Charmed, I’m sure…

My local art quilt group, the Pandoras, met today to make charms. We followed directions in the January/February 2009 issue of Cloth Paper Scissors magazine by Elin Waterston to make charms from wood, polymer clay, and shrink film. We had a ball, and got some great results.

The blue and green charms in the photo above are polymer clay rolled on a texture plate, and then highlighted with Pearl Ex powder. Below are charms made from shrink film (similar to the ShrinkyDinks I made as a kid) stamped with StazOn, Fabrico ink and Sharpie markers:


This is a wooden disc, with a drilled hole, painted with Lumiere, and then stamped:

More polymer clay charms:

Wooden discs painted, stamped and colored with a Sharpie pen (left), and one with bits of fabric stuck on with gel medium (right):


Some of these charms are headed for Cloth Paper Scissors‘ ”Charm & Be Charmed“ swap. You can send in five charms by April 13, and get five back in June. Fun!

Serendipity I

This is a small piece I made this weekend for the silent auction at the Charlotte Quilters Guild quilt show (March 20-22). I started with one of the prints I made in Janet’s open mesh screen printing workshop. It has machine quilting and hand embroidery on top. The embellishments are polymer clay.

Design inspiration at Ikea

A new Ikea store just opened in Charlotte last weekend. My 12-year-old daughter and I made a trek there this afternoon. I’d heard all the great things about Ikea, but was still unprepared ... WOW! This place is huge, and full of wonderful, affordable, well-designed products.

The building exterior is all blue and yellow, like the Swedish flag:

The Charlotte store is 365,000 square feet, and has 49 room settings, 3 model homes, 1700 parking spaces, a 350-seat restaurant, a Swedish food market, a bistro, and a chidren’s play area. We arrived around noon, and had lunch before we ventured into the vast store. The restaurant features several Swedish foods, including dill-cured salmon, and Swedish meatballs (which Lea said were excellent):

The restaurant is decorated with Ikea furnishings, including these black-and-white fabric panels:



Hung in the windows, the red ovals on the fabric panels glowed in the sunlight. Giant nylon leaves marked a small play area for children:

These lights looked like they were made from giant potato chips:

Of course, what I liked best were the textiles:













These two panels of fabric were used as curtains but they also make a bold statement as wall art:





Here’s the same piece of fabric as above, under glass in cool customizable panels that cover shelving units:

These bookshelves had wonderful frosted glass coverings etched with floral designs:

This wall light was made from compressed glass:



These bookcases had a beautiful black floral print at the back:



Cool lights for a child’s room:

Susan Shie has started a blog!

One of my favorite artists (and one of the most influential fiber artists of our time, in my opinion), Susan Shie, has just started a blog. Susan considers herself to be an “outsider artist .” Her fiber art contains lots of writing (and social/political commentary). I was pleased to see that she’s started a blog, because it will give me an opportunity to see how she works, what she is thinking about, and how her work progresses. You can see Susan’s website here, and read her blog here.

Open mesh screen printing workshop with Janet Lasher

I spent today at a workshop on open mesh screen printing, taught by my friend, Janet Lasher, in her Charlotte studio. What a fun day!

Janet and all of the students today (me, Linda Stegall and P.J. Howard) are members of the Charlotte group Fiber Art Options. Janet is a wonderful teacher. She taught five classes at International Quilt Festival in Houston last year, and has been invited back to teach this fall.

Here is a print on fabric by Janet:

and a detail of the same print:

Linda’s print featured an elegant swirl and a sophisticated color palette:

P.J. thought her design came out looking like birch bark …

… or birch trees, when turned the other direction:

Here’s mine:

Janet had done a photo-emulsion screen of a paper cut, then used Caran D'Ache Neocolor Artists’ Crayons to fill in areas before printing:

P.J.’s Caran D’Ache print was interesting on striped fabric:

Here’s my Caran D’Ache print (left) hanging up to dry with P.J.’s birch print:

Janet’s cat Apollo supervised the print-making:

Janet had the BIG set of Caran D’Ache:

This I like! Crop-a-Dile

I’ve been searching for something to punch holes through heavy plastic for a project I’m working on, and after trying a Japanese screw punch (which was a great hand tool for cutting through multiple layers of paper, but not heavy plastic) and considering the purchase of a drill press, I found it … The Crop-A-Dile! It is made by We R Memory Keepers, and it punches through plastic with ease.

The Crop-A-Dile claims to be able to punch through paper, fabric, leather, plastic, chipboard, wood, acrylic, poly and more. From what I’ve tested so far, I don’t doubt it. It’s a bit expensive (I got mine for about $35) but it is very solidly built, and it does what it says.

See the two wing-like things near the handles? That’s where you can punch two hole sizes – 1/8" and 3/16". You can set the depth of the holes using the depth gauges on either side.

It also sets eyelets and snaps using the part at the end. There are two cubes on each side, and you rotate them to get the right combination. On one cube, you can set 3/16" standard and oversized eyelets, 1/8" round standard snaps, and 1/8" standard and oversized eyelets. There’s also a flat setter “for all other oversize, miscellaneous and square-shaped metal embellishments and snaps.”

On the other cube, you do the flares for eyelets and snaps. There’s even a cone-shaped flare for odd shapes. The cushioned handles make punching and setting very easy on the hands.

It’s a keeper!

My Aurifil threads have arrived!

My much-awaited shipment of Aurifil threads (Cotton Mako 50 weight) arrived today … and they are absolutely luscious! I ordered these colors to use in “Lepidoptera.”

It’s funny how much I am crazy about thread these days. I must admit that when I just made traditional quilts, I barely thought about thread. Now that I am making art quilts, the threads I use are much more important, because they define and enrich the surface of my work. I am starting to have a thread stash, just as I have a fabric stash. When I go to quilt shows, the thread booths interest me now.



Aurifil threads are not carried by my local quilt shops, so I have not used them much until now. I got these threads to really test them out, and so far I am very impressed. I’m going to try to quilt all of “Lepidoptera” in the next few days, and then I'll post my opinions on the Aurifil threads with photos of the piece.

I have been busy with several other projects that I am not allowed to post yet (because I want to enter them in contests that make not publishing them beforehand a rule of the competition; and for other reasons I hope to be able to reveal soon!), and it’s driving me kind of crazy. Patience, patience …

The Raven Challenge

QuiltArt, an online art quilt group to which I belong, has unveiled the results of its “Raven Challenge,” designed to honor the 200th anniversary of Edgar Allen Poe’s birthday. They are very cool! Check them out; you won’t believe the diversity of styles, materials and techniques.

Many of the artists have donated their cards to the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative or to Fiberart For A Cause’s Collage Mania (which raises money for the American Cancer Society).

Virginia Spiegel is the woman behind Collage Mania, which will be held May 6-7. Hundreds of fiber artworks will be available for a minimum $40 donation, and Virginia aims to raise $20,000 in those three days. She’s already raised more than $165,000. WOW!

The Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative has raised $273,000 for Alzheimer’s research. Ami Simms, a fiber artist whose mother suffers from the Alzheimer’s started this initiative. “I think it is possible to make a difference, one quilt at a time,” she says.

Two women are behind the Raven Challenge: Lynda Thompson, online curator; and Linda T. Minton, group Collage Mania coordinator.

The Raven Challenge is named for “The Raven,” one of Poe’s most famous poems, with the well-known line, “Quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore.’”

Working with Aurifil thread

I finished the dark blue threadwork on “Lepidoptera” today and started working on the other colors. I am waiting on my shipment of varigated Aurifil thread, but I did have one spool of their Cotton Mako 28 in a varigated pink. It is a bit heavier than what I ordered, but I am so eager to dig in that I decided to use it on some of the pink areas.

This is the first time I’ve used Aurifil thread for machine quilting. The first thing I noticed is how beautifully shiny it is. I almost thought it was polyester, and checked the spool twice. Yep, it’s cotton!



The varigation is very nice on this thread, going from a very pale, almost white pink, to dark pink. In the photo below, you can see how shiny the Aurifil thread is in comparison to the blue thread, which is a Mettler solid blue.


I have heard that Aurifil thread is very strong, and that it leaves very little lint in (and on) your machine. I have not used it enough to know if this is true for me … but I have a long way to go on this quilt. I’ll watch for this, and post about it later. So far, so good!