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Fragments from an off-center turning became leaves and a flower for a framed wooden quilt block.   The inner block was part of ther Creative Gambit wall piece in 2019.

I have added a border of color to fit the 7″ frame.   A quilt applique technique adds shapes to an underlying block. Instead of stitching, this block is held together by glue.   The turned leaves were shaped, cut in half, carved, and painted with leather paint.  The veins are carved and filled with white liming wax.  The flower center is an upholstery nail.  Woodworking techniques applied to quilting habits.  It’s my favorite way to work!

WHITE LINES have their own history in fine craft disciplines.  In ceramics, the ‘cuerdo seco’ technique leaves an unglazed line on tiles which separates sections of glaze.   In print-making, Blanche Lazelle and the Provincetown group in New England left un-printed white lines to separate areas of color on woodblock prints.    In silk painting, the serti technique uses lines of resist to separate colors.   And, for wood artists, there is a white liming wax that we can use to fill carved lines in our work.

This wooden quilt uses while lines to unify the 6 inch and 3 inch blocks of cherry, along with turning, carved textures, milk paint, and stencils.

After making these blocks, I decided to make my own printing blocks for printing textiles.  These very recent efforts will be on display for the Studio Tour this year, along with the first fabric quilts I have made with them.

My Aunt Jo had a collection of small ladies’ footstools before 1960.  This is my ‘revival’ of that memory.   It’s not exactly ‘mid-century,’ but the square shape gives a nice energy to the piece.

Dennis Liggett turned the cherry legs.  The frame uses pockethole joinery, learned from Greg Paige at Paige Woodwoorking in Union Star, Missouri.

I chose a bold upholstery fabric and a 2″ cushion for this 10 x 10″ square footstool.  I am working on more styles and sizes of tops, including one to display a single quilt block.  We will also sell these ready-to-cover for needleworkers.  We will have several ready for the September Studio Tour and our fall selling season.

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 just read Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s history of the Inca, as well as some material on Inca textiles.  This civilization is perhaps the most alien of any ruling class in human history.  They were so weird that I also wrote a story about their quipu (knotted strings) as a binary version of an alphabet.

This Inca thing has possessed me for several years.  The quilt ‘El Dorado’ is made from two oil paintings from 2004, cut up and re-combined here with a more textile context, including the very necessary Inca fringe.  Paintings, after all, are just surface decoration on canvas.    I also made a much bigger quilt of Inca blocks in the 04/05 years, and I have used the outline of the blocks for a medley of Zentangle® designs.    There will probably be more iterations yet…