My First Quilt

     I realized that this my 104th post! I missed celebrating my 100th. So I'll take the time now to reminisce.      

     About 14 years ago, I was shopping for a comforter for our bed and couldn’t find one that I liked. A quilt shop, Quilt Shop of DeLand, had just opened up in our town and I was walking by and stopped in. I asked if it was difficult to make a quilt, and Judy, the owner, said she was offering a weekly class at night on how to make a sampler quilt that would be a perfect way to start. So I decided to take the class and make the sampler for our window seat in the bedroom and then later make a quilt for the bed to match. I had an old Singer Touch and Sew Machine from the 70’s and the class was a machine sewing class.

     I bought the book to go along with the class, Start Quilting with Alex Anderson and fabrics under the direction of Judy. I remember her telling me that such and such a color would make it “pop”. She was right about all the fabric choices. Now I know that I was choosing light, medium, and dark values. And I was choosing some complimentary colors, too. But at the time, I had no art training and had no idea about those terms or concepts. I just followed the directions of the book and her advice. Both were excellent. I still visit the shop whenever I need advice on color choices or just the right fabric.

     I found out then, that I was a rule breaker, though. We were supposed to put on one border and I put on three. Not much of a rebellious act, but a hint of my stepping out of the box tendencies to come. I think I did a very good job with the piecing and making the quilt top. But I did a terrible job quilting it. I should have just done stitch-in-the-ditch, but I tried to get fancy and do free-motion when I had never done that before. My stippling on that quilt is pretty ugly. But it sits on the window seat with pillows covering some of it, usually with some clothes on other parts of it, and two cats often sitting on it when we’re in the room so the quilting isn’t noticeable. Here’s a photo of it in its home with the pillow covers I made to match it.

Sampler quilt with pillows

     As for the bed quilt, I never did make it. I eventually found a comforter that played well with the sampler I made. And as for my sewing machine.... well, Judy had art quilts hanging in her shop, and a few years later I saw an issue of Quilting Arts Magazine with a quilt by Laura Cater-Woods on the cover and I said "I want to make those!" So I bought a Bernina, started taking taking workshops, read everything I could about art and art quilts, and started a new chapter in my life. 

     If you’ve been following my blog, you know I’ve been working on building a cohesive body of work. Here is a photo of the latest quilt in that series with rock cairns. It’s almost completely made with my monoprinted fabrics. 

Rising

And here's a detail photo of it.

Rising detail

      I’m amazed how much I’ve learned over the years and a lot of it is from the generous sharing of other bloggers. I hope, when I show you processes on my blog posts, I show you enough detail so that you can learn from me, too. I still do love traditional quilts and would like to make them, but there just isn’t enough time in a day to do it all. So for now, my main art love and focus is with making art quilts.
I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find more art quilt blogs. Please make comments so that the artists know that you stopped by.
     By the way, this post is part of a contest from Quilting Daily. If I win, I get to choose five prizes from the Interweave store. These are the five prizes I've chosen:

1. 12in x14in Gel Printing Plate  (as you know I make most of my own fabrics from gelatin monoprinting now and I'd love to try the commercial plate)

2. The book  Mark Making  ( I'm really getting into hand-stitching and would love to learn more)

3. The book Mixed Media Technique for Art Journaling ( I don't really do art journaling, but I could apply some techniques to fabric and it would be fun to go through the exercises in this book.)

4. The book Journal Fodder 365 (It has 365 prompts and exercises that seem fun to do that I could apply to my designs on fabric, I'm sure.)

5. The DVD Texture Transformation Stitch Alter Recycle (I love the art of Natalya Aikens and would love to learn some of her techniques.)

     The contest winner is announced in mid-April so we'll see then.

     

    

Taking Photos of Quilts Part 1

     I used to think that my small Point-and-Shoot camera (Canon Power Shot) was fine for all my photography. When I compared my travel photos I took on it to the photos my husband took on his professional camera (Pentax K7), mine looked as good (sometimes, better) than his. My photos were sharply in focus and the colors were true. And the detail shots from my camera were wonderful. He didn’t own a macro lens, so he couldn’t take close-up shots and my camera has a button in the Program to take close-ups. 

But I discovered my camera’s weaknesses when I took quilt photos:

1.) When I took photos of my quilts from a distance to get the whole quilt in the photo, they seemed adequate, but when I looked at the photo on the computer monitor and zoomed in, they seemed a little fuzzy. (And I was using a tripod and a 10 second delay.) When I looked at quilt photos from art quilts of some of my favorite artists, I could zoom in on their photos a great deal and their photos stayed sharply in focus. Sometimes, I could even see individual stitches on their quilts when I zoomed in.

2.) On some of my quilts, the camera had trouble reading the correct colors. It didn’t matter if I took the photo outside in the daylight or inside. 

So, to solve problem number one:

     I asked for help from a Yahoo group from SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Associoates) that I belong to and I got a lot of good advice from them. Various members told me that I probably didn’t have my aperture on the camera set high enough (which means I didn’t have my camera set to focus on both the depth of the valleys produced by the quilting and the top surfaces of the quilt at the same time.) 

     I did some research on-line about point-and-shoot cameras and found out that they do not have adjustable apertures. They only have one aperture setting. That works fine if you are taking landscape photos, or portraits where you aren’t going to be zooming in, or close-up shots where everything you want is at about the same depth. But it doesn’t work for quilts because quilts have depth due to the stitching and quilting. It’s okay for photos that you are going to only use for your blog, but not for your website where you want people to be able to zoom in to see the quality of your work to make sales. It’s not okay for photos for calls for entry where you want the jurors to be impressed with your work, either.

     The only answer I found is to use a camera that you can adjust the aperture setting to above 8. I ended up using my husband’s camera for the whole shots and using an aperture setting of 10 to get clear, crisp photos. And of course, I had the camera on a tripod and had the camera set for a time delay. I used a 12 second delay. I set the tripod at a distance so that the quilt fit well into the photo and had space to crop later using photo software. I had the quilt pinned to my design wall, which is white felt glued onto insulation board.  DESIGN WALL  I had the pins pinned onto the back of the quilts so that they could not be seen.

Here I’ll show you an example with a quilt called "Three Round Bales". I it made several years ago with the theme of a hayfield. (I was influenced by Gustav Klimt at the time, after a trip to Eastern Europe and made several art quilts with the Klimt influence.) Because of many beads, wires, and stitches, it has a fair degree of depth in places, and needed to have a camera with a high aperture setting to get a good depth of field. 

Hayfield art quilt photo with the Pentax

1

quilt photo with my point-and-shoot camera

You can see that the second photo is adequate, but isn't in focus everywhere if you zoom in on it.

And since my detail shots with my point-and-shoot camera came out so crisp and focused I just couldn’t figure out why the whole quilt shot kept coming out fuzzy until I found out that my camera only had the one aperture setting in it.

Here is a detail shot with my little point-and-shoot camera.

Detail showing wire and beads

You can visit my website ReginaBDunn.com to see the other detail shots of this quilt and to read the background information and see the other Klimt-influenced farm hayfield quilts I made at that time (go to the Landscape section of the Gallery).

Next week, I’ll post how I solved problem number two.

I hope I’m not boring you with technical details. I just know how I struggled with this when I was trying to enter quilts into calls for entry and couldn’t figure out what was going on. I hope it helps some of you.

By the way, if you join SAQA, you get to belong to their Yahoo discussion group and you can search back through all the topics that have ever been discussed there. I have learned so much from this group of artists on an amazing variety of topics. You can ask any question and that same day it will be answered in detail by several people. And that is only one of the membership benefits. Visit SAQA.com/ to learn more about membership.

And here is a link to a book that is very helpful about photographing quilts and editing the photos called Digital Essentials by Gloria Hansen

I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can see other art quilt blogs. Please make comments on their posts to let them know you visited.

An organization worth joining

If you are an artist in the fiber arts or want to be, you should consider joining SAQA (Studio Art Quilts Associates). My membership has helped me so much. As a member, you regularly receive full color journals with photos and wonderful articles, e.bulletins and e.newsletters with calls to artists and info on exhibits in your area, eligibility for juried member exhibitions, ability to participate in the Visioning Project to help you reach your artistic goals, access to mentorship conferences, and you can listen to all sorts of webinairs. I listened to one called Blogging 101 by Melanie Testa that helped me understand the blogging world. Thank you, Melanie. Professional artists receive even more benefits than those. Visit SAQA.com for details.
Just visiting the site is a sight for sore eyes. You will see beautiful art quilts scroll on by. I often go there just to relax.