Artful Weekend

     I had a fantastic weekend of art and friends. My quilt Beach Walk is in the juried show Florida in Fabric at the Ruth Funk Gallery in Melbourne, Florida. It was juried by Martha Sielman, the Executive Director of SAQA. So my friends and I, (they were also in the show) booked a hotel near the gallery and we attended the opening reception Friday evening. What a lovely evening it was. So well attended, too. The very impressive docents circulated asking us lots of questions about our intents and our processes. We connected and reconnected with the many Florida artists who came to the event. Afterwards, we went out to dinner and discovered a marvelous part of Melbourne we didn't know existed before. In the morning, we had a great discussion about how to take get to the next level with our art as we had coffee in the garden at our hotel and then we visited a gallery and a museum.
     In the afternoon, we went back to Ruth Funk for the Gallery Walk with Martha Sielman and she walked from piece to piece and spoke about each one. Unless the artist was present (and most were). The artists each spoke about her own piece. That meant I had to speak in front of about 50 people about mine. It actually felt good to do that. It was the first time I've ever done something like that. I explained about how I chose to add lines to the sun to mimic the lines in the grasses and the shell and how I chose  to paint the patterns in the fabric to mimic patterns I would see in water as I walk on the beach. Here's a photo of Beach Walk, although you seen it before if you follow regularly.

Beach Walk

     After the Walk and Talk, we had a SAQA meeting where we had a show and tell and I took my piece that I made about a hole in a screen door. I made it for a call for entry and it didn't get accepted. Of course, I was disappointed for a few hours after the rejection notice, but then I realized that I still was very happy with the quilt. I'm going to keep trying to get it displayed somewhere. I've shown it around at several meetings and I know I'm not going to submit it to one of those shows where you can't have shown it before so you get to see it here and I've put it on my website, too.
     I was sitting in a restaurant in Panama in a tiny one-street town. The street was a dirt road with horses, pick-up trucks, pedestrians, and the occasional car. They only served one type of meal; fried chicken, beans, and rice. I was sitting at my table looking at the screen door that had a hole in it watching the flies going in and out and suddenly I realized what a beautiful hole it was. So I got up and took a photo of the hole. I knew that one day I would use it in my art somehow.

Screen Door With A View

Please visit my website ReginaBDunn.com to see my artist statement and detail photos that go with it. It's in the gallery of newer works. 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 them know you stopped by.

The Eyes Have It

     In my art group, ArtsEtc., we start our meetings with a 10 - 20 minute sketching warm-up exercise to get the creative juices flowing even though we are really a fiber art group. Last month the exercise was to look at a photo of an eye and draw it lightly with pencil four times on separate card stocks. Then, at home, on one of them, with pencil, sketch it very accurately. On the second one, develop it with ink. On the third one, develop it with colored pencil. On the fourth one, develop it with vine charcoal (I skipped this one because I don't plan on working in this medium.) The purpose of the exercise is to compare the different types of media. It was a valuable exercise for me, although I really don't enjoy doing something more than once. Here are my sketches.

Photo and sketches in various media

     And then, I got the idea, since I had eyes in my head, to add eyes to my hand sewing project from the class I'm taking on-line from the Spirit Cloth website. Since the rocks fell into the river, I embroidered eyes in the river to symbolize having the spirits of the rocks in the river.

Still in-progress

It's not laying flat because the river is quilted and I haven't yet quilted the area around the river. I think I'll add some more eyes in the river, too. Then I have to quilt the rest and more fabric at the bottom and quilt that, too. I'll decide the edges later. 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.

Old Quilts/New Cover

     I saved enough points on my charge card purchases to get an iPad Air. I've never had a tablet before so this is quite a new toy for me. As a matter of fact, when I saw the microphone symbol on the keyboard, I thought "No way".  I pressed the microphone symbol and began to talk and my words appeared on the screen! For many of you, this is old hat, but for me, the Neanderthal, it freaked me out.
     Anyway, it required a quilted case, of course. I visited Lyric Kinard's blogpost Here and got the idea to make my case using her method as a base for my fabric. So I dug into the shoebox where I keep scraps of strips that I've cut off of quilts that I've squared off and small quilts that just didn't work out. Then I browsed the Internet for a tutorial on iPad covers and found This marvelous tutorial.
     I chose quilted pieces I had that went together well. Some already had rocks sewn onto them. Yay! To make the appropriate sized pieces for my iPad cover as called for in the tutorial, I sewed quilted pieces together with a utility stitch on my machine by butting up the edges of the fabrics and just sewing them together. (My pieces already were quilted with a top fabric and batting but no backing fabric.) It was a stitch that looks like it was serged.

Piece of old quilts sliced and sewn together

     Once I had all the pieces called for in the tutorial, I embellished them with machine embroidery and added some more rocks by machine appliquéing them on. Then I just followed the tutorial. At first read, it seemed to me like it was going to be complicated, but it was actually very straight forward.

Front of cover with fold-over flap

 I put my fold-over flap more over to the side rather than in the center so that it wouldn't hide the rocks. (So vain of me.) That turned out to not be such a good idea because the iPad isn't protected enough that way. So the next evening, I made another fold-over flap and sewed it on to the first on extending it so that the iPad is protected properly.

Back of cover

There is enough space inside the cover to put a little pouch that holds the iPad power cord and a cloth to clean the iPad, too.
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.

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.

Moon Rocks Falling

     I'm continuing with the hand sewing project from the on-line class with Jude Hill on the Spirit Cloth website. I've sewn a bit of prose using a split stem stitch and added roots to the tree symbol. After I took this photo, I started to embroider a river. The river is going to wind around the quilt from rock to rock. So here's an update.

Falling rocks in progress

In between planning the next steps for this project, I've made two more wheelchair covers. I'll post those photos on a future post. And I'm working on an iPad cover. I may never post a photo of that. I'm not too talented with functional items.

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.

Show Time

     Several posts ago, I wrote about focal point and how I fixed a compositional mistake. You can read about how I fixed it here. The resulting quilt, Beach Walk,  got juried into the show Florida in Fabric II at the Ruth Funk Center For Textile Arts in Melbourne, Florida. It's a wonderful gallery. The show runs from May 24 to August 23. I'm really happy about it, too, because the juror was Martha Sielman who is the executive director of  SAQA. She will be giving a gallery walk at 1 PM on May 24. If you are in the area, be sure to stop by.

Beach Walk

     My quilt, Rise, also got juried into a show. This show isn't a quilt show. It's a multimedia art show. I'm curious to see how many other fiber pieces there will be. The name of the show is Spectrum. It is at Gateway Center for the Arts in DeBary, Florida and runs from April 27 to June 5.

Rise

     Meanwhile, I've started hand-quilting my small piece from the on-line class I'm taking and I've started making two wheelchair covers and I've started a design for a large quilt with a rock cairn and a tree.
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.

Moon Rocks

     I'm so loving the hand-stitching in my Spirit Cloth on line class. Since my last post, I added rocks that I monoprinted and then later added veins with paint. (Two of the rocks are from commercial fabrics.)  I sewed them on by needle-turned appliqué, which was new to me. Then, I needle-appliquéd a moon from fabric that I had printed on my printer. To represent a tree and get some complimentary color in there, I used a method of raw-edge appliqué from Jude Hill on some commercial silk fabric and on a fussy-cut leaf fabric.
     I left one of the blocks empty so that I could embroider some prose into it. Actually, I started doing that tonight. My husband left me alone for the evening so I cranked up my iTunes and set my playlist for female vocalists and I have several thousand songs there. It played Lena Horne, Sheryl Crow, Reba McEntire, Ane Brun, Maria, Taylor, Sarah McLachlan, Ella Fitzgerald, and so many others. I love how you can shuffle the songs on iTunes and get surprised by what comes up. Do you have favorite music you like to listen to while you sew? Here's a photo of the piece before the text got added. The white cloth at the bottom is where I'll be adding more fabric later.

Still in-process

So, I still have much embroidery to add, more fabric to add at the bottom, and things that I haven't yet thought of yet. It's turning into a story about rocks that have fallen from the moon and end up in a river.

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