I also had fun making a necklace (below) using heavily melted Tyvek beads (they are the blue lumpy ones) with glass beads and some I made using Textiva (Angelina film) and then wrapping them in craft wire strung with glass seed beads.


Intrigued? Sign up for my class at Joggles, and join me… we are going to have lots of fun!

“Running Deep” (My Journal Quilt)

This is “Running Deep,” my entry for the Journal Quilt Project II: Elements – Earth, Water, Air, and Fire. It is one of two pieces I have exhibited at the International Quilt Festival in Houston this week. (The other is “Harbinger’s Hope,” which is in the Quilts: A World of Beauty exhibition.)

Several summers of drought where I live (near Charlotte, NC) got me thinking a lot about water… about how 45 percent to 75 percent of the human body is water … about how we are poisoning our creeks and lakes with pesticides … about battles fought between states and municipalities about who gets the water from our rivers and lakes, and how much … and about how essential clean water is to both people and animals.

Many of our native fish – like the beautiful Bear Lake cutthroat trout featured in my quilt – are threatened because of rising water temperatures, pollution and environmental degradation. Will we get our act together in time to save the trout … and ourselves?

I had two main challenges with this piece. The first was to capture the effect of light coming down through water, and the shimmer of water and scales. I chose the background fabric, which has highlights of yellow and green, because I thought it looked like sunshine falling through deep water.

I had used textile paints before, but never to such an extent as I did here. Using Jacquard and Stewart Gill paints, I painted the fish on white cotton fabric, then cut them out and hand appliqued them to the background fabric. The stones and the branches were cut from brown fabrics and appliqued down first, then painted with highlights and shadows to make them appear more three-dimensional.

The second challenge was to achieve a sense of depth. After the fish were appliqued, the two smaller fish (which were supposed to appear as if they were in the background) looked as if they were swimming with the large fish at the bottom of the piece. To solve this problem, I painted the two smaller fish a darker greenish-blue, and added a branch positioned behind the big fish and in front of the two smaller fish. I also quilted water currents over the background fish and the top part of the branch to make them appear to recede. The more detailed painting and quilted scales on the large fish also add to the impression that he is in the foreground.



Karey Bresenhan, president of Quilts, Inc. (which organizes the International Quilt Festival), created the Journal Quilt Project several years ago “to encourage growth and to help quilt artists break out of their comfort zone and try new things.” Karey has been a great supporter of art quilters, and has given us so much visibility through this project.

The two years that I went to Houston, I got to see the Journal Quilt Project and thought it was one of the best things about Quilt Festival. This year jurors chose 48 quilts from more than 150 entries. Linda Minton, G. Armour Van Horn and Judy Smith (owner or the QuiltArt List) have come together to give the quilts that were not accepted into the exhibit this year a chance to be viewed. And they are ALL fabulous! You can see them here at Braving the Elements.

If you are lucky enough to be going to Quilt Festival in Houston this week, I would love to hear what you thought about this year’s Journal Quilt Project!

Nuno felting with Vickie Clontz

Today my friends DeLane, Michele and I took a class from Vickie Clontz of Annie's Keepsakes on Nuno felting. This is a process where wool fibers are embedded in a base fabric (usually silk or cotton) and then felted or "fulled" (Vickie says the latter is the correct term) so it scrunches and shrinks up. Here's how my scarf started out:



This is Michele's finished scarf:



This is DeLane's finished scarf:



And here I am in my scarf. I might add some small beads later.



This was really fun. Thanks, Vickie! And thanks to the nice ladies in Winston-Salem who invited us to join them today.

“Motherhood”

This is “Motherhood,” a group art quilt by the Pandoras. Last year, we decided to do a quilt as a group and chose the theme of motherhood. We designed the shape of the panels so that they would fit together, but could still stand independently. Each panel is 12" on its short end, 24" on its long end, and 36" long. Each has a sleeve at the top and bottom, so they can be displayed together, but are not sewn together.

The panels are by (from left:) Grace Howes, Lushorn Millsaps, Susan Brubaker Knapp, and DeLane Rosenau. Each of us chose a different aspect to motherhood that was important to us. We decided that we should all use some blue in our panels so that there would be some continuity, but other than that, were permitted to do what we wanted.

Grace's panel deals with issues surrounding motherhood in Africa: maternal and infant mortality, war, rape, and famine. It shows a woman holding the continent of Africa on her pregnant belly, and is embroidered with tears done in a metallic thread:


Lushorn's panel is about generations of women, and is done in a family tree. Images of a baby, an infant, a young mother and an old woman are embroidered into the tree trunk. This was Lushorn's first experience free-motion threadpainting and quilting!


My panel is about nursing, one of the great joys of the early years of my motherhood. It shows a breast-feeding infant, and has the word “communion” threadpainted in the arch. I tried to replicate the sleepy, drunken, satiated look of the baby that I so loved seeing when nursing my two daughters. Nursing truly was a kind of communion for me, a holy connection between mother and child.






DeLane's panel deals with the issue of infertility. A woman stretches her arms up to heaven begging for a child, while a trail of beads connects her heart to her womb. DeLane also quilted some important words into her piece.


I am so proud of the work our group is doing! Each one of us is pushing ourselves to try new things, and getting better with each project.

Another lover of the Glasgow Rose

Yesterday, I got a really nice e-mail from a woman named Kelly, who had just ordered a pattern for my "Glasgow Rose" quilt (see photo above). She wrote, “I want to tell you HOW excited I am to find this. I grew up in East Aurora, NY where the Roycrofters are. I have always loved their rose so much. Even from such a young age. When I decided to get a tattoo that is what I got. [See her photo below.] To honor my home town which I miss dearly. I cannot WAIT to get started on my very own quilt.”



I wrote back to tell Kelly that I am a huge Roycrofters fan, and a fervent admirer of the Arts and Crafts movement. About 15 years ago, a wonderful Roycrofters exhibit came to the Virginia Museum of Art and my husband and I, who were living in Charlottesville, VA, at the time, went and enjoyed it very much. We have some reproduction and some antique Craftsman furniture, and I actually made this quilt to compliment my living room furniture.

The Roycrofters were a handicraft community founded in East Aurora, NY in the 1890s. It became a well-known center of the Arts and Crafts movement in the United States.

Kelly included some websites of things to do and see having to do with the Roycrofters:
The Roycrofters at Large Association and the Roycroft Festival

Roycroft Shops, which carry Roycroft china

The Roycroft Inn in East Aurora, furnished with original and reproduction Roycroft furnishings

Roycroft Pottery, which carries gorgeous one-of-a-kind hand-thrown pottern in the Arts and Crafts style by Janice McDuffie

Here's the story behind Kelly's tattoo, in her own words:
“I wanted something to really show who I am. Not to mention it is permanent so I MUST love it. Not an option otherwise. I had a very hard time finding anything I wanted and the couple tattoo artists I went to just couldn’t grasp what I was looking for. I happened to work with someone who dabbled in painting and art. So I told him what I wanted. Something girlie, Celtic hearts and has to have THIS rose.(The Roycroft/Glasgow Rose) So this is what he came up with.

“I am of Celtic descent on my dad’s side. It is just uncertain to whether we were Irish or Scottish. (I have red hair, fair skin and blue/grey eyes), but I have always been drawn to the Celts. For me it represents my heritage.

“The heart to represent my love for most everything. Family, friends, animals, nature, etc. The Rose wasn’t an option. I always LOVED that rose from my days growing up. For me it represents home.

“Being my birthday is 6-26-76 and my mom always called me her demon child (too many 6’s she said. LOL ..) my friend decided to put in 7 hearts to give me a little added luck. The little heart above the rose originally was a swirl pattern. But it was too tight for the tattoo artist to do. So we changed it to another heart. Never can have enough.”

Here's a little history about the Glasgow Rose:

Charles Rennie Mackintosh was part of "The Four" — a group of artists including Mackintosh, Herbert MacNair, and Margaret and Frances MacDonald — that grew out of the The Scottish Movement at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland in the late 1880s and 90s. They are credited with popularizing the Glasgow Rose, which became one of the most famous motifs of the Arts and Crafts movement. It was adapted from Aubrey Beardsley, and used on furniture, pottery, stained glass, metalwork and other decorative arts. For more information, go to the website for the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society.

Follow me!

I just added a new feature to my blog called “Following.” If you look on the right-hand side of my blog, right at the top, you'll see it. It says, “Followers,” and then “Follow this blog.” If you click on those words, you can sign up to subscribe to my blog, and you'll be notified whenever I post something. It's one more way of building a little community online, which is what I love most about blogging.

I'd love for you to follow me! – Susan

Fabric bead necklaces

The Pandoras and a few friends had great fun this morning making these funky bead necklaces. Lushorn organized this project. We took 20mm wooden beads, wrapped them in fabric (smeared with a glue stick on one side) and stuffed the excess into the holes using knitting needles. Then we strung them on ribbon and added toggle clasps. Cute, no?

What a great way to use up some of your little fabric scraps! (Each bead uses a 1-1/2" x 3" strip.)

Here's Rhondi, wearing her first necklace and starting on a second:

and Grace:

and Lushorn:

And Liz (concentrating VERY hard):

and Alisan:

and DeLane:

I didn't get a photo of Michele or her beads because she had to skip out early.