Award at La Connor Textile and Quilt Museum Festival

One of my goals this year was to submit to some Calls for Entry. It may have been half way through the year before I got to this, but I submitted 3 of my art quilts for the La Connor Textile and Quilt Museum Festival in La Connor, WA -- and all 3 of the pieces were accepted!

Then the next exciting news was that one of the pieces had won 3rd place in the Abstract Pictorial category. The piece that won was "Rabbits in the Grass." Here is a picture of my daughter in front of the quilt. I think they did not allow photos at the exhibit, but they let my daughter "sneak" in a photo because I couldn't be there in person.



Nothing like an award to get you motivated to create!

These are the other two pieces that were in the exhibit. My daughter said that her favorite of the three was the squirrel.



I've been continuing my series with rabbits and am now working on a largish piece. It will feature a line of duplicate rabbits and then one large rabbit.

Here are the duplicate rabbits in process. The faceless rabbits have sparked some more ideas!



A full hand of rabbits! I made seven, but am not sure how many I'll use in the current piece. It was great fun to make a batch of duplicate rabbits (the same fabric selection for each piece is the same of all rabbits) and fun to have a stack of them ready to use.

Squirrel-ish Dilemma

I want to be happy with this, and I am with most of it, but still it is not quite right.

The dilemma is that to fix what I think needs fixing could require removing most of what I've already done. Gads! Suggestions are welcome.

My next moment in the studio is not until next Saturday, so I'll be mulling this over all week.

Hear the Music

I finally decided what to do with the rabbit figure I created last December. The rabbit has been on my design wall all year just waiting for inspiration to strike.

I was cleaning up my studio and came upon stack of leftover cut-outs from making guitar ties. I spread them out on my cutting table trying to decide if there was some way to reassemble them into a "fabric" sheet that I could use again, when out of the corner of my eye the rabbit beckoned. I lay the rabbit on top of the scraps and noticed that the colors were very complementary for the rabbit and when reassembled in a random fashion were scrambled enough to become an almost neutral background.

Well, that was that. I call this piece "Hear the Music."

I'm currently working on squirrel piece. The squirrel and tree were created by the same technique as the rabbit.

Right now I'm working on what other elements I'll add, such as the grass. Nothing is stitched to the background yet, so this is very much a work in progress.

I'm also playing with the idea of adding some sort of flowering tree/shrub blossom in the upper left corner, just to contain the eye within the composition.

More Animals Assembled

Ok, so that's not a scintillating post title. All of my creativity must drained into the squirrels.

The next animal I create during the Hudson River Valley Art Workshops retreat is a squirrel. Technically a Gray Squirrel, but all of the Gray Squirrels around here are two-tone. It's fun watching them outside of my office window. Occasionally I'll see one outside the window of my third floor studio. They are always shocked to see a human that far above the ground! LOL.





It is a fun process to create animal figures. The tricky part is getting the right expression and maintaining the animal-ness while using commercial prints. I like the commercial prints for the little "surprizes" you see - like the flowers on the belly of the squirrel.

The next step will be to come up with a scene to put these critters in.

Fused Animal Figures

I'm getting a little break from my regular duties as innkeeper and art workshop director, to join in the fun in the studio during our December retreat. I am giving some informal lessons on how I create the rabbits for my rabbit series. I use two different techniques and was going to show both, but everyone is having such fun with the fused method (which is faster. LOL) that we have gone from rabbits to squirrels!

These are two of the finished rabbits. The one on the right is mine and the one on the left is by Leonie Lister of Australia.



I'm supplying the fabric, so Leonie and I are working on tables opposite of each other and selecting from the same stash, but you can see what a difference it makes with how the values are used and where they are placed on the figure.

These rabbits will eventually be put in a composition with other similarly made elements, but because Leonie, just loves squirrels, we all decided to jump to that.

This is the start of my squirrel - the freezer paper templates.



If I had made the squirrel the same scale as the rabbit, I could have put them in the same composition, but I decided to go for the mondo-sized squirrel. Watch out for your nuts!