Time Flies and Art Updates

I can't believe it has been 5 months since I posted updates. Time really flies when you are busy!

The Alzheimer's art show at Lover's Lane UMC was wonderful. We had a few pieces sell and I'm proud to say that "In Flight" was one of them. The luncheon reception was great, getting to talk to church members about the art and about our walk with Jeff's Alzheimer's Disease.
Here are a few pictures from the show.

Shattered Curves hung with the
atrium as a backdrop

One wall of the show - MRI Mirage
and In Flight on this wall

Dallas Area Fiber Artists members enjoying the show.

This week I was able to end the drought of not being in the studio. I basted a quilt a few days ago and yesterday I switched up and pulled out an art quilt I started a couple of years ago and went back to work on the applique' process. Several years ago, Jeff and I vacationed in Charleston, SC. Love that city and all the history and architecture. We took a photo walking tour one day and I took so many wonderful pictures and was able to start looking at things a different way. One picture I took was of a pebble stone walkway. The texture and colors really drew me in. Here is a picture of my end of day process yesterday. I'm going to place it on hand dyed cotton batting, the batting will show through and give an additional texture to the piece.

I have more art news to post, but due to time, I'll post it as soon as I get a moment. 

I've been pondering the idea of separating my art blog and my blogging about our journey with Alzheimer's Disease. I realize many of you want to read about both, but there are some that may want to just read about my art journey and some may just want to read about our Alzheimer's journey. So, as soon as I can get it set up, look for another page on my blog called "Alzheimer's - Rushing Style".

Things I Have Learned...

I’ve been working on my latest quilt “Down the Drain”. I used one copy of the pattern to place behind my white base fabric to use to position my applique pieces properly. At one point I wasn't pleased the way the flow was coming across, so I started “unfusing” (aka, peeling off) some of the pieces (so thankful for Misty Fuse!). Ugh, the black ink from the pattern had transferred onto the back of the white fabric and was showing through.  Lesson learned, watch the way I fuse from now on. I did grab a new piece of white fabric and transferred the other pieces over, without the pattern behind the fabric.

Down the Drain - in process

I like the way the quilt is flowing now and I’m creating most of the pieces without the pattern. Here’s a peek at what I have accomplished so far. My deadline for this quilt is growing closer, so I need to get busy and get back in the Studio for some serious fusing time.

When I was frustrated with the black ink transferring to the white fabric, I had to step out of the Studio and do something different. So, I made my way down to the Dye Studio and tried a few “sink dyeing” ideas I had been thinking about. When I was about to pull the fat quarter out sink I went looking for my drying racks. Hmmmm, where were they? Mr. Wonderful has been a little OCD about straightening the garage lately. Second lesson learned that day, when Mr. Wonderful comes to me and says, “Look how much more room we have around your car”, I need to start asking where my drying racks are and my other treasures in the garage. He had done it again, stored “my stuff” in the upper cabinets where I can’t reach them. He wasn’t using them, so they could be stored out of the way, right? My drying racks are now safely (I hope) stored under my dye table.

MRI Mirage

I have completed “MRI Mirage”. Here is the final picture of it. It is ready to be entered in the DAFA / Alzheimer’s show. This is my favorite quilt, right now. I love the dept of the colors and how the deep center draws you in.

Back to the Studio I go! Have a creative day everyone!

Where has the Month Gone?

Where has the month gone? I can't believe it it only 9 days until Christmas. I've been busy shopping, wrapping and planning for this week and next. This little quilt is one I did for the Dallas Area Fiber Artist group I am in. We have a silent auction each year to raise money for our group and this was my contribution to the auction. I had such fun with it. It is hand painted fabrics, appliqued to hand painted fabric. The vintage stamps (1946 Christmas stamps were to support the VFW National Home in Eaton Rapids, Michigan) were scanned in and then printed on ExtravOrganza by Jacquard. The brown grass is hand painted cheesecloth and the snow is raw silk fibers. Everything was fused down with MistyFuse. I had such a great time making this little quilt that I am going to make a few more and for different seasons.
Well, I'm off to get ready for a party and ready for all of our family to be here next week, so I hope you have a safe and wonderful holiday season and are able to pass along joy to each person you greet!

Genesis 1 Quilt

I have started working on my Genesis 1 quilt again. After taking a class with Paint Sticks at the Houston Quilt Festival I have decided to use the paint sticks in the "space" part of the quilt. The last few days I have been testing out designs to see what I like and what I don't like for the quilt. I have also taken away some of the hand dyed silk pieces, because they just weren't working very well in the overall design, so here is what I have so far.You can see in the first picture that I have just lightly used gold and silver paint sticks to soften the black background. I want the "space" to keep it's infinite feel and not fight with the major color pieces of the quilt.
The second picture gives a little more detail of the background image. I used leftover floor tiles to give the textured background
The last picture shows some of the testing I have been doing with color images, stars and galaxies. I printed out several pictures from the Internet of actual galaxies and star formations to work on these. If I'm going to create my vision of how God created, then I should use pictures of the actual galaxies and stars that He did create, right?
Hope you enjoy my journey with this quilt!

Store Sample Quilts

Monday afternoon on the way to my Dallas Area Fiber Arts meeting I stopped by the Bernina of Dallas store to pick up some supplies. To my pleasant surprise I was able to bring home several of the samples I had made for the store. Most of them have sleeves on the back, but a few do not. So this afternoon I am going to put sleeves on the back of three of the quilts and get them ready to hang in our stairwell gallery. I’m so excited to have these back and to be able to hang them in my house! If you want a close look of these quilts, they are in my gallery.
I still haven’t quilted the Pumpkin BOM I made earlier in the year, but I think I’m going to hang it “As Is” for now, just for the season. I’ll run the edges on the serger so I don’t have any fraying issues. Hmmmm……I may do that with the Batik Sampler BOM I did too. I love these quilts and just hate that I haven’t had time to quilt them.
I am also tacking up fairy costumes for two of my granddaughters to wear on Halloween. All I have left to do is put Velcro on the wings and the back of the costumes. They are so excited to be fairies and then to be able to play dress up in these costumes later. My other two granddaughters are going to be fairies too, and our little grandson is going to be Peter Pan. What a fun night it is going to be!

Journals in the Making

My afternoon time ran short today, so I decided to use come of the scrap batiks I have. I hate to throw away scraps and have a huge bin full of them. Some of the scraps already have Misty Fuse or WonderUnder on the back of the fabric, so it's ready to use! I hadn't used my stamps and Paintstiks in a while, so I thought I would paint some flowers on the front and then just doodle on the inside a back of the journal.


To protect the flowers I used Misty Fuse and adhered a blue piece of chiffon to the top. On the insides and back I used my Fabrico markers and a Bic Whiteout pen to doodle.

I found these great little recycled paper journals at Target. For Mother's Day I adhered some of my hand painted fabric to the front and back and then taped pictures of the grand kids to the pages for my mom, sister and DIL. They loved them and loved that I used my fabric!
Next I'm going to cover my sketch book. I'm going to try some different techniques for this tho. Hey, have a great weekend and I'll be back at you soon!

Pumpkin Quilt Top Complete!

Finally!!!!! I love the way this turned out. I didn't want to use the same fabric for the sashings and borders. The border fabric is one of my favorite fabrics in my stash. Now, I have to quilt this huge quilt, it is roughly 71"x74". I guess this will be one of my summer projects!!!
Off to do some things around the house, or I may relax with a movie or show that I taped, or do some Pilate's/Yoga to stretch out. My shoulders are achy from sitting over the sewing machine for the past several days....See ya'!

Pumpkin Quilt Day

Well, I've been to Pilate's already this morning and feel great! :) I have one block and the header block to finish up today on the Pumpkin Quilt. As long as there are no major distractions I should be able to get these done today and start working on the sashing!

Pumpkin Quilt Progress

This morning started off with 8 blocks stitched out, let's see how many I can get finished today! I feel charged up since I finished the Sunflower Shawl yesterday.

The Quilt Studio Sign

Well, The Quilt Studio Sign is done, without any spelling mishaps! The only mishap that I have not is the "new" external hard drive we bought to house all of our photos decided to die after only one week. So, thank heaven for who ever invented digital camera's! I just took another one and here it is! Now I hope that our "computer dude" can "undelete" the pictures from our main computer that I deleted when I put them on the external hard drive.

This next picture is of the dress I made my little Nickola today. She's our oldest granddaughter and she loves to wear dresses. This dress is made from the "The Little Vintage Jumper" by Favorite Things. She just loves it, now if the Texas weather would get warm and stay warm, she can wear it! It suppose to be freezing again tonight, this is the time of year when the themometer rides one of the roller coasters at Six Flags!
I've cut out another dress for her that hopefully I will be able to finish tomorrow and then Wednesday we will wait for our new grandson to join our family!

Cosmo's Condo Complete!

Well, I actually got Cosmo's Condo complete today. The Quilt Studio sign will wait until tomorrow, my sinus/ear infection would only let me finish one thing today. After pressed the letters back, in the correct order and no additional letters it was ready to hang! Instead of putting a traditional binding on the sign I decided to stitch a multi-colored ribbon on the edges. The ribbon goes so well with the batik fabrics that I used and I like to use different finishings on my art quilts. After I finished the re-application of the letters my "Mr. Wonderful" put three black grommets across the top for me. Then we hung the sign quilt with nails and colored the nail heads with a black Sharpie.

Medicine Warning Labels

Any of you out there suffering with a cold or the sinus crud that has plagued me, my family and most of North Texas, and may be taking cough medicine that has a warning label on it cautioning you not to mix with alcohol and not to operate heavy machinery, beware, we need to petition for additional labeling. I think we need an additional label "Use caution when appliquéing." Yes, it happened to me. Now most of my family will tell you that my spelling has always been on the side of "creative", but my husband and my DIL both looked at the "Cosmo's Condo" sign and no one caught the extra "s" until after I was completely done and ready to hang (see Raw Edge Applique' posting and you'll see my error!). I thought something looked odd when I was ironing the letters down, but just couldn't figure out what it was...you know when you look at something so much the error is hard to pick out. Well, thank goodness the sign is raw edge appliqué. I carefully picked off the COSMS and repositioned the COSM and ironed them back down, carefully. Since I quilted the sign with black thread and it is going to be hung above eye level in the laundry room (aka Cosmo's Condo), I didn’t have to requilt any of the sign. Now, if I had put a decorative stitch or satin stitch on the sign…I would have started over completely. It’s not a big sign and picking out would take longer than making new one.
I did have another incident a couple of years ago when one of my daughters' friends was having a baby girl. Val kept vacillating between the names Mia and Ava and the last Amanda Jo had heard it was going to be Ava. Well, the quilt was a name quilt and I had appliqued Ava on it, but hadn’t put the decorative stitch on it yet. I received a phone call from Amanda Jo telling me she was at the hospital visiting Val and baby Mia, yes, Mia. I told her not to sweat, that Val could change the name! Hahaha! No problem, I picked off the first two letters and replaced them with the correct letters. Mia loves her quilt and looks like a Mia, not an Ava.
So my warning to all of you is, let your three year old granddaughter practice her spelling by looking at the sign before you iron it down! And, make sure the baby is here and the name is on the birth certificate before you finish the quilt!
We all have to learn something new everyday!