Great prizes on Candy's blog hop!

My friend Candy Glendening has a great new Quilting Arts Workshop called “Free-motion Sketching: Drawing with Thread from Birds to Botanicals” and she’s hosting a blog hop to publicize it. At each stop, there’s the chance to win prizes, including a copy of the Workshop, and one of Candy’s original stitched botanicals.

I’ve admired Candy’s gorgeous hand-dyed fabrics, and her lovely, loose free-motion motifs, since I met her on the set of “Quilting Arts TV” a few years ago. (If you want to learn Candy’s dyeing techniques, make sure to check out her first Quilting Arts Workshop, “Dyeing to Stitch: A Comprehensive Guide to Creating Colorful Fabric Art.”) She takes her hand-dyed fabrics and makes lots of usable projects like tote bags, baskets, iPad cases, and sketchbook covers. (Many of them have been featured in Quilting Arts and Quilting Arts Gifts magazines.)

If you are a new, or hesitant, free-motion quilter, the technique Candy demonstrates in her new Workshop is a great place to start learning. Why? Well, Candy believes in stitching so that the hand of a human being is evident; she doesn’t want her stitching to look too perfect or mechanical. She likes the sense of movement created by the repeated lines, and stresses that these sketches look better if they are slightly imperfect. 

Candy spends a lot of time demonstrating how she stitches her motifs – birds, vessels, and botanicals – while she talks through what she is thinking about as she stitches. This is very valuable for the beginner free-motion stitcher, because she shares tips, as well as practical advice about when to snip your threads, how fast to move your needle and your hands, and how to visualize the motif you are creating. 

In one of the chapters, she shows photos she’s taken of botanical subjects, and talks about how she closely observes what she sees before stitching it. 

Then she shows you how to assemble these stitched motif pages into a beautiful sketchbook where you can preserve your motifs. Just as artists work in sketchbooks as a way of developing ideas and working through problems before they begin a major piece of art, Candy uses her stitched sketchbooks to preserve motifs, see what works and what doesn’t, and determine if the thread and fabric colors play well together. Then she goes on to use her motifs in other projects.

While Candy doesn’t mention this, I think one of these sketchbooks would be a beautiful gift that could be personalized for your favorite gardener, teacher, or bride and groom.

Candy is very enthusiastic and supportive, and offers great advice to make beginners feel at ease: “The freedom that you feel once you are secure in your subject matter and secure in your free-motion sketching skills gives you that flow you really need to get … fluid lines. Definitely don’t think that you are going to be perfect the first time around. You need to sketch, sketch, sketch.”

GIVEAWAY!
Win a DVD of Candy’s workshop and a botanical motif that Candy stitched. Leave a comment after this post and tell me a little bit about why you’d like to win. I’ll draw one winner at random at 6 p.m. Eastern time on March 26. Make sure you leave me your e-mail address, or some way to reach you. And check back on March 27 to see if you’ve won. Make sure you visit the other bloggers listed at the end of this post for more chances to win. On the last day of the blog hop, Candy is giving away a DVD copy of her workshop, as well as all the fabric to make a sketchbook in the Autumn Splendor palette!

Note: If your comment does not show up right away, please don’t freak out. Please post only one comment. I now have to moderate/approve all comments, because I was getting a ton of Japanese porn spammers leaving comments on my blog! 

 We have a winner! Susan Isaacson has won this give-away. Thanks for reading, everyone!

Candy’s Blog Tour
Wednesday, 3/12 –  Vicki Welsh of  Field Trips in Fiber (entries end 3/24)
Friday, 3/14  – Diane Doran of Ooh! Pretty Colors
Monday, 3/17 –  Victoria Gertenbach of The Silly BooDilly­
Wednesday, 3/19 – Susan Brubaker Knapp of Blue Moon River
Friday, 3/21 – Beth & Kristen of Sew Mama Sew
Monday 3/24 – Melody Johnson of Fibermania
Wednesday, 3/26 – Candy Glendening of Candied Fabrics

Your chance to check out TheQuiltShow.com

I’m in episode 901 of TheQuiltShow.com

If you have never watched the online television show “The Quilt Show with Alex Anderson and Ricky Tims,” now is your chance! Alex and Ricky are celebrating International Quilting Day beginning today – Friday, March 14 — through Sunday, March 16.

Everyone who signs on to TheQuiltShow.com will have free access to more than 160 shows featuring some of the top quilting instructors in the world. It’s the perfect way to watch and decide if you want to subscribe (I think you will; it is a fabulous value for everything you get.)

You can also enter a prize drawing for a chance to win wonderful fabrics; the grand prize is a Bernina 550QE!

You can start with my show, Episode #901. I demonstrate a traditional needleturn block, and a small art quilt, both featuring nests:

New thread sketching article in Quilting Arts magazine!

I have an article in the new issue of Quilting Arts magazine! If you don’t subscribe, you can order the April/May 2014 issue here. The article includes instructions and a pattern for making “Red-Spotted Purple” (below). I’m writing a series of articles on thread sketching for beginners; the second installment is scheduled for the next issue, June/July 2014.

“Red-spotted Purple”
19.75" x 16.75"
Copyright Susan Brubaker Knapp 2013

“Lepidoptera” on the cover

A slice of my piece “Lepidoptera” is on the cover of the February issue of Genetics in Medicine, the magazine of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics. A friend from my graduate school days at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's School of Journalism, Karyn Hede, is News Editor, and suggested they use my work on the cover. Thanks, Karyn! 

It is based on a photograph I took of a Painted Lady Butterfly. It is a wholecloth quilt, painted with acrylic fabric paint and then quilted. Lepidoptera is the order of insects that includes butterflies and moths.

More “Beauty on my morning walk”

If you’re my Facebook friend, you know that I try to post photos each day of “Beauty on my morning walk.” Most are photos I take around my neighborhood when I walk my dog. Some are photos I take where ever I am traveling. It’s my way of encouraging my friends to seek out the beauty around them, and to feel grateful. Here are some recent photos. If you are on Facebook and have not found me yet, please send me a friend request here!

Interview with “the Dishcloth Diva”

Deb Buckingham, the “Dishcloth Diva,” interviewed me today on her blog. You can read it here. She interviewed me after it was announced that I’ve been named as the next host of “Quilting Arts TV.” Deb is a full-time knitting pattern designer, author, and fiber fanatic. She enjoys knitting cowls, socks, afghans, scarves, and dishcloths.

I told her that I make super-simple knitted dishcloths, too. Here are some of mine:

And after I looked at her beautiful designs, I think I need to run out and get one of her books, because her designs are fabulous!

The Sochi Olympics patchwork quilt

My husband, who works for Street & Smith’s SportsBusiness Journal, and I always have fun looking for crossover topics between his line of business – sports – and mine – art and quilting. Here’s one! Have you noticed the beautiful graphics at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia? It is a patchwork quilt!

I absolutely love it. You can go here to read more about it, and see examples of the beautiful handcrafts from Russia that went into the design. Here is information from the press release:

“The Olympic patchwork quilt, developed by Bosco’s creative department and given to the Sochi 2014 Organising Committee, will be the official Look of Russia’s first Winter Games.

Our goal was to represent a diverse range of emotions and feelings, connecting concepts like Motherland, Family, Culture, Time, Olympism, Peace, Nobility, Friends, Memory, Honour, Dreams, Beauty, Freedom, Pride, Warmth, Happiness, Greatness, Reliability, Victory, Creativity, Hospitality, Creation, Future, Russia, Planet Earth.

Every region in the world is proud of its unique origins, and it is no different in Russia. That is why there are so many different local traditions, songs and crafts that highlight the individuality of their creators, each valuable in its own right. Bosco had a wealth of choices to represent Russia’s rich diversity, but in the end we settled on something familiar, warm and welcoming: the patchwork quilt.

In the concept design, every patch was infused with the history and personality of traditional crafts from each of Russia’s 89 regions: in a single tapestry we combined Uftyuzhskaya painting and Vologda lace, Gzhel and Zhostovo painting, Kubachi patterns and the flowers of Pavlo Posad shawls, Mezenskaya painting and Khokhloma, Yakutsk patterns, fabrics of Ivanovo and other distinctive Russian patterns. That is how we arrived at a modern, distinctive and unmistakeably Russian Look of the Games.”

I’d kill for a jacket with these graphics (but at 19000 Russian rubies, the equivalent of more than $550, I think it is out of my price range!). You can check out the apparel by the company that designed it (BOSCO) here.  

I have several handcrafts from Russia, brought back by friends and family. But I really want to go to Russia now, so that I can collect more!

I’ll be on Mark’s radio show Wednesday

 

I’ll be a guest on Mark Lipinski’s “Creative Mojo” radio show Wednesday! Tune in and join us!

NOTE: The show didn’t air on Wednesday, Feb. 12, as the other guests were affected by the snow storm on the east coast. I still did my segment with Mark, and it will air on Wednesday, Feb. 19 instead!