Turtle
Trax Diary. Page 38
July 15, 2002
Spring and Summer! Page One
by Lucky Magnolia (Susan Shie)
The photo above is a detail of "Seeds and Weeds," a small quilt made this spring, celebrating the garden.
This is page 1. If you like, go to page 2 now.
Topics in this diary: Art Quilt Network April, 02 meeting; start of the Runaway Train project; Uncle Lester's garden; my trip to Lowell, MA; May, 02 art camp; Doug and Cindy's visit; Robin's visit and garden work; June art camp with Wash U's Island Press; our two classes at Q/SDS 2002; and the July art camp here. Artworks of ours shown here are: The Dish Soap / Hermit; The Lazy Susan / Wheel of Fortune; The Owl Sampler; The Juggler; Middle Age Spread; The Garlic Queen; Seeds and Weeds; The Coookbook Print Quilt #1 (Toasted Cheese Sandwich); Q/SDS auction piece; Fish Fry; Salmon Fly; Shrink art; Lucky House; Teapot Sampler; and The Food Scales / Justice.
Right after I got the last diary up
online, I went to AQN (Art Quilt
Network) in Columbus, to our semi annual international meeting (we
have one Canadian, so we're international, but artists from all over the
country come!) This one was hosted by Pat Owac, Joan Maxwell, and Martha
Lee Burleson and was held at the Fawcett Center. I roomed for the second
time in a row with Michele Merges Martens, and we had a great time.
In this picture, Jo Ann Carleson and Mary Helen Fernandez Stewart are working away on their handwork, like most of us do during the meetings.
Willie "Bing" Davis, a well-known
artist and educator in Ohio, who lives in Dayton and teaches at Wright
State University, was our speaker at AQN this time. He presented a slide
lecture about his amazing life and art, as well as showing us projects
he's worked on with inner city youth. It was refreshing to listen to Bing
speak, as he's a very kind and gentle artist/teacher, as well as an activist.
Joyce Seagram of Toronto modeled the lovely kimono
she bought from someone else in AQN, from our casual sales tables, to give
to her daughter. Joyce makes it to AQN about as often as I do anymore,
around once a year, I think. She had a lot of quilts to show us, as she
was preparing for a solo show July 11 to August 4 at The
Guild Shop in Toronto. The quilt above is her piece about the 9-11
attacks here in the US. She was standing on a chairto show us the piece,
and the quilt actually is much longer! Very beautiful. Seems like Joyce
is using more and more yellow in her quilts, and they really glow!
Here's my favorite of Michele Merges Martens'
new works, a fairly large piece of her hand dyed fabrics, knitting, and
embellishments. She uses wonderful things like feed sack fabric to dye,
and comes up with very organic shapes and textures. It's called "backyard
forest."
Look for her work in some very good art quilt shows! Fine Focus 02 is one, and maybe Quilt 21, if I'm right.
When Michele and I came up to our house after AQN, we shopped
at Goodwill, and I found this beautiful bridal train, without its dress.
I bought it, thinking that someday I'd come up with a way to use all that
satin and applique. But soon I had worked my way into a full blown challenge
project with about 25 participants, only this time, I was smart and gave
it a 20 year deadline, for me to receive the finished quilts by!
Here I am modelling the train, before chopping into it!
I named the project "The Runaway Train," in honor of its not having the dress to go with it anymore. Besides, curating another challenge thing feels like a runaway train! I wonder how many people will really finish the work!???
Here are Michele and me, admiring the top of the train, which
she requested to have as her section to make something from. It looks like
a little doll skirt, since it's got the crinolin still in it, and all the
fabric is gathered on a band. Chopping that off all at once was quite a
thrill to me! Although most of the participants haven't said much to me
about what they're going to do, Michele is working away on hers right now,
and it's becoming quite the extravaganza! Very mixed media!!!
After I got what I wanted of the train's fabric,, the appliqued
and cutout section of the center of the train, and gave Michele the top,
I cut the rest into pieces to send out. Most Train Quilters will have to
supplement the bridal satin and lace I sent them, if they want more of
those particular materials in their artwork. They got a piece around 4"
x 10" is all! But they can use whatever they want, and make the quilt
any size and about any subject they want.
I did ask for a story to be sent to me from each of them, about a wedding, within 10 years of now... but that doesn't mean the quilt has to be about a wedding. Mine isn't, at least, not so far. I have room to put a wedding story in it yet, if I want to, tho.
Above are the first pix of my own Runaway Train art quilt, in progress. It's also my next Kitchen Tarot quilt: #9, The Dish Soap / Hermit, and so far is 61"h x 36"w. And as I write this in July, I have done very little more to it! Yikes! I would like to finish it to submit to Quilt National, but the prospects look very bleak! I think a Kitchen Tarot piece finished earlier this year will be our entry, if things don't change soon! Too, too many quilts in progress!
Above on the left you see the quilt already sandwiched and with the satin of the train sewn down, with dishtowels above and below it. I had only drawn on it with black airbrush paint at that point.
Then in the middle picture, I'm adding color, which is tricky on slippery satin! At left I've added brush on paint, and I've gotta say, I hate painting on dish towels. It's like painting on a sponge! So now I know that the towel's being absorbant is great for dishes, but not for painting. This was dishtowel fabric from some towels I bought at Lehman's Hardware, and from now on, will use only on dishes!
When Michele was here, this is what the crabapples looked like.
It was such a wet and cool Spring, hard to imagine now, in our summer dry
spell, and just after a major heat wave. Ah, the variety of weather we
experience in Beautiful Ohio! I guess we really have a drought now, and
I realized last night that my ever-faithful perennial Turtle Heads were
getting so wilted, they were ready to die off! Time to water even the established
plants. But not the grass! Ours is "native plants" (weeds) so
the grass will come back, almost no matter what. It's very resilient!
Jimmy and I drove over to Orrville, to go out to supper with Aunt
Nellie and Uncle Lester one evening in April, and Uncle Lester, my mom's
older brother, took me out to see his gardens. In front of him were daffodils,
and in the front of the picture were young Tiger Lilies. He grows them,
and gave us some bulbs a few years ago. Right now, in mid July, they have
buds all over them, and we're poised to enjoy the splendor of his exotic
blooms again! I think Japanese Beetles even leave them alone, maybe because
the lilies look like they have big black wasps hovering under them, but
it's really their stamens!
At the end of April
I gave a talk at the New England Quilt Museum in Lowell, MA, and was given
a wonderful time there by the museum and Maxine Farkas, deva of The Brush Art Gallery and Studios. Lowell
is a historic town of New England's textile era, and is being restored
by the National Parks Service and local business people. Maxine is an official
Ambassador of Lowell!
Here is a very typical Lowell scene, painted by Vassilios Giavis, another artist of The Brush, who specializes in capturing the fascinating factories and canals of old Lowell. The town really looks like this, and I was totally fascinated. If you get a chance to go to Lowell, do it! Go to the big Quilt Festival there this August 14 - 21, if you can, and see Quilt 21 and Art Quilts at The Whistler. You can email Maxine Farkas, MaxQuilts@worldnet.att.net, if you really want good info on any of this stuff! She knows everything about Lowell and the quilt scene, and is the director of Quilt 21.
My sweet friend and artist Faye-Merrill Geller came to Lowell,
too, and we enjoyed the weekend there together. We looked at a bunch of
each other's art in her room at the hotel, and here she was picking out
one of my Psychic Colander pieces to work on, to collaborate with me as
my first guinea pig in the Lucky Partners scheme I have, in which friends
I respect collaborate with me, by quilting one of my paintings. We'll see
how it goes!
Maxine Farkas' studio is very tiny, but she has it jammed full
of wonderful things! She's one of those wild artists experimenting with
rust and fabrics, and here she's showing me some of her exhumed experimental
booty! She and her pals Corni Forster and Robyn Daniel are also creating
incredible works with tyvek, that stuff they use in hard-to-rip mailing
envelopes. Those three artists are a lot of fun in general, by the way!
Robyn is curator of Art Quilts at the Whistler, and Corni just works hard
on everything anyone's doing. And they laugh plenty! But they are dead
serious about their art and careers, and in networking with art quilters
around the world. Really good folks!
Another artist at The Brush is Gay Tracy, who
labels herself a visionary artist. Her paintings are full of wonderful
color and lively imagery.
She and Maxine co-curated a Shoe Show (which I am very interested in, since I'm one of the curators for a Shoe Shoe here in Wooster for January...). Theirs is called "Stepping into an Uncertain World," and is at the Boott Mill Gallery in Lowell until Sept. 11, 2002.
It's an amazing show of works from artists
all over the country, including some school groups. The Parks Service,
who owns the gallery, likes the exhibit so much, they extended its venue
to 9-11, when it was only scheduled to be much shorter show to begin with.
This is Bill, Vassilios Giavis, the artist I told you about earlier,
and whose painting I used to introduce you to Lowell. He's working every
day on new paintings, and has prints of all his Lowell works there to buy
in his studio.
The Brush, which is part of the US Park Service property, is home to around 14 aritsts of the area, and they have quite a wonderful interaction going on there! Their website has a good page for each artist, including Maxine, Gay, and Bill. Between them and the quilt museum, and taking a ranger guided tour of Lowell, or Maxine guided, if you're really Lucky, you won't want to leave this town!
The New England Quilt
Museum of Lowell is one of the strongest proponents of art quilts in
the country. Jimmy and I have had work in many national exhibitions there,
the last of which was "Parallel Threads," a show of various cultures'
art quilts, within our country.
I gave a slide lecture there on April 28, which was well attended by an audience from all over New England, thanks to the publicity efforts of my pal Faye-Merrill! There is a great permanent collection at the museum, and the gift shop is super, now carrying my friend, art professor Annette Mitchell's wonderful new book Foam Is Where the Art Is, the very clear instructional text on using foam trays to make very detailed art prints. Annette and her husband David Colburn, as well as Michele Merges Martens and her son Kyle all showed up in Lowell to hear my talk at the museum, as well as did Faye and her daughter Rebecca!
I'm not taking up time and space to show you all the cool locks, canals, rivers, and the Four Sisters Owl Diner that Maxine showed me in Lowell. Just go there, OK??????
When I got home from Lowell, it was time to get ready to teach
here at home, for the May Turtle Art Camp.
We had only one student this May, but she was the great, the delightful,
and very mysterious Trish DuBois, whose forehead you can barely see in
this picture of our cat, Evil Tulip. Tulip simply adores having students
here, and she and Trish fell immediately and hopelessly in love. Trish
doesn't like to see pictures of herself, so, how does it feel to want?
Sorry. Gotta respect the Greta Garbos of the world!
This is the next Kitchen Tarot piece, begun
while Trish was here for May camp. As usual it began as an airbrush painting
demo and then got brush paint added, along with paint markers. Trish helped
me figure out some of the coordinations between astrology signs and kitchen
tools, which was not easy! "The Lazy Susan / Wheel of Fortune"
is around 45" x 34", and will be a major piece for me, when I
get back to it!
The piece is still, in mid July, only a painting. I now have #s 9, 10, and 11 in the Kitchen Tarot series to work on, so have no problem with what to do when the Trailer Court piece for Issie is finished. (I AM working on it again, now that all the teaching is done for a bit, Issie! I'm working hard on it!!! And it's going to be my best piece in a long time, you guys!)
Trish made her art and learned what Jimmy and I had to teach her,
but she also wanted to relax and see the sights of our area. So it was
with glee that we took her to Amish Country, down to Berlin (pronounced
Burrlin.) And in Berlin, we soon ran into our friend and local artist,
horticulturalist, and Amish-Mennonite historian, Stan Kaufman, who was
building a fence outside his Pomeraine House on the main drag. He scooped
up Jimmy, Trish, and me and took us to see his brand new greenhouse, which
he's standing inside of in this picture. Stan could make a rubber tire
take root and bloom, and his talents were already wicked at work in the
month old greenhouse. You can't get away from Stan, but he knows absolutely
everything in the world about plants, and you can buy some plants of your
own from him! Get down there to Berlin!
Trish did make art. This was her little sampler, made first with
the Lucky School of Quilting techniques. It's tadpoles. She was celebrating
her personal rebirth as an artist, sensing a move to another creative plateau.
She also started a quilt in which she's developing her personal imagery
with Wolfie DuBois. Incidentally, Trish called the other day, and is the
happy grandmother of a baby named Emily! Now that's a real new creative
plateau!
These are the deerskin baby booties Jimmy gave Trish to take home
for the expected baby, when she was here. He makes these for all friends
who have babies, and if you ask him nice, he'll make a pair for you to
buy, too. They aren't on his site yet, so just email and ask him, or call.
And they are really about the right size when the kid's around a year old.
Very soft and earthy.
This is my own sampler, which I made while Trish was here in May.
We turn on our patio owl lights every night, year round, but somehow, when
it's getting nice in Spring, I'm always thinking more about them and the
evenings on the patio, sewing and chatting, swinging on the porch swing
or sitting at the fifies dinette set, sipping margaritas! Ah, such a hard
life we lead! ;)
The piece actually is about the Bowling Owlies game I invented for the little kids, for them to knock my broken plastic patio owl lights off big bowls with a tiger bean bag. There's a tiny tiger in the bottom left corner of the piece, too!
After Trish went home to Phoenix, we popped up to Lakewood to
see Gretchen and Mike, and they took us to this pretty little pier, just
north of their place, so we could enjoy Lake Erie a bit, after eating at
The Tick Tock Tavern for the first time! You can see downtown Cleveland
over Gretchen's left shoulder. While we were there, we saw a guy get down
on his knee and propose to his girlfriend. Mike pointed out how that made
him feel blessed, and I agreed. It was magical! We're so happy that they
moved up to Cleveland! Cincinnati friends, we're soory, but we won't be
back down to visit for a bit longer!
During our March camp, Robin Rice had commissioned Jimmy
to make her a special case for her sewing stuff. She thinks of herself
as The Juggler, since she's always running in circles for her family's
and her own needs. So here is "St. Quilta the Comforter Blesses The
Juggler." Q has three pin cushions in the air at once. I drew it,
and Jimmy built the case and tooled, dyed, and sewed it. Robin also really
does do juggling! She's quite the versatile chick! And so much fun, to
boot! Yes, Jimmy can make you your own custom order "girl stuff"
box! Just email him!
In May I created six little "Lucky Duet" pieces for
the Q/SDS faculty show, "Small Works" at The
Gallery at Studio B in Lancaster, OH.
I used 12 of the little Lucky Samplers I'd started in 12 different classes, and combined them into six two-sampler sets. This one is called "Middle Age Spread", 10.5"h x 5."w. I got them all done at the same time, but the components were made over a two year period. The pear piece was made in Austin last year in April, at Frances Alford's Austin Turtle Art Camp, and the St Q Wash Day, on top, was made this year sometime. It was about her having to go naked, because she washes all her muu muus at once on Mondays! Notice she still has the frumpy cross and heart doily. Only maybe here that's a tattoo????
All six pieces are for sale and are home again. Give me a call if you're interested. I need to make a little gallery page of them soon!
Doug Hall, of Decatur, GA, is Jimmy's best pal, besides me, I
think... and sometimes I'm not sure of that status order. Especially when
fly fishing is the topic! This May, Doug and his wife Cynthia Litchfield,
one of my dear friends, came up and spent some time with us. Jimmy and
Doug were going to fish and camp all weekend at Ohiopyle in western PA,
but got frozen and rained out after one night. That first day, Cindy and
I wisited The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, but the rest of
their visit was spent at our house, with both couples under one roof.
In this picture, above, the mens are admiring their gifts to each other. Doug brought with him the surprise gift of a new bamboo rod he'd made for Jimmy, and while they were back at our place, due to the rain out, Jimmy made Doug the reel case he's holding here. Doug is one of the best bamboo rodmakers in the country, and his buisness is called Broad River Bamboo Fly Rods. Cindy gave me a lovely felted wool beret she'd made, including the dyeing and beading. She's started to get her artwork shown in Belle Amoire Magazine!
I took this picture of Doug and Cynthia just before the guys left
on their weekend adventure to Pennsylvania. Little did we know that our
Outback would be severely keyed in the Wal-Mart parking lot, on the guys'
way out of town, that they would freeze and get soaked in PA, and that
on the way home, the storage box on top of the car would come apart and
fling their gear all over Interstate 80! What a tough time they had! They
came home, and we managed to enjoy the rest of the weekend together here
at Turtle Moon! I wish they'd have had a better time and could have stayed
to get their fill of fishing. (Only Jimmy did, of course, go to Grayling,
MI in mid June, meet Doug up there and camp with him, during the big Trout
Bums Picnic and The Makers Rod
'2002 Stream Restoration Raffle gathering! So we won't feel too sorry
for them!) Jimmy made the rod case for the raffle, second time. And he's
included in the limited
edition book maed about the raffle project!
Here
are Jimmy and me, relaxing together in May, before or after he and Doug
went to PA to fly fish at Ohiopyle. When one of us leaves for a few days,
we get really lonely for one another. We're not even together a lot all
the time, though we both work at home, but when we're apart, we get sad.
So you can see my happy little smile. Yes, I think this was right after
they came back from being rained out!
My one best friend Robin Schwalb was our next houseguest in late
May, coming to do her gardening time at our place. Living in Brooklyn has
its little drawbacks, such as not having your own garden! So she came,
she saw, and she conquered our weeds! Every morning, she'd whip us into
shape, reminding us that her garden time was very limited, and we had a
job to do! Thanks to her, we managed to get everything planted in a week!
The weather had been so cold and wet all through May, and finally it was
cooperating. You can tell from this photo, weeds don't have a chance against
a New Yorker!
Now Robin has just returned from the opening of the show of the new quilt collection of the American Craft Museum in New York, at the Paine Weber Gallery. Her art quilt "Speaking in Tongues" is in that permanent collection, and therefore that show and its upcoming world tour!
While Robin was here in May, she and I took one day to drive down
to Lunn Fabrics in Lancaster,
which is a two hour drive south from here. Debra and Michael are good friends
to both of us, and we needed some fabric, too!
Michael was all suited up to take off to the roller blading park when we got there, so we had to get this little image. Sure is tall in them skates! He left and we women got down to serious fabric work! It was a very successful hunt. If you haven't been to Lunn's lately, you'd better set up an appointment and go! Or shop online. They make the best of the best hand dyed fabrics for fiber work anywhere! And you'll get to see their award winning art quilts, while you're there!
Another day Robin and I drove up to Lakewood and picked up Gretchen,
after she showed Aunt Robin her and Mike's new apartment. Gretchen had
been so busy with her new job at the museum that she hadn't taken a tour
of its galleries since being hired. So the three of us ambled our way through
most of the collection together. The
Cleveland Museum of Art amazes me, since it's one of the best museums
in the world, right up there in Cleveland!!! I've gone there since I was
a little girl, but now, it belongs to ME, since Gretchen's a registrar
there!
On the way home from eating an Italian supper with Gretchen in
one of the many little restaurants in Lakewood, Robin and I had to stop
at the amazing yard art shop on the square in Burbank. They had plants
out for sale, but Robin is always stunned by the cement yard art, and had
to pose with Elvis. This store's merchandise fills the lot, all the way
out to the street, right there at the only traffic light in town. I think
they leave it all sitting there all night, all the time, and hopefully,
no one steals things. We bought a few plants to put in the garden and drove
on home. Oh, and Gretchen had taken us to Lakewood Park, to walk down by
Lake Erie, at a new spot she and Mike had discovered. It's not easy to
access the lake, as most of the shoreline is private now. But the longer
they live there, the more fun stuff they find! Hurray!
Mama Wanda had her birthday on May 11, but was off in southern
Illinois with her sisters and brother that weekend, so we celebrated later,
when Robin was still here. Jimmy's mom is the only parent any of us has
left of Jimmy, me, and Robin, since Robin and I are both now orphans. So
we now share Mama Wanda with Jimmy! And Wanda continues to be more active
than the three of us put together, so we are inspired by her!
By the last day of Robin's working vacation here, this is what
the garden looked like. I forgot to take pix of it in its pre-worked-on
stage, but just imagine a rainforest, and you're pretty close! The big
wet season had really fed the weeds well, and it was easy to identify what
was what, in the weed-pulling party stage of the work. Robin and I would
yank weeds, so Jimmy could come through with the little Mantis tiller,
Robin would sift out rocks, I would plant, and Floyd would gather our weed
piles to scoop into the wheel barrow. Quite a garden dream team, we were!
Well, with his yen for fishing left unsatisfied after the PA fiasco,
Jimmy and I went down to Mohican State Park, south of Loudonville, OH,
to give him a chance to fish one more time! Plus, a wonderful new fly fishing
magazine, Art of Angling Journal,
was in the process of writing an article about Jimmy for this September's
quarterly issue, and the editor wanted pix of Jimmy fishing. So I brought
along lots of cameras and documented his fishing time. We eventually got
rained out, but got plenty of images. So look for this big fat Jimmy article,
coming soon! He's supposed to get a 20-30 page article, plus the back cover
of the beautiful magazine, dedicated to the artwork made for the fly fishing
community.
Back at the ranch, I had to get some more art pieces finished
up, that had to do with my Lucky School of Quilting Techniques, because
I was writing an article myself, about these processes, for the September
issue of Quilting Arts Magazine.
I even made ten blocks to illustrate the build up of my processes, and
am now using those blocks in my classes. Look for images of them and some
other works in my article soon! If you saw the last issue of Quilting Arts,
you know it's just getting better and better as a new magazine, and the
photography is spectacular. They use almost exclusively 4 x 5 transparencies,
so the illustrations are super clear and vibrant. Same as Jimmy's magazine,
and I think it's wild we both have articles coming out in Sept in very
visual magazines!
Oh, here's the finally finished version of "The Garlic Queen," 8"h x 7"w, which I added more detail to, for the magazine photo shoot. Later in June, Jan Brasier of Kettering, OH, bought this piece from me, so it won't be in shows. So I had to show it here! When you saw it before here, it had less stitching and lacked the button border
These are the 10 Lucky Sampler blocks I made this Spring, to demonstrate
my Lucky School of Quilting Applique methods, to illustrate the article
for Quilting Arts. It's good to hang them up at a class, so students can
really study the order of the processes, which is important. If you bead
before you're done stitching, the beads can get loose on the quilt later.
The writing I did on the cups is different in each of the blocks, even though the blocks are supposed to be identical. I just couldn't bring myself to put the same diary on them all, so they're all unique, making a build up of a story, which is how I work anyhow!
Jimmy had to learn more about our digital camera for the photo shoot we did for Quilting Arts, as we needed tiff files of closeups of my hands making the blocks. He did a great job, I editted them and put them on a CD for the magazine, and you'll see them in the article soon!
Since so many of my new pieces in progress are started as paintings,
and the techniques I focused on for the Quilting Arts article are applique
oriented, I had to dig around to find this appliqued piece, started two
years ago and abandoned after its class demo period. I start so many works
in classes, and then start more, instead of finishing what I've begun.
It gets very frustrating.
But anyhow, I pulled out this St. Q garden panel, which was only started really, and decided to combine it with the smaller piece about Jimmy's magic fish, since it was now both garden and fishing season. I added all the writing on the muu muu, as well as the whole pink panel that goes between the other two pieces, and worked like a maniac while Cindy and Doug were here, to complete it on time for sending out with the photo shoot. Looks like it'll go to Thirteen Moons Gallery now, since it's back from the photo session. I also hope to enter it into a show or two, but would be very happy to sell it any time! I would also enjoy hanging it in my house, but it needs to get out. It's the newest finished piece I've got! And it tells all about our May, 2002 adventures.
Named it "Seeds and Weeds, " because that was a good summary of our garden this Spring! On the quilt it actually has a little affirmation that says, "Seeds that grow; weeds that go!" But the three word title is better! I'll have to label slides, after all, and this has taught me to concentrate on short titles! The piece is 22.5"h x 13"w.
June 2 - 8 was a very special Turtle Art Camp here. Maryanne Simmons,
the Master Printer of Washington University's Island Press in St. Louis,
came with two of her students, Amanda Verbeck and Roxanne Phillips, and
we got back to work on the experimental printing project we'd begun there
at Wash U in 1999. Because Maryanne was
leaving Island Press in July, she decided to bring the work here to start
on the real print quilt making of our edition of 19 quilts! We almost completed
#1!!!! What a job, as this is a real and very large quilt, made of printed
panels of fabric, which are quilted in my techniques, all by hand, and
beaded, and sewn together.
A lot of sleep was lost that week, in order to make the first quilt really move almost to completion in one week! They had made all the print panels of all 11 pieces for each of 19 quilts, and my main job was/is to use permanent markers and write a diary on each panel of each quilt, along with outlining all the forms. Plus I helped constantly with the sewing of the quilt panels, after I got the writing done.
We had designed this quilt back in 1999, when Jimmy and I spent a week at Island Press, and now the other projects they'd been working on were all caught up, and we were once again up to bat! Wow! It's really happening!
Above we were looking at the eight side panels of Print Quilt #1, and had to decide how to sew them. We ended up settling on not cutting any corners for this project, after I showed them a bunch of our "real" quilts up close. We all agreed that the print quilts had to be as close to looking like I had sewn them, as was within reason. No machine work, no wonder under, no skimping on stitch density or beading! Work, work, work!!!!
Those first eight panels, the little side pieces, went fairly
fast, but when we got to the very large top, bottom, and middle panels,
our progress slowed to a crawl! Here Amanda and Roxanne are working on
the huge middle panel, after I'd worked some on stitching it myself. They've
draped it over a chair back, to hold it up, so they can both stitch on
it at once! By this time, we were becoming pretty sleep deprived, and the
work was our life! But everyone's spirits were still high!
Maryanne and I were working at the same time on the bottom panel,
which was the second largest piece of the quilt. I think we were beading
at this point, but I don't remember for sure. I just know I was amazed
at the work level we were putting out, since I'd believed for three years
that Wash U would fizzle out, when they tried to make prints of our quilt
images! Just didn't count on this powerhouse Maryanne and her equally enthused
little band of printmakers!
They had done work with Joyce Scott, Nick Cave, and other mixed media artists, before us. Every edition is very experimental, daring to go where most printmaking studios wouldn't even attempt. Besides being willing to work with things like beading, Island Press is famous for having a very huge printing press. This wasn't really needed for our pieces, even though the final quilts are 75"h x 45"w, because these are made of 11 smaller panels sewn together, and the middle panel actually is formed from about five separate plates that jigsaw puzzle together, before printing!
This is pretty late at night the last night of the June camp here.
And when I say late, bear in mind that most nights, we worked til 3 am!!!!
Here we're sewing the quilt panels together. Normally I would have the
whole thing on the work wall to sew it together, but normally I work alone
on this. I decided we needed to put it on the big studio table, so we could
all sew at once. We worked out the most logical order of sewing things
together, and they'll use that order on each of the 19 quilts. The panels
wouldn't necessarily fit together if we'd chosen to sew them together in
a different sequence. Miraculously, it all fit. We had to make two little
shims on the sides to get a perfect fit, and we may have to do that with
each quilt. We'll see. But compared to what I thought might happen, it
was an extremely accurate fit! I guess we were really being careful when
we created the model panels in 1999!
Here are two Pyrex Cups, only I made the one on the left this
year, as a little class sampler, with applique, ("Green Pyrex Cup",
6.25"h x 5.3"w, owned by Trish DuBois). I designed the one on
the right as part of this print quilt project back in 1999, and it's one
of the 11 panels of Print Quilt #1: The Cookbook / Hierophant: Toasted
Cheese Sandwich." Each of the 19 print quilts will have all the same
images, but I can write a totally different diary on each one. So on each,
I'm going to make a new recipe in the open cookbook in the center quilt
panel.
As far as I know, no one has ever made an edition of actually hand quilted and hand embellished quilts like this before. I know Faith Ringgold's quilts have had silkscreened printed quilts made of them, but our edition features experimental hand painting into each print panel after printing, as well as my individual writing and drawing on each panel, not to mention the incredible amount of hand work done by the printers to sew and bead, then join the panels. And I doubt that this effort will ever be done again! Who would have the energy??????????
This is page 1. If you like, go to page 2 now.
Turtle Moon Studios
Susan Shie and James Acord
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