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For a lot of woodturners, pens are their introduction to the craft.

I have made up a few from kits, but it seemed like 90% fussing with assembly, and 10% working on the lathe.  Our Club president challenged all of us to bring a writing instrument to the May meeting, so I looked for a way to reverse those percentages.  I found ‘stick pens’ that use the guts from a Bic pen.  This definitely keeps the parts budget low, and the user can replace the ink cartridge any time with another Bic pen’s parts.

The first challenge is to find a drill bit long enough.  Luckily, Dennis Liggett always has the tool that I need for the job.  This time, he even drilled the holes.

These three are made from osage orange (‘hedge’ to a mid-westerner).  It is a straight, fine-grained wood for turning.  Some of the beautiful color mellows to a brown over time.  Nature’s improvement on plastics, and now, mine, too.

Zentangle® drawing is a great exercise for quilters.  It develops facility with infilling spaces, which makes the quilting easier and more successful.  Machine quilting is especially good for the sheer multiplicity of patterns that come from drawing with a pen on paper.   In this quilt, the leaf is an original drawing, re-sized and rotated with Photoshop, then printed on cotton and over-dyed.    The blocks are irregular to add motion to the leaves, which are rarely stationary in nature.  18″ x 30,” it hangs either horizontally or vertically.

Let’s stop talking about zentangle drawing as therapy, and recognize that it is to quilting as playing scales is to music.

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.

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…

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.

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