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Quilting Your Feelings

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 Unexpected news, sudden events, and loss are hard to deal with and so I channel my feelings into quilting projects.This piece is called ‘Blindsided’ and expresses my response to being the last to find out a very dear person was moving away.  In this design I explore the destruction of calm, the ripples and rips in the fabric of life that happen and hurt. I used colored pencil to create the weightless bubbles and Derwent InkTense pencils to shade areas.  I used raw edges in the rips, and turned edge appliqué on the outer stable rim of the circle. Stable, stationary borders box in the central chaos and make a weighted base to hold the design steady. The complementary limited palette of blue and orange creates tension and impact, as does the explosive batik fabric and tiny ditsy fabric.  Designed to be a wall-hung art quilt, the finished size is 30 x 40. While art quilting is about stories, the story doesn’t have to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Some stories ...
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Butterfly May

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 As I continue with creating one new original art quilt a month I was drawn (pardon the pun) to an art project I did in college a long time ago.  In  one of my college classes, I was assigned to create a design based on a real object. The task was to use the object as a design inspiration - not to illustrate it! That was a new way of thinking for me. I selected a butterfly as my subject. The second part of the assignment was to paint our designs - AND we were only allowed to use red, yellow, and blue - plus black and white. We had to mix colors to get all of the shades and tints. AND we had to work within the boundaries of good design principles and apply the paint in a professional manner, and, and, and.....  I learned so much from this one project, things I still use everyday.  Playing off of this college project I used my butterfly design as an inspiration. to create an art quilt. Working on a white on white piece of fabric, the finished design ( 41.5" x 69")...
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March Quilt - The Guitar Man

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 The Guitar Man Quilt We all have our gifts. Things we do that bring comfort and joy to others.  Things that come naturally to us. Our gifts are our voice and it doesn't always speak in words. The Guitar Man art quilt is about a man who had an elderly mother. This woman was kind and gentle, taught school most of her adult life, was a devote Catholic, prayed for others often and lived alone until her son moved in to help her. He was a musician, not famous or wealthy, just a man who loved music and played where ever he could. Together they crafted a life of mutual love and caring. As she slowly departed this world, he would sit by her bedside and play music for her. Together they drifted on sweet cords and soft melodies until her life was over.  The Guitar Man quilt was created from her clothing and depicts her son bringing comfort and joy to her using his gift of music. This quilt celebrates lives well lived and love unconditionally given. 
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One Art Quilt a Month - 2025 Quilting Goal - What I learned in April

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APRIL: The Star Dust Motel the story When you need a break, you are always welcomed at the Star Dust Motel.  Pull-in, check-in, and sit a spell watching the stars come out.  Snuggle up in a pile of cozy pillows next to warm lamp light and read a while. Everything may be a little old, but it feels so familiar.  At the Star Dust Motel time stands still so you can catch up. This quilt, The Star Dust Motel, took a lot of chopping, sewing, more chopping, re-arranging, and more sewing to work itself out. I had a big idea with lots of moving parts. I wanted to capture a place and a time period that was less crazy, slower, kinder. I wanted humor and unexpected whimsy. I wanted to use retro colors and fruity fabric and a cat instead of a person. I combined painting on fabric, raw edged  appliqué, piecing, sashing, FMQ quilting and lettering. My take away from all of this is that there are an infinite number of ways to tell a story in fabric.  Quilted fiction, as I call i...
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The UFO's have Landed!

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  I love the term UFO, and it so neatly described the unfinished projects flying around my quilting studio. I took a workshop with Audrey Esarey a while back where we did these amazing radial designs that were paper pieced - it was such a learning curve (pardon the pun) for me. I managed to finish one of four units and have a nice 30" square to which I have added borders and hung unfinished on the wall. I look at it daily. Someday it will be finished, it just has to decide what it wants to be.  And I will wait patiently! These vintage blocks were a UFO project from 1947and only joined the ranks of a finished quilt in 2024.  It took 77 years for them to find their place! Now it looks like they look so perfect in this quilt, as if they were made for it!  And maybe they were!  What UFO projects do you have flying circles in your sewing studio?  Do they make you happy or drive you mad?   
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What to Do Next

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Having just finished the Cat Claus quilt, I am at a crossroads with what to start next. December gives me room to work on new ideas.  I am definitely going to create more of my cat quilts, I even coined a phrase for them - Quilted Fiction. Some themes that are dancing in my brain include: Kitty Cat Cafe, Cat-a-comb, Catnap, Catfish, and more. Words are my springboard that launch me into creating.  Take for instance the word 'ring', is it a sound or something you wear on your finger, or maybe just a circular shaped - like ring of fire? Or the words knight and night, or bawl and bald and ball... You see what I mean? Word confusion is like a beehive of fun! And my second treasure chest of joy are phrases like, "You are what you eat", or "a bee in your bonnet", "true blue", or one I heard in England- "Mind the crack"!!!  Quilted fiction comes alive when everyone gets it and smiles, so cheers to filling 2025 with art quilts filled with miles o...
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A Fine Line Between Chaos and Creativity

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I taught middle school art for 18 years. That was chaos. It was one pubescent drama after another accentuated by administrative directives that set a new standard for crazy.  I danced that jig daily and loved it! Curiously, in the midst of this chaos, creativity flourished.  The years proved that creativity needs the unexpected, the uncontrollable, the spontaneous. I found that a controlled and linear life puts us in a coma of complacency where routine and  systemactic procedures sterilize our minds turning us into beige mush. So cross the line, there's nothing fine about it and discover your creativity among the mess!                                                                                       .
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