More Butterflies

The arrangement of the bays and the plastic bands that kept viewers back from the art made it impossible to take a full photo but this was a lovely butterfly applique.

Barbara Barrick Mckie

There was a little bit of a butterfly theme at a spot in the show. Here's one by my one of my favorite quilters: Barbara Barrick Mckie. Her work is amazing.

Group Quilt Detail

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Detail of the quilt below that shows the parts, each worked on by a different quilter.

Group Quilt

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Eight-person butterfly group quilt. In the last year I've seen a few of these and I enjoy them every time.

Crazy and Embroidery

Details of the crazy-framed blocks below. The maker embroidered images of Victorian women reading in the block centers and fainter images that could be from particular works of fiction along with authors and titles on the crazy frames. The theme is particulary appealing to me!

Crazy Quilting Framing Embroidery

Another new crazy quilt, blocks or crazy framing for embroidery. This one with sepia-toned themed images.

Detail, The Wise Virgin

 

Log cabin blocks.

The Wise Virgin

A very small, 11 by 18 inch quilt. I think it is photo transfers, embroidery, applique and some log cabin-type piecing.

Detail, Crazy Quilt

Detail of previous post's picture.

Pastel Crazy Quilt

 

This was a small quilt. The sign said about 25 by 68 but it looks "squarer" than that. I'm pretty fastinated by crazy quilts. I've always liked the idea of them more than the reality. The Victorian ones tend to be dark and for all their use of scraps, have a similar feel one to another. In the past few years ones that have distinctive, lighter qualities have begun to show up. This one is all light colors and there is quite a bit of tatted lace included. Summary of the artist's statement: Part of a series of dragonfly quilts, made from vintage kimono panels with stenciling, stamping and beading.

Here They Come: Quilt Odyssey Quilts

This is the amazing 3-D quilt. I don't think I've seen another like it. I've tried to give a sense of the sculptural quality in the photos. It hangs about 4 inches out from the wall and the stars and the hanging pocket areas have depth. That is they are constructed to create valleys or, conversely, to stand away from the wall and make three dimensional shapes. The wonderful thing about this piece is that is it fully constructed, it isn't just a surface that shaped move off of, the piece has a two planes about 4 inches apart that the shapes are engineered between. Interesting and unusual.

Quilt Odyssey in Hershey

The ride over and back was pretty, found great raspberry softserve! The quilt show included the $100,000 Quilt Challenge (updated to remove link since it is no more!) quilts to date and specific Quilt Odyssey entries. There were not as many quilts as I've seen at some other shows but still a good trip and a good show. The quilts were set up so that clear plastic tape made an X cross in the middle of each viewing bay. This prevented visitors from seeing the artist's statment in many cases. If I get really ambitious I'll transcribe some of the statements into this blog when I post the pictures starting tomorrow!

Hershey Show

The Hershey Quilt show is this week! Something to look forward to and lots of new pictures! I think I'm going Thursday.

African Prints, detail

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Detail of the quilt, below, showing an applied piece that looks to be a portion of a motif cut directly from African fabric.

Using African Fabric

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I buy African fabric when ever I see it and can afford it. I suspect other quilters do also but I don't have a lot of ideas about what to do with it. It is characterized by large scale prints and I know I am always reluctant to cut these up because they are so graphic as a single piece of fabric. I like this use. We can see the whole motifs in some places and in others the artist has chosen to fragment the images.

Alphabet Detail: L and M

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Detail of the quilt below.

Alphabets

  

IMG_0023v2 Originally uploaded by LauraMoore

I really love alphabet representations of all sorts: children's books, fonts, monograms and this quilt.

http://www.LibraryThing.com

I heard Abby Blachly, a Librarian from LibraryThing speak on Friday. She gave a great demo of the site, pointing out features I didn't know it had and really got me intersted in it. I've had an account for a year or so and really never did much with it but this weekend I spent time adding more books, looking at the tools, reading group posts and viewing the profiles that have many books in common with me! It was pretty compelling!

Goals

As my birthday month approaches I am becoming vigilant. I've learned that it is a good time to think about change and its progeny: milestones and goals because this is the time of year when it comes to call whether I've planned for it or not. What about:

• At least one entry in this blog per week?
  
• I'd also like to finish my zinnia quilt
• Post more pictures (any pictures?) of my own work even though it isn't good enough, is derivative, isn't finished and so on (!).
  
• Write more posts that are creative and fun. One creative post per month?
  
• Take an art class this year.
  
• Be less stressed.
  

Roses in May

Here are the roses about 10 days ago. When I look at these pictures I can almost smell them. When I owned a house for the first time I planted 5 old-fashioned type roses in the back yard. I don't ever remember them being this beautiful.

Eyes

This may be my new favorite mural.

Quilt and Embroidery

 

Incorporating embroidery onto simple patching and bright color.

My Spring Garden

 Spring garden of April 14th. 

It looks much different now. The irises really bloomed and they are a lovely purple/black. The roses are amazing also. This is the first year of real rose exhuberance. The non-climbing one is showing some yellow leaves already in the interior if the plant. Why, why? I guess I'll spray for fungus? It is to early for bugs I think.

Hoopty or Hooptie

Either way I love the word!

More Home Improvements

Here is the wall paper mural in the entry. It is faded and torn on both sides but I can't bring myself to remove it.

Home Improvements

House projects have taken up much of my time this winter. When all the work was done on the house and I could actually CLEAN again I had a burst of energy and painted the entry way. It turned out pretty much as I thought -- or maybe hoped - - it would. There is a picture of the ceiling here also. We have a new (to us) light fixture and need to take the electrical risk and hang it.

Another Pallette, another motif

Full Quilt Image

Here is that other, more autumnal, pallette I'm drawn to that includes yellow, golds and oranges. I also like the leaf shape. I like the in and out skwiggles when I draw it and I like the variations in shape that all, in the end mean leaf. Then the leaves make me think of tree and the roots trees have under the ground (more skwiggles) and the outdoors and nature. All comforting beauty and associations.

Detail

Detail

"Composed" sunbursts

Here are more variations on the sunburst, sunflower theme. These are not in the calendar format. They are "composed" on the quilt plane. The sunburst is there but there are also independant spikes and triangle shapes. Flying geese is another favorite pattern. Plus these both have spirals and nested rings. Great quilts.

What about the colors? I do love bright colors on black and where there are sunburst shapes there is yellow, gold and orange. I like these colors popping agains the black and the blues but I also like them blending with browns and taupes and khaki-influenced greens.

Classics

It occurs to me that I also like the classic quilt format, and irregular variations on it, more than I actually think I do. By the classic format I mean the sort of calendar layout -- design elements in a regular or irregular grid. The two quilts below are examples of each. It is important to me to know what I return to as pleasing over and over again because I do like so many different kinds of fiber things that sometimes I can't make a choice about what direction I want to go in when I'm designing a project,

Favorites

These are some favorites from today. This one is faces and descriptive words.

Detail

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Detail

Detail

I seem to like quilts with women's faces on them.

The Quilt Fest of New Jersey 2007

Spent the day at the quilt show. I didn't buy any fabric. I've been out of my sewing room so long I feel like I need to get reacquainted with what I have but I took lots of pictures! The quilts were beautiful of course and I came home with my head spinning with ideas as usual. I did buy some thread.

This particular quilt was wonderful. I came back to it many times. It is a round robin. A group of eight cut up the Renoir painting The Boating Party into eight pieces and worked on their portions individually, not seeing each other's work until all the parts were completed and assembled sort of.

One of the neat things about it is that the pieces aren't joined together but are little mini quilts, finished all the way around that just hang next to each other like a puzzle. The results are really spectacular. Everyone's technique and materials were different. Some used cottons some "fashion fabrics," satins and beads. There was traditional applique and free motion quilting and embroidery. All the interpretations were consistently "realistic." It did receive a ribbon.

The OPAC Sucks

What more is there to say?

Tokyo International Quilt Festival

Tokyo International Quilt Festival
Originally uploaded by movinghands.

Beautiful pictures. It is great to see them here since I can't go there!

Snow in Philadelphia

It snowed today. Not in that obsessive, East Coast-Nor'easter way that scares people but slowly, lazily, drifting in spirals to the ground. That hardly ever happens here and I had forgotten how it can be delightful. The flakes fill up the space around you and make you aware that it is there.

Too busy

I've been to busy to blog. Good things that have happened:

• I took a nine patch class and at least settled on the fabric. I think I've cut and sewed enough nine patch units for 2 quilts.


• The elections! The House AND the Senate! It gives me hope.


• We have tile on the bathroom floor.


• Tommorrow is Friday

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.