• Category Archives Events
  • Quilt Show This Saturday

    I have been invited to show a few of my quilts at the Columbia River Piecemakers Quilt Show this Saturday. Click on the link to get the details – time, place, admission fees etc. They are giving me four quilt standards for my quilts and now I have to make the incredibly hard decision of which quilts to choose out of the literally hundreds of quilts large and small I have in my collection.

    I have decided to hang two large quilts and devote the other two stands to panels featuring a collection of smaller quilts, one will be devoted to my landscapes while the other to my ethnic inspired quilts. Still, even with that narrowed down parameter, I have to choose a crosscut of my work that will hang well together and yet provide some visual variety. This will not be easy and I know what I will be doing today and tomorrow.

    One of the quilts that will be on display at the Columbia River Piecemakers Show this Saturday
    One of the quilts that will be on display at the Columbia River Piecemakers Show this Saturday

    On a related note, a friend of mine – Irena Swanson – is having a one woman show of her work at Reed College in the Vollum College Center Lounge. The lounge is used for meetings and is not readily accessible to the public at predictable hours but she is having an artist’s reception this afternoon (I’m sorry, I should have posted this with more warning) from 4-6 pm. She will also have an open house demo of her unique piecing technique a week from today on September 14 from 2:30 – 6:30 pm. If not the reception tonight, perhaps you can attend the demonstration, it is well worth seeing.


  • Upcoming Expo Classes

    It’s hard to believe that a whole year has gone by – where did it go? Summer is almost over and Fall will be here before we know it and with Fall comes NW Quilting Expo.

    Once again, I have been invited to teach and give a trunk show at Expo and I want to take a few moments to give you an overview of the classes I will be offering, the show class brochures have to condense the class description into one paragraph and often that is not enough to cover the class content adequately. Last year, my classes filled fairly well, some better than others but all had enough students that none were cancelled and I hope to keep that up for this year as well.

    I am offering three classes – two half-day classes and one full-day class and a trunk show/lecture as well.

    The Trunk Show takes place on Friday September 23 from 10am – 11:45am and will encompass a general sampling of my work over the years starting with some of my earliest pieces and how those led to what I create today. During this journey through fabric and thread (and even a bit of mink) I have explored a far ranging array of styles and techniques that span the globe in their inspirations; it will be a virtual smorgasbord of my work.

    My full-day class – Free Motion Magic – will be on Wednesday September 21 from 9am – 4pm. This class is well suited for beginners who have never tried free-motion quilting and more experienced quilters alike. The class will focus primarily on free-motion quilting and will cover a variety of techniques to use for various designs. After this class, you should be able to approach any design you wish to stitch and decide which of the techniques will yield the best results for that design.

    Free Motion Magic Sample
    Free Motion Magic Sample

    On Thursday September 22, I will be teaching Man-Doodle-Dalas. You may already be aware of the whole Zentangle® movement that inspires people to doodle, even those who don’t believe they have an artistic bone in their body can learn this ‘stream of consciousness’ style of dancing with a pencil. These free-form doodled mandalas make wonderful motifs for quilting and in the class I will show you a variety of approaches to create and use them. You will learn to doodle your own ‘dalas’ and also receive one of my Man-Doodle-Dalas on a wash away stabilizer to stitch along with a handout with a few other mandala designs (in case doodling your own is not your cup of tea). This class will run from 9am – noon.

    Free-Style Medallion #2 stitched without a template
    Free-Style Medallion #2 stitched without a template
    Free-style Medallion stitched without a template.
    Free-style Medallion stitched without a template.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    On Friday September 23 from 1pm- 4pm I will be offering Simple Sashiko Landscapes. This is the class I’m most excited about. I learned to hand embroider as a child then abandoned that in favor of quilting for much of my adult life but I have rekindled the passion for hand stitchery in recent years. My love for embroidery, like my love of quilting, spans a world of techniques – mostly ethnic. Years ago I discovered Sashiko (Japanese Hand Stitching) which I took to like a fish to water. Many of you may have been hearing lately about a rather new stitching fad called ‘Slow Stitching’. Well, it’s not really new at all, anyone who has explored Scandinavian Darning, Indian Kantha or Japanese Sashiko, knows this meditative sewing technique has been practiced for centuries. What’s new is old and what’s old is new. What’s new in this Sashiko class is the subject matter for the stitching. Sashiko is usually applied to a wide variety of traditional Japanese designs ranging from all-over patterns to Komon (Japanese clan crests). In this class you will apply this slow stitching technique to creating little stylized landscape vignettes. There will be a couple of designs included in your handout with a variety of interchangeable tree designs in case you want to customize your own scene.

    Sashiko Trees, rendered on a piece of  antique Kimono silk
    Sashiko Trees, rendered on a piece of antique Kimono silk
    Sashiko Landscape #1
    Sashiko Landscape #1

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    I do hope you will come join me for one of more of these classes and/or the trunk show, I promise you will leave the event with new skills in your repertoire or at least inspired to explore and take your own quilting to new heights.

     

    PS: Here is a sneak peek at my NW Quilting Expo show entry – Vintage Falls. It is yet another rendering of my Multnomah Falls pattern this time in Japanese Taupe fabrics (I LOVE those Japanese Taupes!) My goal was the try and recreate the image in a sepia tone presentation just like one of those old time photographs. It is hand and raw-edged machine appliqued with some textural embellishment. The photo does not do it justice – you need to come to the show and see it in person.

    Vintage Falls - my latest incarnation in my waterfall series
    Vintage Falls – my latest incarnation in my waterfall series

  • More Student Work (and a bit of my own)

    The photos of projects from my April workshop in Las Vegas keep trickling in. I must say – not only am I pleased with the  beauty and creativity of their work but also with their follow through; I always ask students to send me pictures of their finished projects but rarely get as much response as I have from the Desert Quilters in Nevada. The two images here are from one student who did two of the class projects and is working on a third that she promises to send me when it is done.

    Now onto my latest workshop: I taught my Animal Totem class to the Westside Quilters Guild  last weekend, I had a fabulous turnout for the class. I did manage to snap a few pictures before the end of the class and hope to get more as students complete their quilts. Several (more than usual) chose to hand applique their projects so those may take awhile, it seems these days most students prefer a faster method but as a dedicated member of the ‘Secret Society of Handworkers’ (not really a guild – I’m being facetious) myself, it always pleases me to see hand applique is not a lost art.  My heartfelt thanks to the Westside Quilters for a successful class.

    Some new additions to my own collection of  Small Wonders are two samples I finished for my Journal Quilts classes. I hold these once a month at two shops in the Portland Metro Area – Pioneer Quilts in Milwualkie (the first Friday of each month) and Sewn Loverly in Wilsonville (the last Thursday of each month), In these three-hour sessions we explore techniques a bit more on the artistic side than traditional quilting, Stamping, embroidering, beading, painting, fabric manipulation, embellishing… we poke our noses into just about anything fiber arts related and the students get an opportunity to learn and try techniques on small projects (I call them ‘Small Wonders’) that beats experimenting on a larger project and finding that it’s really not your cup of tea and then relegating it to your UFO pile. If, on the other hand, you do find you like the process, you now have yet another skill you can add to future projects and expand your horizons.

    Last month at Pioneer Quilts, we explored an approach to embellishment I was inspired to from a report I heard on NPR. It concerned an approach to composing music based on a sort of DNA model and what is called The Music of the Spheres – a composition in which each celestial body (or musical instrument) follows its own repetitive cycle or beat that might be static on its own but blended together with others forms a complex pattern. I wondered as I listened to the report if there was a way I could express this visually with embellishment and my artwork ‘Music of the Spheres’ was the result. The previous month we explored working with flat piping at both shops and the design approach was inspired by the abstract work of Dutch artist Piet Mondrian who created a series of works consisting of squares and rectangles in primary colors divided by graphic narrow black lines (we used the flat piping here). My instructional layout yielded an area larger than the rest of the arrangement that cried out for a motif so I hand embroidered the iconic ‘She Who Watches’ petroglyph on my sample. The last image is of yet another Bella Vista landscape, this one of Mt. Hood portrayed in moonlight.

    I will be giving the Bella Vista Landscapes workshop in a few weeks for the Crook County Quilt Guild over in Prineville, the Mt Hood pattern will be one of several pattern options.