100 Days, 100 Nights

100 Days, 100 Nights
40" x 40"

Here is my entry for Dinner@Eight's new exhibit this year, Patterns.  I am so happy that my quilt was juried into this exhibit!  Yay!  It will premier at the Houston International Quilt Festival, Nov 3-6.  

Serendipity.  I was making a different quilt (which is not finished yet), and when cutting and stacking all the blocks, I saw a really cool and unintended pattern emerge.  One that fascinated me enough that I wanted to do it instead.  I took a picture, and then made the top for the other quilt.  And though I wanted to continue working on it, this other idea got stuck in my head, so I set the big one aside and cut some more blocks.  Putting all the colors together was the fun part!  It is always so surprising to me that while attempting a random arrangement, patterns will emerge!  At first, I thought the only pattern was the shape of the blocks, and that the colors were random.  It reminded me of how every day is 24 hours, but each day looks different because of the choices we make and things that happen to us.  Even the nights are different, different sleep periods, different dreams, insomnia, noises in the night, etc.

And because this one is relatively small in size, I got to play with my new threads from Superior, Sew Sassy.  They are just the perfect weight and handling for the bigger sized hand quilting, some people call it seed stitches, others call it Sashiko stitching.  I just like the texture and find the process very relaxing.  I was also inspired by the thread.  I loved the colors and the way it feels. 

I also did not have enough of any one color for the back, so I pieced this from the leftovers:

It is fun to try out new ideas for the back, just some extra design practice! Here it is relaxing on my couch, I call it the "glamour shot"!  Ha!

A Day at the Lake

A Day at the Lake
12" x 12"

I Love this little quilt!  It has been donated to the SAQA auction this year, so if you like it, you could bid on it and get a chance to have it for your very own!  The auction runs from Sept 19 to Oct 8 and you can click here to learn more about how it works. The auction is a yearly fundraising event because promoting art is an expensive task. And though the members pay expensive membership dues and entry fees, it is not nearly enough to cover all the expenses, and thus the fundraising begins! SAQA represents a lot of artists and has a lot of traveling exhibits to many, many places.  If you haven't seen the SAQA website yet, check it out.  There are many beautiful art works to browse through, and perhaps one of the traveling exhibits will be coming close to you soon! They also offer many pieces of art for sale if you desire!

The inspiration for this one came from two places.  I have recently remodeled my studio and in the course of moving all my belongings back in to the studio, I discovered my stash of hand made batik pieces.  The second source was from an inspiration I had to make a giant piece for the exhibit Stories of Migration.  I never committed to making the piece though because of it's size and the ensuing shipping costs and difficulties.  And, I was not interested in making the idea smaller!  I wanted to represent fleeing refugees, in origami paper boats.  I thought the metaphor to the actual flimsy-ness of the boats refugees use for dangerous water crossings was right on point.  In fact, as I tried to fold boats out of fabric, they kept falling apart.

This quilt is a more uplifting and recreational take on the idea.  For the boats, I solved the falling apart dilemma with a few little tucks of Mistyfuse in some of the places.  For origami, that would have been equivalent to cheating with glue!  However, for my little quilt, it made it all work out, so I remain enamored with the miracle known as Mistyfuse which allows many of my dreams to come true!  The rest of the piece was just putting together elements from previous quilts I have made.  It could be considered working in a series, as I have done the little pocket buildings many times before.  I still like the colorful nature and texture of working with these little blocks, and then finally filling them with the little people.