Art shoes!

The Pandoras, my local fiber arts group, met today to make art shoes. We followed an excellent tutorial on painting shoes on artist Lyric Kinard’s blog. Basically, you strip the finish off an old pair of shoes, then gesso them, and paint with acrylic paint. I only have one of my shoes finished so far; it is shown above. I’m pretty excited about the results!

Michele, Grace, DeLane and I gathered around DeLane’s brightly lit table and got to work. 

Grace, dressed all in red (her favorite color) was painting her shoes red – what else? — and orange.

DeLane’s shoes were also red, with some pretty purple swirls and dots.

Here are the results of a few hours of painting (well, truth be told, I was so excited to try this that I did one shoe last night!). Michele and DeLane already have the acrylic sealer on theirs; that is why they look shiny. Mine look shiny because I used metallic paint. And you can see the white gesso still showing on my clog that is in progress. Grace is still working on her pair, too, adding some nice details on the red sections. 

DeLane’s ruby slippers

Michele’s gray clogs

Grace’s red-and-orange swirly shoes

This photo shows how I started out on the gessoed shoes, penciling in the basic areas to paint. The shoe on the right is almost done, but still needs a coat of acrylic sealant. These are several-years-old Dansko clogs that had started to get a bit scratched up. I considered painting cheapie shoes, but after having a painful foot condition (plantar fasciitis) that lasted nearly 18 months, I have to be very careful to wear well-constructed shoes with good arch support. And I figure if you are going to spend the time to make a pair of shoes a work of art, you might as well start with good shoes, right? I can’t wait to finish these up and wear them!

2010 Barnful of Quilts Raffle Quilt

Isn’t this a beautiful quilt? And it could be yours! This is the 2010 Barnful of Quilts Raffle Quilt. It was made and donated by the UCo Quilters (Karen McWhorter, Joyce Walker, Rose Giacchetta, Jane Beamer and Judy Jewell). It is 75" square. 

If can’t get to the show, but you’d like to purchase a ticket, you can print out the ticket below, and send it in with $1 to:

Valerie Fox

7505 Sims Road

Waxhaw NC 28173

If you want to purchase multiple tickets, just send in your check with your name and phone number, and Valerie will write out the tickets for you! All funds benefit Waxhaw Presbyterian's missions and outreach efforts.

Nancy G. Cook to exhibit at DSBG this fall

Summer Split (detail) by Nancy G Cook

My good friend and fellow Fiber Art Options member Nancy G Cook will have her work exhibited this fall at the Daniel Stowe Botanical Garden near Charlotte. “SeedPlay” will show from Oct. 1 through Nov. 14, 2010. 

Here is information from Daniel Stowe about Nancy:

“In her work, Nancy highlights the seeds and fruits of trees, bringing them to life with multi-media techniques including botanical illustration, stenciling, quilting and embroidery. The result is a unique effect that inspires closer observation of the beautiful shapes and forms of nature. Working from collected seed specimens, these unusual designs are based on research and sketching to clarify what is architecturally unique for each species and focuses attention on a part of trees that is often overlooked.”

Daniel Stowe is also offering the following classes in conjunction with SeedPlay for an artful and horticultural focus on seeds, pods, and winter gardening:

Seed Saving
Saturday, Sept. 18, 10 a.m. - noon
Instructor: Dr. Barbara Albritton-Grant

Seedplay: Plants Portrayed in Fabric
Saturday, Nov. 6, 10 a.m. - 3 p.m.
Instructor: Nancy G. Cook

Gardening for Winter Interest
Saturday, Nov. 13, 10:30 a.m. - Noon
Instructor: Dr. Barbara Albritton-Grant

Quilting Arts TV taping

On Sunday, I flew to Cleveland to film three segments for the 700 series of Quilting Arts TV. Here I am with host Pokey Bolton on the set. These are the very girly-girl quilted dog beds I made with a new line of fabrics by Bari J. Ackerman called Country Lane (for Windham Fabrics). I used lots of the lighter fabrics for the strips and side/back panels, and cut out the big roses on another fabric from the line and raw-edge appliqued them down. 

This segment will air in program #712. (All the shows I shot – #703, #707 and #712 – will air this fall/winter on many public TV stations across the country, and will be available on DVD at the end of the season.)

Here’s all my stuff for the segments arranged on the bed at my hotel the night before. 

I’d met Jamie Fingal, well-known for using zippers in her work, at Quilt Festival last fall. She was talking about how she created some of the pieces in a series featuring her feet in Doc Marten boots. Jamie’s blog is called Twisted Sister. 

Here is a close up shot of some of Jamie’s Doc Marten series.

While each artist is taping, the rest of us get to watch on the big TV in the green room (that’s the name of the room where you wait before you go on set). Here are (from left) Jeannie Palmer Moore, Jeanne Cook Delpit (Bernina USA), Leslie Jennison and Katherine Lamancusa (from Beachwood Studios) watching and photographing Jamie’s segment.

Jeannie Palmer Moore (right) and Jamie watch another segment from the green room as it is shot. Jeannie, a mixed media artist, does a lot of painting and stitching in her work, but somehow, I managed to miss getting a photograph of her with it. Shoot!

Time for makeup!

Since the segments are shot out of sequence, Pokey has this helpful photo guide to what she needs to be wearing for each show:

This is Julie Fei-Fan Balzer (lef) with her mom, who spent a good hour untangling a necklace Julie made that she needed for her segment. What a nice mom! Julie also taught at the CREATE retreat.

Julie used computer kaleidoscope software to create these really cool designs that she then made into little fabric beady things and put on a necklace. 

And she had the funkiest hand-painted shoes!

I got my first look at the spread for my project, Magical Mistletoe, in the 2010 Quilting Arts Gifts magazine. They had a copy in the green room.

The fabulous Jeanne Cook Delpit of Bernina USA (left) helps Jamie learn the features of the machine she’ll be using on set.

Here is Leslie Tucker Jenison on set with Pokey. Leslie is a textile and mixed-media artist who makes spectacular art cloth. She mixed up the dyes for this segment in her hotel room bathroom the night before! You can read more about Leslie and see silly behind-the-scenes photos from the CREATE event – including dinosaurs and fake eyeballs – on her blog. 

Pippa Eccles, assistant editor at Quilting Arts, was often hard at work on her laptop in the green room. Pippa has helped edit my series of articles for Quilting Arts magazine this year.

This is the sweet, sweet Helen Gregory, managing editor for Quilting Arts and Cloth Paper Scissors. She was such a huge help to me!

On Tuesday, I popped back into the studio to meet some more guests, because my plane wasn’t leaving until the afternoon. I met Victoria Gertenbach with one of her lovely “work quilts” made of shot cotton fabric, with the most beautiful hand stitching:

And Candy Glendening with her cute, cute, cute fabric houses featured in Quilting Arts Gifts 2010:

Candy and Victoria check out an issue of Studios magazine in the green room.

Leslie Tucker Jenison and Pokey prepare to cut up one of Pokey’s quilts in a “Save My UFO!” segment. In these segments, people send in quilts that they don’t know how to finish or fix, and a guest talks about what she’d do to improve the piece.

Jamie tests out a new technique using Shiva PaintStiks. Pokey needed samples on set, and Jamie and some of the rest of us jumped at the chance to play in between tapings.

Together, Jamie Fingal and Leslie Tucker Jenison co-curate art quilt exhibits for the Dinner at Eight Artists. They had come directly from teaching at Cloth Paper Scissor’s CREATE mixed-media Retreat in Rosemont, Ill. (near Chicago) the day before. They had to be exhausted, but you’d never have known it!

Pearl Krush, most famous for her snowmen fabrics, shows off her beautiful quilt made with her most recent fabric line for Troy called Petal Pushers.

I am a big fan of Deidre Adams’ work, and it was exciting to meet her and see it up close.  Deidre is also a painter and graphic designer who creates a lot of the beautiful catalogs for Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA).

The texture and subtle color in Deidre’s work is fascinating. These are a few of the pieces she brought for her TV segment.

This afternoon, I headed home, back through the Cleveland airport, which has this great giftshop with stuff from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame & Museum.

Interviewed at AQS Paducah

I was interviewed and videotaped by Linda from Zede’s Sewing Studio, a Bernina and Baby Lock dealer in Columbia, Missouri, at the AQS Quilt Show in Paducah! They wanted to know more about how I machine quilted Pink Petal Party on my home sewing machine, a seven-year-old Virtuosa 153 Quilters Edition Bernina.

Good STUF

This is my friend and neighbor, Dave Sopp, hanging up a sign I made for a company that he and his wife (Kelly) own called Wry Baby. (Wry Baby makes hip, funny, irreverent gifts for babies and their parents. They are guaranteed to be the hit of any baby shower you might attend.) They needed a stuffed, three-dimensional sign for their booth at the New York International Gift Fair earlier this month. Who better to ask than a quilter who happens to live down the street and can’t say no?

It needed to be lightweight and easy to transport. I made it by tracing the logo onto white fabric, then painting it in black using acrylic textile paint. I layered it with more white fabric, and stitched outside the black lettering. Then I slit the back and stuffed it. After adding a backing of heavy felt, and stitching that down, I glued the two layers of fabric outside the lettering together, and reinforced the back with wooden dowels so it would hang flat. The whole thing can come apart and be stuffed (pun intended) into a suitcase. It was an interesting logistical challenge. 

What the heck is this STUF, you ask?  It’s their cool new line of stuffed toys you can see under my sign in the photo below, or up close on the STUF website. That’s Dave with the interesting facial hair and ice-cream-man suit. 

This STUF is so cool that I really want one of each. The pirates and the birds especially. I don’t have any babies (mine are too grown up for me to have any excuse), and I still want them! If you go to the STUF website to look, make sure you move your cursor over them so you can see the backs, which are equally wonderful.

Another great product they just introduced is the Zippit! Pacifier Case:

 

 

It features the “Gromm-o-Vent” on the back to keep those moist pacifiers from getting all mildewed and groady.

Video from Art Meets Science

Alex Veronelli, Product Manager for Aurifil Thread, took a nice video at the SAQA Art Meets Science exhibition at Festival of Quilts in Birmingham, England last week. He zooms in on Lepidoptera, one of my pieces! I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Alex at several Quilt Markets, as I am on Aurifil’s Artists’ Team (the A-Team!). He always has mobs of quilters around him, since he is a sweetheart of a guy, and has an adorable Italian accent to boot!  :-)  If you are on Facebook, befriend him and you can see other great videos, get industry scoops and find out the latest from Aurifil.

Art Meets Science at Festival of Quilts

My friend Melinda Schwakhofer, an American living in England, attended the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham England last week, and took these photos of the SAQA Art Meets Science exhibition, in which I have two pieces.

Here is a woman taking a shot of my tiny piece Coleus. At 7-1/2" x 11", I think it must have been the smallest piece in the exhibition!

SAQA volunteers answer questions about the exhibition and explain SAQA’s mission.

Here is Lepidoptera (left) hanging.

This exhibition had hard white walls that set off the artwork very nicely. Art Meets Science “explores the unexpected intersection of two seemingly different disciplines, Art and Science. These 35 artworks focus upon inspiration from scientific theories or phenomena expressed in new and unexpected ways. They illustrate, with strikingly visual impact, a gamut of scientific ideas, from the harmonies of randomness to the dynamics produced by scientific imagery.”

Melinda had two beautiful pieces displayed at Festival, too. You can see her pieces, Cleaved (created for her recent marriage), and Winter Trees Wept (a powerful piece about the removal of her native American Muscogee ancestors from their land in the 1830s) on her fabulous blog, Inspiraculum. You’ll find more photos from Festival of Quilts in her most recent post. Thanks again, Melinda!  :-)

All photos courtesy of Melinda Schwakhofer-Coxon. Website: www.melindaschwakhofer.com