ridgewaystudios.org

Continuing my interest in making towers with cupolas, I set up a Pinterest board (Cupolas, turnips, onions-Kay Liggett) to collect inspirational images.  This one is all turned wood, with various finish options, free-hand pyrography, and gilders paste.  The block of green twistwork is a simple 3-start twist.  11.5″ tall

A special thanks to Austrian artist Hundertwasser, for inspiring some brighter colors, and to global wood artist Nick Agar for teaching me how to apply different colors to wood.

This series of 3 quilts started with a drawing of four peppermills on the table.  The shapes were similar, but varied in proportions, and I liked the way that the overlapping shapes created perspective without the pesky business of making a realistic 3D rendering.   I chose a color scheme that I rarely use, leaning toward adjacent colors (red and violet) with limited value range.

The background is heavily quilted because there is a lot of it, and the handpainted fabric is quilted with only a few hand embroidery stitches.  This lavender/red fabric was made in a ‘scroll’ that I learned from Linda Colsh in 2015.

When I had arranged all of the shapes, I cut away the background fabric in as big a piece as I could manage.  This scrap became a ‘gift’ for the composition of the next quilt.  I was careful to save lots of scraps with this project in order to incorporate them into the next quilt.  It felt like a very traditional way of working, to value all the leftovers.  The challenging part was to find a way to also value the shapes of the scraps.

After piecing together the 4 Classic Shapes quilt, I had two large scraps cut from the background–the flowery shapes on the right and the left, as well as some left-over handpainted pink/purple fabric.

The scraps were long, but thinner than the original quilt, so this design is taller and skinnier, almost like minarets on the horizon.  The hand-painted fabric is in the foreground, with no quilting.  It is quite a bit stiffer than the other fabrics, and the patterns are very subtle, so quilting would obscure the complexity of the fabric.  The brighter fabric is a new addition, which follows on to the next quilt as a kind of gift of its own.

Another quilter at the Alegre Retreat (’04 or ’05) told me about the way that scraps could be used as Gifts to built a series of quilts.  I believe that she was in a class with Michael James.

Casbah Dream is a tribute to the drawings and paintings that Matisse did of Moroccan subjects.

The Gifts that generated this quilt are the two black domes (cut from the background of Minarets) , and the many small scraps for the clamshell parts.  I added green and some blue to this color scheme.  The Casbah gate in Tangier has been drawn and painted by many artists.

The clamshells have a nice evocative shape that could be architectural, or possibly even botanical.

Save