Generous Gift and Using Up Fabric

     I was in the studio minding my own business when my husband came in with two plastic cases. I thought they were hardware or fishing tackle or something like that because he had just come home from bike riding with his buddies. He opened them up and this is what was inside!

Gobs and gobs of  embroidery floss

     "Holy moly! Where did you get that?" I asked. One of his friends cleaned out his garage and the floss was from his late mother. It was in two separate cases in random order so I dumped it all out and began to organize it by color as you see in the photo. I'm planning to keep only some of it and take the rest to my art group to give away. I can't imagine that there are any colors missing.
     The last couple of weeks I've been busy making wheel chair covers. I've made seven. I'll be traveling in the Fall a bit so I wanted to have them made through the Holidays and I found it was easier to make them in pairs. So here are photos of six of them. (I haven't taken a photo of the last one  yet.)

Night sailing

Day sailing

Modeled after my friend's dog

A request for another dog

Butterfly

Hummingbird

     I inherited that gingham fabric and wasn't sure I would ever use it, but it sure has been useful for these covers. It's very colorful as a background. Little by little, I'm digging into my stash of commercial fabrics. That's a good thing, because for my art quilts I hardly ever use these fabrics anymore and I hate for things to go to waste. I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please make comments on their posts to let them know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.

Spring Time Influences

     The birds are singing their hearts out and baby birds are making their appearances. Most of the migrants have made their way up North. Every now and then I see a few stragglers still. But all the activity has influenced my theme for the last two wheel chair covers. These are the covers for April and May. I decided it's easier to make two at a time and to make them with similar themes. Here they are posing on the back of my wooden office chair. Its back is curved, which makes it a very comfortable chair. That's why they aren't sitting flat.

April's contribution

May's contribution

Onwards to the many other ideas swimming in my head. Thank goodness they never stop arriving.

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

My Muse (One of Them)

     It wasn't difficult to think what to use for the theme of my next wheelchair cover since he is always with me in my studio. Rosie is always there, too. But she isn't quite as involved as Opus.

Can't keep him away

     Here's the finished wheelchair cover sitting on a chair in my studio. I wanted to model the other cat after Rosie, but she is a gray tabby and I felt that the art needed more color, but her personality is in the gold cat on this cover. She's a sweet, gentle soul.

It feels good to be using up my stash of commercial fabrics this way. There are so many bright, pretty ones in my bins that I forgot I had. If you want the pattern for the cover or directions you can visit this previous post on the covers.
     I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please leave comments on their posts to let them know you stopped by.

New Wheel Chair Cover

     Now that I am retired, besides enjoying making art, I want to do some kind of volunteer work. I have lots of commercial fabric that I have saved up and that people have given to me. For most of the work that I do now, I paint my own fabric so the commercial fabric just sits in the bins doing nothing. I decided to try to make one wheelchair cover a month for the residents in one wing of a local retirement home where I visit a friend. I made one for him for Christmas and posted a photo of it. A female resident a few rooms down the hall from him saw it and wanted one with flowers on it. So here is one I made for her. It is my contribution for January. Here is a photo of it hanging over a chair in my studio.

This is the part that will face the world.

This is how it would sit on the chair. The ties are on the top
to tie onto to knobs on a wheelchair. NOTE: the
reginabdunn.com is a watermark on the photo
It is not on the wheelchair cover.

This is the part that would be against the back of the
person in the wheelchair.

I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can visit other art quilt blogs. Please make comments to let the artists know you stopped by.

Blast Off!

     Here is my second wheel chair cover. (I never took a photo of my first one.) This one I made for a gentleman who used to work for NASA in the Apollo 11 project. His mind is completely intact and I visit him regularly in the retirement home. He had a stroke and is extremely weak in his legs and needs a wheel chair to get around and can't use one arm at all and can hardly use his other arm. This wheel chair cover was my Christmas gift to him.

Up, Up, and Away

The clouds and the flames are stuffed so that they are somewhat three dimensional. I hand-painted the moon and the rocket and the flames. Then I added thread sketching before I quilted it.
I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can visit other Art Quilt Blogs. Please make comments on their posts to let the artists know you stopped by.

A Remarkable Project

      I have a friend, Margaret Loomis, in my art group, ArtsEtc,  who has come up with an amazing idea and has put it into action. She saw that Alzheimer’s patients were lined up in their wheelchairs in the hallways of their nursing home and they sat with their heads down with no stimulation for several hours. To provide some interaction for them, she decided to make covers for their wheelchairs that had three dimensional art so that they could reach out and touch the cover on the chair in front of theirs. She made sure that there were no embellishments on the covers that could be removed by the patients and put in their mouths like buttons, sequins, beads, etc. She also found out that patients with dementia and Alzheimer's can be disturbed by shiny things so no glitter, foils, or shiny fabrics. She also made sure that the covers were comfortable on the side facing the back of the patient and that they are machine-washable. Here are five of the many she has made so far.

African Iris

I'm Still Me

And here's the artist!

     Even more amazing, a nurse got wind of her idea and has applied for a grant to do a study at one of our local rehab homes with an Alzheimer’s wing to see the effects of the covers on the patients and the staff. So our art group is busy making the wheelchair covers for the study. 

     I’m sharing this with you because I’m hoping you will pass this on to many others. They don’t take long to make and really brighten up someone’s world. I could see many guilds and other groups taking this project on. Even if the staff of a retirement home or hospital is cheered up by wheelchair art, it will have a positive effect on their patients.

     Here's a diagram of how to make them. It has the size for a wheelchair for the average adult. I cut batting and backing fabric the length and width of the whole thing and spray basted them together. Then I spray basted the part that would go against the person's back. Then I assembled the artwork and attached that last by fusing and finally quilted the whole thing. I attached bias tape to the edges with a zig zag stitch to all the edges and it was finished.

     My personal goal is to make wheel chair covers on a regular basis for a retirement home in the long term ward with the understanding that the staff will put them on the wheel chairs in the morning when the patients are using the chairs, and then velcro or pin them onto the curtains that divide the patient’s beds from each other in their rooms in the afternoons when they are in bed so that they can see the art on the cover when they are in bed. I’m going to sew velcro onto the cover and onto the dividing curtain if the staff will allow it. If the retirement home doesn’t like the idea, then I’ll make the covers for children at the local hospital or find a place that will want them on a regular basis. Nov. 14:  I recently found out that they cannot be put onto the curtains because the curtains are fire retardant and the fabrics of the wheelchair covers would have to be fire retardant, also. Makes sense.

     Wheelchair art doesn’t have to be as elaborate as Margaret’s. One of our group made several covers that are blocks of traditional log cabins and her covers are gorgeous. Mine is a bouquet of flowers that I made by fusing fabrics that I fussy cut and fused onto a background and then zig-zagged stitched to make sure they stayed on after machine washed. Anything that is cheerful would be appreciated. But Margaret has truly inspired us at ArtsEtc with her beautiful art and her clever and witty take on these wheelchair covers!

I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday  where you can visit other art quilt blogs. Please make comments to let the artists know you visited.