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Children of all ages enjoyed my space suit salt shakers, as well as samples of NASA’s slime recipe.

St. Peter’s is a merciful one-day craft show with faithful attendance, and many vendors selling knitting, crochet, felt, quilts, and homemade jams.

A great part of a home-town craft fair is the opportunity to meet all the crazy needlewomen in our midst.   They don’t buy my stuff, but they really like to see it, and ask about the techniques.  After all, art is just something that we make.

I enjoyed showing  my ‘interstellar’ series of quilts, which I developed while my granddaughter, Helen, took an astronomy class.  The Hubble telescope photos were a great inspiration for work in silk!

This small quilt (11.5″ square) tries to capture some of the wonder of our colorful universe.

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In honor of February’s ‘Snow Moon,’ I made this quilt with hand-painted silks and a commercial batik fabric.  It is meant to create nostalgia in space travellers for what they left behind.  Of course, they see the heavens with the colors of their own experiences, which is not exactly the more black-and-white way that we think of the Milky Way from high in the mountains of Colorado.  Thanks to the Hubble telescope, we know that those colors are out there…

Like an embroidery sampler, this small quilt has a domestic feeling, with the three odd moons to place it in the interstellar series.  The row of white dots across the landscape add another technical element just beyond our usual sense of tin-can space structures.  No guns in sight.  Just ‘Home Sweet Colony.’

Scraps of marbled cotton in this 12 x 12″ quilt reflect some of the swirling of nebulae in recent space photography.  Without silk, it is hard to create the luminosity of nearby stars and planets.  These are acrylic paints with the ‘Starry Starry Night’ title printed on the front of the quilt.

‘Distant Planet is the second of the Interstellar quilts.  Dyed silk combines with commercial cottons and machine quilting to evoke an unfamiliar sky.  The shape of the quilt and the green silk reflect the quadrilaterals used extensively in Star Wars.

Photography from space exploration and science fiction blend freely in my first efforts.  As I make more fabrics for this series of quilts, I hope to find the quilt-like features of space exploration that we tend to overlook.  Most habitations, for example, come from archaeology or submarine design, and feature weapons as the most common human artifacts.  It will be good to nurture a different vision…

After the surprise of the blue pears, I took a more hopeful look at using blue colors on wood.

Generally, we get the best results with the warm colors on wooden objects.  However, this amazingly deep blue matte paint combines so well with silver highlights that I have indulged extensively on these ornaments.  (2.5 -3″ tall, Colorado Aspen)

The only drawback to these ornaments is that they may require a silvery tree, or maybe some very blue lights on a green one.  I am looking forward to seeing how the colors respond to the LED Christmas lights.  I have always thought the LED colors were somewhat cold.  Like outer space.  Like interstellar space….

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