A Class With Pamela Allen!

My days have been pretty busy here between printing and art quilting. My Year of the Horse prints are drying and will show them here after they're off and running and corralled at their new destinations with members of The Baren.

But there's been lots of art quilting fun! I'm taking an online class with one of my favorite art quilter's, Pamela Allen.  She has a new Etsy site that's worth a trip over to see at https://www.etsy.com/shop/Pamelart.

It's a very exciting class that's a constant challenge, with new lessons every day. It's called ABOUT CONTRAST and  nothing is quite finished yet but I can show the beginning stages.

I started out cutting and laying in some of the basic shapes and realized before long that I needed a lot of different values of B&W fabric - more than I had.  So, up I went and printed up some new fabric with old hand-carved soft block....and as you can see below, it worked!

The entire foreground is my hand made on the fly fabric as well as the back of the chair on the left.

Finally, the top is finished with the "piecing" of it...it's actually fused on so it's really a fabric collage.  To finish it I will Free Motion Quilt it and then go in with some hand embroidery before  binding it in some way.  I'll probably stretch it onto some stretcher strips.   And I'm on to the next!

Serendipity Study One

Believe it or not, it took me the entire day yesterday to make this little 10" X 7" art quilt.  I started with a gelatin print I made a few months ago. First, I made the stencil and it went from there.

Gelatin Print

 I traced my stencil onto parchment paper, reversed it, went over the image again in pencil, adhered it to fabric that was adhered to Misty Fuse, cut it out after it cooled down. Same technique for each of the shapes.  Ironed each piece onto white cotton then free motion quilted it between batting and backing. I then "faced" it to finish:  facing tutorial.

Art Quilt - fused raw edge.

Close Up of art quilt.

Another Share and a word about ego.

I subscribe to an artist's newsletter that I often get too busy to read but today I opened it up and it was so good I wanted to share it with other artists out there and those who love an artist too!  It's about what he calls the  "ego force" of an artist."  Here's the post from Robert Genn.

Another share from this summer's LQF, a fabulous art quilt by Betsy Abbott of Andover, MA (please forgive that it's not my best photo but I thought it was still a great quilt to show).  I so love birds in art and this is a very powerful looking old bird!



Wild Ravenworld by Betsy Abbott

 

 

Heirolglyphics Interrupted by Patricia Washburn

Today, I want to share a pieced quilt by Patricia Washburn from Taunton, MA titled "Heiroglyphics Interrupted #1.  This is such a well executed piece of art and a showcase for a fabric collage.  The FMQ design is perfectly chosen to add another dimension to the piece, so much so that it seems equal to each of the other elements of this quilt. The black and white shapes make a great foundation structure that also leads your eye all the way through it and perks up the color choices.  This wins an award in my mind for exceptional design in the abstract art category!  I aspire to this quality of work.

At the Lowell Quilt Festival, 2013

 



 



Winter Woods Finished

Finally finished Winter Woods:

Winter Woods WIP

This winter scene is still heavily in progress, shifting and expanding and taking on new shapes.  It's quite a stretch on the learning curve for me but it feels more like an extension of previously, though fairly recent, developed skills rather than something completely new. The heavy thread painting is something I've never done to this extent but it does feel like I'm "painting" with thread. 

The foreground shapes are not in their permanent positions yet and a border around it is in progress.