Innholdsfortegnelse for June - July 2016 i Quilting Arts Magazine

CONFESSION: Some days, the only creative thing I do is to decide what color thread I should wind on a bobbin. As someone who works in the quilting industry, you’d think I would be a bit more productive in the studio. Recently, one of my quilty friends called me up and asked if she could drop in to see the latest quilt I am working on. “You must have so much fun trying all of those techniques, patterning cloth, and making samples. But what about your current art quilt projects?” Well, that’s not quite how it works, I thought, as I eyed the massive pile of scraps scattered around my cluttered workspace. Truthfully, it has been quite some time since I focused with real intention on creating art. Between all…

At QUILTING ARTS, we celebrate contemporary art quilting, surface design, mixed media, fiber art trends, and more. We are always looking for new techniques, innovative processes, and unique approaches to the art of quilting. We’d love to hear from you! What are we looking for? • Artists with inspiring portfolios of work to be featured in our In The Spotlight, Artist Profile, and Q&A articles. Show us your work and tell us your story. • Essays for “the last word” (up to 800 words). • Unique techniques, new ways to use existing tools and supplies, and ideas we’ve never featured before. • If you are teaching, blogging, or exhibiting your art quilts, you probably have great ideas to share! How to submit • Write a brief description of your idea…

Cathy Wiggins’ art quilts are at once cutting edge, and yet familiar. Mixing artful machine stitching with expert thread drawing and fine finishing techniques is nothing new for fiber artists whose work is shown at international quilting competitions. However, the fact that Cathy’s show quilts are stitched on supple leather, colored by hand with dye or shoe polish, and embellished with grommets and harness findings makes these pieces stand out from the crowd. Originally a traditional quilter, Cathy took up needle and thread in 2002 after leaving her corporate career in the telecommunications industry. Soon she began designing her own pictorial quilts and never looked back. Her early pieces included a series of 14 “Just for Fun” whimsical quilts. After seeing the reaction to one of her early competition quilts…

Dear QUILTING ARTS, While reading the April/May issue, I realized two of the articles—“Handmade Nests Two Ways” by Susan L. Edmonson and “Noodles of Fun” by Colleen Harvey—applied to a small quilt I had just finished. I used multiple techniques to make the quilt and I started with a pattern made by enlarging a photo. I thread-painted the bill, eye, legs, and feet, and used fabric markers for shading. I machine appliquéd the bird to the background. Western gulls’ nests are loosely built so I did not fill it in as much as Susan did in her article. I cut my own pasta fabric for the nest, rather than getting it at a quilt shop like in Colleen’s article. I have used skinny strips before for grasses and such but…

Warm weather is perfect for getting outside for some creative mischief. Getting messy with paints, experimenting with cyanotypes and sun prints, or creating hand-dyed fabric in outdoor buckets. Of course, many artists work inside, too, but there’s something about the longer days, chirping birds, and sunshine that stimulate creativity. New growth, new work. For years, QUILTING ARTS has featured articles on surface design and dyeing fabric and we frequently hear from readers about their experiments with the techniques they have learned. How about you? Starting with white fabric, we challenge you to show us what you can do and share your work in a Reader Challenge fabric swap. Wow us! mark your CALENDAR AUGUST 15: Your fabric must be received in our offices by this date to be a part…

we are quilters. We sew faster than a speeding bullet. Our design skills are more powerful than a locomotive. And, we are able to leap obstacles in our sewing rooms in a single bound. We are super quilters! Well, maybe. Some days we might need a little help. If you could choose a super power to have, what would it be? Or, perhaps, you already have a super power waiting to shine through. In the December 2015/January 2016 issue of QUILTING ARTS, we challenged readers to create a 9" × 11" art quilt interpreting the theme “What’s Your Super Power?” We hope you enjoy this gallery of their work! “I Can Do This!” LINDA MOON DAUGHTRY • CHERRY LOG, GEORGIA “My super power is that I can take a piece…

“Six textile artists from the Folsom, California, area—Donna Brennan, Deb Cashatt, Sue Garmston, Penny Hanscom, Denise Schmidt, and Gayle Simpson—are all members of the 236-member Folsom Quilt and Fiber Guild (FQFG) as well as charter members of its offshoot art quilt group called Quartz. The six of us decided to form a smaller group to create collaborative works, and expand our horizons past local quilt shows by exhibiting in art galleries, other art venues, and large national and international shows. We dubbed the group Q6, and in 2014 began creating our first collaborative work, a 84" x 54" art quilt called ‘Hillside Houses.’ We began by brainstorming ideas. From the stack of photos and drawings considered, a photo of houses on a hillside in Pacifica, California, taken by Bill Brennan,…

WITH A HEART PUMPING FULL SPEED, I GUIDE THE SCISSORS THROUGH THE PACKING TAPE LIKE A FIGURE SKATER CUTTING ACROSS FRESH ICE. New crafting supplies have arrived and my afternoon has suddenly booked up. Oh yes, there’s nothing like shiny, new materials to help learn a cutting-edge technique. Fast-forward a few weeks and there’s another delivery of shiny, new supplies and the excitement of the previous delivery has dulled a bit. Sound familiar? Countless times I have dropped a small fortune on learning a newfangled technique only to forget about it or decide I didn’t care for it after all. After several go-rounds of the same behavior, I’ve begun to realize a simple but hard truth: my best pieces of work have come from the most basic supplies. Finding simplicity…

Sandi Colwell is a quilt pattern designer and writer living in Massachusetts with her husband and three daughters. Her projects have been featured in several magazines and she is the author of Little Quilts For Big Occasions. She maintains a quilting blog and podcast. quiltcabanapatterns.com Susan Purney Mark is a surface-design artist living and working in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. She is most often inspired by her travels. She has a Quilting Arts Workshop™ video, “Fabric Embellishments with Color, Surface Design and More,” has appeared on “Quilting Arts TV,” and is a frequent contributor to Quilting Arts. susanpm.com Ana Buzzalino is a fiber artist and quilt instructor living in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Her recent work focuses on surface design such as fabric dyeing, rubbings, stamping, and monoprinting. She is a…

when I started using images in my work, I was looking for a way to edit them simply, without using photo editing software. I wanted to be able to use photos and layer images but I found that when you copy a photo onto a background, you get a “rectangle” even if what you see is white background on your photo. (figure 1) I needed to find a way to remove the background so the text would wrap around the photo. I discovered a simple way of editing photos in PowerPoint®, a slide show presentation program developed by Microsoft®. I will use as an example a photo of a crow that I took in Halifax a few years back. I love crows, and this one seemed interested in posing for…

MATERIALS • Flat work surface (See ‘Make a portable work board’ for tips to make a surface that can move with you around your work space.) — Foam board, 20" × 30" — Plastic sheeting (I use Grafix ClearLay® Plastic Film.) • Prepared for dyeing (PFD) cotton fabric, 2 fat quarters • Masking tape • Liquid dishwashing soap (I used Dawn®.) • Transparent fabric paints in black (Black Lake) and assorted colors (Cardinal Red, Lemon Yellow, Cobalt Blue, Light Green, Turquoise, Fuchsia, and Parma Violet; I used Pēbēo Setacolor.) • Small plastic containers • Plastic spoons • Water • Flat bristle brush, 3/8" • Paper towels • Foam brush, 2" • Foam brushes, 1", at least 1 for each accent color of paint • Pressing cloths, 2 Optional • Plastic…