Last Finish of 2013

Last finish of the year - winding down 2013 attempting to finish so many things!

 

  I've been at this one for over a month and it's finally finished and bound with a facing on the back.  Full size is 41.5" X 32.5", but these are smaller detail shots.

 

Hand dyed shibori on cotton. Machine quilted and hand embroidered with running stitches.

Hand dyed and batik.

Sections hand painted with Jacquard fabric paint, embellished with hand carved designs.
 

Goodbye to a year that had its fill of grief and sorrow, but also had many good times and a lot of persistent labor on and progress in my art!

 

I started off the year with a carving that foretold the focus of the rest of the year.

 

This year I entered my first submissions to a SAQA quilt show and was accepted by the curator !

 

I also showed at the Boston Modern Quilt Guild Exhibit at the LQF 2013.

 

We've wound down a group of book artists who finished our second collaborative book, this year was a fiber art book.  You can see my finished book here, although I still can't publish all of the pages just yet.

 

I've submitted a small art quilt that will travel with the SAQA Trunk Show during 2014.

 

I finished a quilt for my grandson Jack that I still haven't taken a finished picture of!  And for Josh.

 

I started a new small, private group of local art quilters which has turned out to be a fabulous collection of talented women, all doing their own unique fiber art. Collectively we have some high hopes for our future!

 

I HAVE BEEN BUSY!  And that's just some of the highlights and I've been sitting around on this computer still in my bathrobe for waaayyy too long. 

 

I better start preparing my New Year's Eve Dinner.  On the menu: Ceasar Salad,  Onion Soup, Beef Empanadas, and Fruit Salad with Gingerbread Cookies for dessert! 

 

 

 

A Rippling Quilt

I've been working on an abstract piece that has a lot of quilting going on in  straight lines across the width of the quilt, both handwork and machine stitching.  There's also a variety of fabrics into the mix on this one, some are pretty thick pieces of hand painted fabric, some burlap and white cotton are commercial fabrics, the rest are hand dyed fabrics I made months ago.

When I finished I noticed that there was enough rippling happening to disturb me because it would keep it from hanging flat.  So, I went onto the SAQA list group and asked for some advice.  It turned out there's one way to avoid it that I learned - stitch only in one direction!  Allright!  For the next time.  But there were a few good options to straighten it out after the fact as well.  I tried the path of least resistance first - the simplest method was to "block" it.  And it worked  - hooray!  Easy, too.  Just took a lot of time to put that many pins into it.  If I hadn't just picked up a new box of pins, I would have had to run out to get them - lucky me and my impulse to buy these little accoutrements to the quilting habit.

Here it is all pinned up and drying:

I still have to bind or face it and I may have to do it again afterwards but that's not a problem - it will lay flat when it's finished.

Soy Wax Batiks

It is a glorious day out there today in New England!  They don't get much better than this!  A great day to hang my freshly batiked fabric out on the line in the sun!  It's my first batch of the season.  As usual I used soy wax and 2 different Pro Chem MX blues.  One, a cerulean blue and the other, an alpine blue, although they are very similar. Some will be overdyed soon, some may be painted over...who knows!