2006 Journal Quilts
January - I was gifted with a free five-day trip to Art Quilt Tahoe, and elected to take Hollis Chatelaine’s Dye Painting class. I learned a lot about quilting and thread, contour and line design. I also learned to “Suck it up, Princess,” once I realized that dye painting is NOT the same thing as fabric painting. What you see is not at all what you get!
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February - My sister’s son’s girlfriend, Claire, posed for this photo in a tree at Muir Woods. She looked so much like a fairy, I couldn’t resist adding the pointed ears and the wings. The tree is made with my Embellisher machine – just put the yarns on top of black batting and felt them down, the figure is hand painted.
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March - I do talks and lrunk shows across the country. Recently, I was teaching a workshop in San Diego, and a woman came up to me with a fabric rendition of a wave. It was fairly done, using hand-dyed cottons and a valiant effort to rendering the wave, with painstaking beading, totally orderly and done in a quilterly style, but lacking in impact. She asked what it needed to be a wave and I did my best to explain, but here is my interpretation of a wave in visual terms.
May - When I went to the Sibling Reunion in April, I saw a photograph of my Mother, Alice Evanick, that I had never seen. I loved it, and tried to paint it three times – this is the best rendition. My Mother wrote a book which she self-published and entitled “Alice’s Adventures in Quilterland,” and the printing on the front and back of the background from this piece are from her book.
July - I was invited to make a quilt for the MyFab exhibition, to be held in Japan. I was sent 40 sheets of MyFab to be printed, then made into a quilt with only solid fabrics to be added. I printed this scene, but 60” wide and 80” tall, in segments onto MyFab, and made it into a quilt. It certainly felt like cheating, since I printed it in 2 hours, then pieced it in 8 more hours, then quilted it. Talk about a weekend project!
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April - Every year, my family of 7 children tries to have a family reunion. This year, we made it to the beach in Washington in April and – miracle of miracles – it wasn’t raining. I picked up pebbles, rocks, and sand dollars from the beach, and when I went home, I recreated the beach, complete with little tiny bird footprints and a wave, using Expandaprint, fabric paint and Shiva paintsticks, opalescent organdie, sparkle organza, metallic sheers, and Liquid Beadz. Quilting Arts Magazine published my article on this piece in Winter, 2006.
June - My husband, a Porsche fanatic, made reservations for us to go to the Porsche Parade (convention) in Portland in August. There’s an art show there, so I figured if I had to go, I might as well enter something. I entered a quilt of 8 scenes of Pat’s car (Porsche Carrera 911), set against another scene of the San Francisco Bay. I won Best of Show, but in June, I was busy making the quilt. Here is a duplicate of one of the blocks, the Palace of Fine Arts. The columns and buildings are Puff Painted.
August - In August, we went to Portland to the Porsche Parade, and one of the tours we took went to Multnomah Falls. Here it is, as taken from the second pool, and done on my Embellisher machine. The bridge is done on Puff Paint, painted with Setacolors.
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September - Well, it just seems fitting that the last Journal Quilt of the year should be my portrait, as taken against the Oregon coast on a cloudy, but still lovely, day. The background is a painted sky, layers of silk batting and tulle, layers of painted fabric, sheers and silk fusion, which I experimented with this month.