Apparently I love art/word challenges

My hand tendonitis is pretty good. It’s not completely gone, but is much better. Now I just have to get motivated to work on the Halloween quilt. I have been making bread again and my hand has been OK doing that.

While I have been taking it easy in terms of working on quilts I’ve been thinking about all the art challenges that I have participated in. Seems that I have done a lot of them. I guess I must like the challenge of coming up with a quilt that fits a particular word or idea. Years ago I belonged to a quilt guild and I never did the quilt challenges that others participated in. I wonder why I never did them. 

In 2012 I found an online challenge group that made a 12 inch by 12 inch quilt every other month. A word was chosen and you had to make a quilt representing that word. I was in the group for 2 years. I don’t remember the words and have given away most of the quilts. Here they are for 2012 and  2013. Apparently we only had  5 challenges in 2013.

When the 12 by 12 wasn’t enough of a challenge I found an online 15 inch by 15 inch challenge group in 2013. It was basically the same process as the 12 by 12 group. I did that for 2013 and only one in 2014. I dropped out of that group because one member was especially insulting of other people’s work.  She never specified who she was insulting, but I took it personally. Also I was taking Elizabeth Barton’s year long master class in 2014. Each month was a lesson and a challenge. That was already a lot to deal with plus I was still working.

The master class in my mind was also an art challenge. Each month we had to make a quilt that fit the lesson. The lessons were things like line, monochromatic, value, motion, or a quilt based on a photograph. We made 10 quilts that year. We received the lesson on the first of the month, had to submit 3 sketches by the 10th, have it blocked out by the 20th, and finished by the end of the month. I still have all of those quilts. Here’s my summary of the class. It was definitely important for my art quilt development.

https://chrissquiltinguniverse.blogspot.com/2014/12/this-years-master-class.html

Since I retired and joined a local art alliance I have taken on the challenges for the recycle art show. You have to make an art piece from recycled material that fits a certain word. I have really enjoyed those. My favorites have been those made from plastic bags or my dad’s drafting vellums. I love the first 2 below.

From the Inner Mind to the Outer Limits

Dad Built Pittsburgh

Abandoned Cement Works

This year I also did the word challenge for a local art museum. My word was wonder. This was made of fabric.

Warhol’s Lunch

So looking at all of this history I’ve concluded that I must live for challenges. I guess it keeps my brain active and my creative juices flowing. 

Thanks for reading.

Chris

The show was a big success!

Yesterday was the opening reception for my art show at the Bellefonte Art Museum. (Current exhibits). The museum is an old house in an historic Victorian town. The person that hung my show (Lori) did a great job. I was really pleased with how it looked.

It was an ego boosting experience. There were a lot of people that came through and they really, really liked my work. Of course plenty of people said I should sell my quilts. I suppose I should have put some prices on things, but am still skeptical that things would have sold. Or maybe I'm not ready to part with them yet....

Here are some photos. The first one is my friend Ellie and I in front of my most recent circle quilt.  I am the grinning fool on the left. My energy quilts got a lot of attention. I don't think people had seen anything like them before. What was also amazing is how many people got that they looked beautiful from a distance, but then when you look at them up close you see they reveal an ugly problem. A lot of people really liked the toxic barrel one....go figure!

I never took a photo of this quilt that was also in the show. This one got a lot of attention.  It is based on a Frank Lloyd Wright window.  I almost wish I had put a price on it. That price would have been $600 ($450 plus some added for the 30% commission the museum takes). Not sure people would have payed that much!

Visions Past 19 in by 26 in

Thank for reading.
Chris

“Taking its Toll” nearing completion

Linking to Nina-Marie.  http://ninamariesayre.blogspot.com/

The blocking and trimming are done. Now to move onto facings, sleeves, and a label. The size is approximately 36 inches by 13 inches.

I am going to add some French knots to the teal barrel in the right front. The fabric got a little ratty after tearing out some quilting stitches here. I was going to do some hand stitching anyways so the knots will cover a bit of the rattyness and add that hand stitching. The thread for the stitching is brown to match the rust on the barrel in these spots. It will not be noticeable from a distance, but will become a detail up close. Rust dyed fabric is not very forgiving and I'm thinking that the fabric will deteriorate with time. But then I'll be gone and I won't care! I might add some French knots in some other spots as well.

Here are some close ups that show the fabrics and also a summary of the techniques used in the quilt.

The quilt is totally fused and the pieces were stitched in place with invisible thread. The fabric was rust dyed fabric that I painted over with setacolor fabric paints in teals,blues, purples, oranges, and yellows. The browns are all from the rust. I rust dyed a lot of fabric back in 2015. The labels were created in Photoshop and then printed with my ink jet printer onto some yellow and orange rust dyed fabrics.  The numbers were stenciled. I wanted the numbers and the labels to look worn. Most of the quilting threads were King Tut superior threads. Maybe this will be next years entry into the juried art show here!

Thanks for reading.

Chris

Blocking in progress

Well I finished quilting the toxic barrels and it is now blocking. With our rainy humid weather who knows how many days it will take to to dry!  Then of course I get to trim it and sew on facings and sleeves....yuck.  I can't believe how many times I changed thread color while quilting this....certainly much more than a normal quilt.  At any rate we are now on the home stretch!

Thanks for reading.....

Chris

Toxic still/spill life progressing

I think I have all the rims done and now need to make the labels and stencil the numbers. The label you see with the fire is just a trial at making a stencil. I just put it up there to get an idea on how a label would look. It is not what it will finally look like. I am thinking of using the flammable label, the nuclear label and the skull and crossbones. Although I'm not sure if the skull and crossbones is too obvious. 

Toxic still/spill life

I need to make a label for the back of my piece for the juried show at the arts festival. I guess I will do that first thing today since I have to drop it off on Tuesday. I am one of those people that are guilty of not putting labels on things!

Linking to Nina-Marie.

http://ninamariesayre.blogspot.com

Thanks for reading.

Chris

"Visions Past"......remembering Frank Lloyd Wright

"Visions Past" 19 in by 26 in

I am posting a day early.....we are heading out of town and I won't have time tomorrow morning before we leave to post.

I fell in love with the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright when I saw Falling Water  https://www.fallingwater.org/ back in the 1970's.

When I thought about the theme of this challenge being nature the idea that popped into my head was to do one of his stained glass windows that looks out onto a nature scene.  I happened to have the tree fabric that I had printed at Spoonflower this past spring and thought it would be perfect.

I drew out the placement lines for the leading and the dark blue sheer fabric right on the tree fabric. The leading and the blue sheer fabric were fused to the tree fabric and then it was heavily quilted. My husband came up with the title.

"Visions Past" detail

Original tree fabric used

Here is the fabric.....I wish the piece of fabric which was only a half yard was bigger. Making a bigger window would mean I could piece it rather than fuse it. Keeping the fused leading which was between 1/8 in and 1/4 in wide was hard to keep straight. You can see that I was not completely successful. Of course piecing would not have been perfect either. I need to move away from geometric quilts so I don't have this level of required accuracy to deal with! Pieced and with less quilting would be how I would redo this idea.

I love the simplicity of the design of Frank Lloyd Wright's windows. They are elegant rather than gaudy as some stained glass can be. I love that you can see the surrounding scenery through the windows.








Here is an article on Frank. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Lloyd_Wright

The window I chose to use as my inspiration comes from the Willits House built in 1901 in Highland Park, Illinois. You can see it in this photo. My fabric was a blue gray so I went with dark blue for the colored glass pieces instead of brown.










I did this as a challenge for Art with Fabric blog hop hosted by Alida.   http://tweloquilting.blogspot.com/

This is the 4th time I have participated in the challenge. Thanks to Alida for doing this again. Here are the others...

May 2016, October 2016, and May 2017.

Also thanks for reading my blog today. I know it has been a long time since I posted anything. I took a vacation from sewing for a while! I am still figuring out my new sewing machine and at times miss my old one. I guess no machine is perfect. They need to consult me when they design a machine. I am sure we all feel this way. There were things I liked better on my old machine and things I like better on my new one. I guess no surprise there.

These are all the other artists for today and tomorrow so make sure you check them out. Also if you go to Alida's blog you can see the list of artists for the entire week.

Wednesday, October 11th, 2017 

Janeen: http://quiltartdesigns.blogspot.com/
Andrée: http://quiltinglearningcombo.blogspot.com
Carol: http://www.quiltedfabricart.com
Karen: https://tunaquilts.wordpress.com/

Thursday, October 12th, 2017 

Kat: https://www.katknapcrafts.com/
Terry: http://www.terryaskeartquilts.com/
Anita: http://quiltlovefordomesticfelicity.blogspot.com/

Chris

"Beantown"

"Beantown"  25 in by 16 in

I was challenged by Alida from Art with Fabric Blog hop (see links at the end of the blog) to create another piece of fiber art based on an artist as inspiration.

The other two times I participated in the challenge last year can be seen here:

May 2016
October 2016


This time the challenge was to use a woman artist or a woman in an art piece as our inspiration. I chose 2 fiber artists....Charlotte Ziebarth and Wen Redmond. I love their work with layering photos and using photo editing apps to make interesting photos to print on fabric. I used their techniques to create the Boston image. I also created several other fabrics that I will reveal at a later date.



I chose a photo of Boston where my daughter lives and used Photoshop as well as the ArtStudio app for the iPad to edit and create layers for this image. The photo was layered with an image of a tree, a colorful background as well as several signs seen around Boston. I also used several filters that I did not bother to record. I now realize that that is probably a good idea for future reference. This to me was a lot of playing to get something that I liked.

Here is the tree and colorful layer, Unfortunately I deleted the images of the signs and cannot find my image of Boston. I kept this layer because I thought I might use it again.

Here is the final image I sent to Spoonflower for printing.

Here is the printed fabric before I quilted it.
















Here are some images of the fabric after it was quilted. I used a piece of the fabric for the label.

The quilt has already been sent off to my daughter for her birthday last week. She says it looks great on her brick wall in her condo. Her condo is in an old box factory and she has one wall that is all brick. I am still getting used to my new sewing machine and this was the first quilt that I quilted on that machine. Here is the quilt on her brick wall....looks pretty good there if I say so myself! Plus she liked it.

Check out the other fiber artists that are posted today. Alida's blog will also connect you to the artists from the entire week.

Alida from Art with Fabric Blog hop: http://tweloquilting.blogspot.com/ 

Shannon: http://imworkingonaproject.blogspot.com/

Chris: http://chrissquiltinguniverse.blogspot.com/

Anita: http://quiltlovefordomesticfelicity.blogspot.com

Thanks for reading.

Also linking to Nina-Marie and Off the Wall Friday.

Chris

Still playing

I am still playing with layering photos for the challenge. Here are some of my results....

I took my original photo from the last blog and put it into a Fragment app. Now it looks like a hot Sun in the image....global warming!

This is one of Boston. I have incorporated some signs into the image. Can you find them?

Thoughts? I might get several printed at Spoonflower.

Thanks for reading.

Linking to Nina-Marie at http://ninamariesayre.blogspot.com/

Chris

What qualifies as a still life?

"Toxic Still Life" inspiration photo

My fiber art group's challenge this year is to make a still life quilt. When I think of a still life I think of paintings of fruits, vegetables, and dishes. But does it have to be that kind of composition?  So I searched online to get the definition of a still life.

This is what I get from Wikipedia...."A still life is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which may be either natural (food, flowers, dead animals, plants, rocks, or shells) or man-made (drinking glasses, books, vases, jewelry, coins, pipes, and so on)."

So rusted barrels of toxic waste are certainly inanimate objects that are man made. So does this composition qualify as a still life? Thoughts???

"Toxic Still Life" sketch

The sketch of the barrels is one of the sketches that I made in Elizabeth Barton's master class in 2014.The lesson was to create a mood with a color scheme. That month I chose to make a wind turbine quilt instead of the barrels.

"Blown Opportunity"

This is the wind turbine quilt that I made that month. The mood is peaceful and color scheme is green and blue to show that.

What do I want to accomplish with the barrels and the jewel toned color scheme? I wanted it to look "beautiful" from a distance. However, when you look at it up close you see the tags that say poison and danger and then realize that this is not beautiful at all.

My goal this year to make quilts with meaning to add to my energy/environmental series. You can see the rest of the series by clicking on the tab under the header for my blog.

Or click here.

"Still Life with blue cheese and figs"

Or should I make a traditional still life like the one I made back in 2013?

Linking to Nina-Marie.

Thanks for reading.

Chris