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Traditional darning mushroom to honor my Grandmother Franceska, who was a pioneer farmer in Utah–the source of this cottonwood burl cap.  The stem is mesquite – another wood that was unknown to my Slovenian grandparents.  They both brought needlework skills to their new life.  Grandfather Francis was trained as a tailor, but preferred to try farming.  They moved to Denver soon after my mother, their 8th child, was born in 1923.  Grandmother continued to sew, darn, make lace, and crochet in the city, passing her skills onto my aunts.

I imagine that January was a time for pioneer women to indulge themselves with scraps saved up from the busy months of outdoor work.  The daylight is short, but adequate for piecing together leftovers into new fabrics.  A 21st century quilter can still capture the nostalgia of sorting scraps and assembling them into a new memory.

This small quilt started with the branch-like silk scrap from silk artist John Venezia in bronze and blue.  The hand-dyed blue scrap finds itself in the floral and the graphic prints.

A quilt is only a quilt because of the stitches that hold it together – here some free-motion work to create the texture of branches.   I saw a lot of ‘v’ shapes, which are repeated in the small scrap and the embroidery.    That is the feeling of scrap quilting – following the links between fabrics until it is finally captured by a binding.   There are discoveries, memories, and the joy of freehand composition.

What’s your superpower?

I spent quite a long time developing this quilt from my photos in Yellowstone last October.

It comes from a close-up of water in the Grand Prismatic Pool.  I worked with Photoshop  filters to discover more design in the patterns.  One of the iterations created a kind of plaid effect, and all of the photoshop filters found a tremendous range of color in what appeared on the surface as golden sparkles on a brown background.

Those exercises led me to consider making shiny fabrics–the hand-painted silks in the ‘windows’ of the cathedral windows quilt blocks.  I kept the notion of the plaids, as well, because a softer weave works really well for all of the hand-stitched parts of building a cathedral windows quilt.   The silk squares were top-stitched by machine to give extra loft.  There were 49 original plaid squares, and it took 91 buttons to fasten the quilt to a backing fabric so that the loose weave will hang well.   28″ square

I thought the hand-painted silks in the center would combine best with gray, but the green and red worked out much better.

This traditional quilt block is striking enough to stand alone as a boudoir pillow. 14″ square.

In addition to quilts, I always include some notions in our inventory of fine crafts.

This year, I had variegated fabrics for the cabbage pincushions.  They also have walnut shells inside (provided by my friend Toni Pollard) to keep the needles and pins extra sharp.

The seamrippers will have lots of new wood options, and a wide array of shapes to fit every size of hand, including XL.

This bear has been in two Studio Tours, and will need to be marked down this year, but all of the other softies are new work from 2015.  It has been fun to use quilts in 3D formats.  Now that many folks are downsizing, we have to get quilts into their lives any way we can!  Dennis and I have a house full of new work for the 2015 Tour, and our other shows leading up to Christmas.

I will have coloring on fabric available all day for visitors to try out some of the new products for drawing and painting on fabric.

Our stop also features wooden ornament blanks and wooden eggs for the other artists who stop by.  We’re here to celebrate and invoke the power of making!

September 12-13 at our house, 19930 W. Top O’ the Moor in Monument.

We haven’t experienced fires and floods this year, but the cold, rainy weather took away even our usual three days of Spring.  I was sitting in the sewing room during a big hailstorm on the 28th of May, sorting scraps.  These fabrics jumped up and merged together with a reminder of the color and joy of our usual May weather.  Oh, well, at least there is lots of water, and the little Spring Peeper frogs are singing away madly in the pond, trying to stay warm.

This and other micro-mini quilts will be our Studio Tour in September.  They are the quilter’s version of sketches.  All are matted in a 9 x 9″ format that fits an inexpensive IKEA frame.

I went to a friend’s house and asked her little daughter where she was.  ‘Oh, she’s upstairs getting new ideas from some old books.’

Quilting has wonderful traditions of recycling, remembering, and rejoicing in a wonderful heritage.  For the studio tour this year, I have been revisiting the Crazy Quilts from the 1880’s.  They have a great deal in common with Art Quilts:  inventive design, collage techniques, ‘fancywork,’ use of popular images, and a decorative purpose.   They were not made to cover a bed.   And pets never slept on them–too many buttons and embellishments.

This section of ‘What they are wearing’ features a patriarchal ancestor framed by a house shape.  My embroidery skills are minimal by 1880’s standards, but our fabrics are more exciting.  I also used free motion machine quilting.  I’m certain that it would have been used for the old quilts had it been available to those quilters.  We also have better image transfer techniques that make it possible to capture some of the quality of old black and white photos.  Much easier than using kerosene and a spoon!

The Tour is September 13 and 14th.  If you stop by our house, you can also see great woodturning from Dennis.   For more information about other artists, go to the Front Range Open Studios website for a map and links to their information.

The Colorado members of Studio Art Quilt Associates have a show of small work at TACtile gallery in Denver July 11-September 2nd, 2014.  ‘Small Vision, Big Voice’ features new work by SAQA members less than 24″ in any dimension.   The gallery is open afternoons Wednesday-Sunday at 1307 Bannock St. in downtown Denver.

Sea Turtle is a silk painting with batik borders.  I have been working on a series of work in both quilts and woodturnings incorporating fish and turtles.  All of this work will be in the Studio Tour in September.

Quilting has its own fashions and fads.  Crazy quilting comes out of the Victorian excess of velvets and laces, combined with the development of ways to process photos onto fabric.  Dying lace in old tea gives a perfect cameo of resourceful women using up all of their little treasures.

This year, I am revisiting crazy quilting with updated fabrics and available sewing technology.  Our culture is obsessed with images, so I am using images from art history, commercial art, and family photo albums as design elements.  The first ‘sketch’ quilt in the series is ‘Living Large,’ which is a 12 x 12″ quilt.  It uses a cubist painting by Gino Severini, 1912, which added sequins to the composition over 100 years ago [Dynamic Hieroglyph of the Bal Tabarin).   Divided and reconfigured with fabric, embroidery, lace, and a handmade buttton, it emerges here as the anchor of an image and font-rich quilt.