Travelin' Blues

This one is big enough to be an actual lap quilt! It started out with just playing with the combinations of fabrics from one step to the next, and this is what it turned into. I originally wanted a red-orange flange but the hot pink just spoke to me. I'll probably use it for the binding too and I'm going to play with a variegated pink thread to see if it works for the quilting.

Another one bites the dust!

This time, it was a heavy duty Sunbeam, auto shut off, stainless steel sole plate, burst of steam. I'm reduced to using the light weight Proctor Silex that barely gets hot enough to melt fusible, but it has a purdy purple water tank! Be grateful for the small things.

OK....Anne is working on the postcards for the show and I get so excited every time I think of it I giggle. The little bit of it that I've seen looks great, and I am in extremely capable hands with her doing the graphics for it. Snap, snap, snap. Just like that she slaps something together that would take me months (if ever!) to do and it looks great!

I'm posting a few of the new quilts, in various stages of completion, just because that's what bloggers do. We post pictures. I have pictures of my cats and dogs and a couple of the snow we got the other day, but I figure the quilts are more appropriate for a QUILT blog. But maybe that's just me.

No particular order, and I'm leaving off all the usual info (size, techniques, etc) that I usually include because I'm just flat-out lazy today and figure I'll come back and put all that stuff in after I get final pictures when they're completed.

Pinecone quilt

This is what I am doing, instead of what I should be doing. I'm using 4" squares for the prairie points, rather than the traditional 3" squares. I don't mind making a nod towards very traditional, but I'm not crazy! Well, other than stopping in the middle of some hellacious deadlines to do a pinecone quilt, I'm not crazy. Like I didn't have anything else to do today to get my stuff ready. It's sort of a reward for totally finishing a Charley Patton piece yesterday (except the label) and getting one of the shadow instrument pieces hand quilted. YES! I did say HAND QUILTED. Sort of. Small stitches that show through individually to the front in a gold metallic thread. And the same gold metallic for an outline around the black silhouette. You'll see it on the postcard! (The response when I emailed the image was "All I can say is ......WOW!" so I was happy about that.) I'll try to get the pic of "Patton's Pieces" up soon. Or maybe not.

So far, this one is 16" and will probably finish out around 24" if things go as planned. Commercial cotton Mardi Gras prints.

Hellzapoppin!

"Overwhelmed" is the word for the day (week, month, whatever.) I'm off to Greenwood Monday morning for the Grand Opening of Hoover's Kitchen, and a presentation of my work to Sylvester Hoover, for exhibit and possible purchase of some. Sylvester owns and runs DeltaBluesLegendsTours.com and is interested in putting some of my stuff in their gallery. I'll also get to see Dr. Marvin Haire again, which I'm looking forward to. I got invited to exhibit at the Brick Street Fine Arts Festival in Clinton (I think I already posted about that) and got another invitation yesterday to exhibit at the Crossties Art and Jazz Festival in Cleveland, MS in May. Teaching at the new quilt shop, quiltartsonline.com and a couple of presentations for local guilds. A workshop in Oxford in Feb, MQA meeting in Natchez and hanging the quilts at ARTichoke. The reception will be Feb 21, from 6-8 pm. I have a break for most of March and then the editor of the Japanese Quilting magazine will be here on April 15 to interview me and Gwen Magee and Dorinda Evans on her whirlwind tour through the state. We each have a different aspect of quilting that she's interested in.

I'm feeling sort of schizophrenic with the current work I'm producing, but it's been a kind of serendipity how it's working out. The show at ARTichoke is specifically Blues music-themed stuff, but I have to sort of switch back and forth between other things too so I don't get burned out. My switches have just happened to be towards jazz and some New Orleans stuff, and then the Art and Jazz festival invitation came so it works out that I won't have every single thing that's finished all hanging in one place. I'm hoping to actually have enough finished that I have a choice of pieces to hang together. That whole "body of work" thing, donchaknow?

And totally off the subject, but on my mind, would those of you who show prefer being in an invitational show, or getting juried into a competition? Which one is more exciting to you?

Cover Girl!

This is my youngest daughter on the cover of a local business paper.

They don't even know how prophetic that headline is.

better late than never!

I know it's been a while since I posted but life happens! Not only do I have the show coming up in February, but I've just received the paperwork for an invitational show (Brick Street Fine Arts Festival) in March. Maybe I'll have some stuff left over from the show at ARTichoke to use. Either that, or I'll be sewing madly to get MORE stuff made for Clinton. Or I can use some of the non-musical pieces I have already. It seems like things are breaking loose all at once and it's sort of scary! I'm booked all the way into August (at least one a month) for workshops and presentations and classes and demonstrations. If I keep going at this rate I might actually MAKE more than I SPEND with my art.

Now on to the pictures.......

This is "Coltrane" and it's done on a piece of hand-painted fabric I did during Sonji Hunt's class this summer. It's actually the back of the fabric and it already had the Wonder Under on it. If you iron it long enough and hot enough with a non-stick sheet, the WU eventually loses it's sticky without losing the cloudy effect that I liked about it. The image of John Coltrane is a (copyright-free) picture that I adjusted the color on to be sort of a reddish pink. Printed off on 4 pages, assembled and then coated with several layers of gel medium. Paper removed and the resultant image is sort of translucent. Again, I wound up using the backside of the transfer because of the effect. Very minimal quilting around the image. 16x21, hand painted muslin, gel medium transfer.

And "The Jazzman Cometh"

Another hand-painted background from Sonji's class, and a painted image from some original artwork by Stephen Avgerinos in Bloomington, IL. Used with permission of the artist. Once more, the backside of the fabric was used and very minimal quilting. 24x34, hand painted muslin, stenciled Jazzman and lamppost.