Kodiak Bear Paw Quilters Annual Quilt Show

The Kodiak Bear paw Quilters hold a quilt show every year.  The show is Saturday and Sunday, October 8th and 9th, at the Kodiak High School auditorium Foyer.  These are my entries. The photo above is called Big Dipper.  It is 21.5 x 20.  This piece started out with a piece of hand dyed fabric.  I had a block left over from a reduction print I made in Liz Mitchell's print workshop, with which I printed the distant mountains.   I decided to extend the mountains beyond the silk border.  The gradations in the border are hand dyed.  I originally printed the stars with gold Lumiere paint, but they weren't  as bright as I wanted, so I stitched with gold metallic thread.  This is the quilt that led me to a thread crisis about a month ago.  I ran out of thread with only 12" of the border left to quilt!  I asked the wrong daughter to quickly send me thread!

 This quilt is 15 x 20 and is called Joy.  The print is an Alutiq petroglyph.  She is actually the only recognizable female figure.  Arms upraised signifies dancing.  Although I am not Alaskan Native, she is my Goddess.  The people who carved these images in the rocks many, many years ago, came to this island from someplace else and made it their home, just like I have.  I was not born here, but after 35 years, I am from here.

 Alaskan Sky is 21 x 12.5.  This piece shows one more stage of the reduction print.  The stars and the Northern Lights were printed first, then that was cut away, and the mountains were printed.  I really like that the red border does not extend into the mountains, making them look more authentic.  The gradations in the border are hand dyed.

 Kings is 15.5 x 20.  One morning, I just decided to start cutting this print up and inserted strips thinking sea grass.  I was happy with the layering effect, and though everything matched up quite well for freeform work.  I don't normally do alot of hand embroidery-I am pretty much hooked on beads, but the stitching on this piece was fun and I am pleased with the results.  I used 3 stands of red embroidery thread on the distant blades, and  hand dyed purple Size 5 pearl cotton on the closer blades.  I will not try that again-multiple layers of pimatex is not easy to pull that thick of a thread through.  I used hand dyed size 12 pearl cotton to outline the starfish, which turned out great.  I bought both of those thread at Visions in San Diego last Spring.  Then, of course the required beads and buttons were added.  I used higher contrast thread than I normally do.  I have thought that my stitching gets lost when i use lower contrast thread, but I am not all that great of a stitcher.  Of course, when my thread really show is when my sewing machine started misbehaving and eating the thread.  I tried new needles, rethreaded, put on some thread treatment.  She just was angry with me that day, I guess.  Our first bad day!

 A close-up of my starfish and button creatures.

Over the Mountains is 12 x 12, with a portrait quilt measuring 4 x 6.  I posted about this piece several months ago.  i wasn't happy with the placement of the mini quilt.  I moved it around for months, then I read somewhere to leave blank space in the upper left corner, which works for me.  This is my donation for the silent auction.

I have been playing with Decolorant and paint with stencils this week, as a means of procrastinating binding and hanging sleeves!  I had some ugly scarves that I experimented with.  I used spray decolorant on one which was a mistake-it crept under the stencil.  Then I did three with plain decolorant paste.  I was working on a table with batting, covered with plastic.  I guess paper or cotton underneath would be better.  The paste went through the scarf and seemed to just sit there on the plastic.  You can't move the scarf until it is dry, also.  Anyway, one of those is beautiful.  Then, I used yellow Decolorant and a leaf stencil on a red scarf.  That one is pretty awesome.  Finally, I printed Lumiere paing with a stencil.  those turned out OK, but it is hard to apply the correct amount of paint.  Tomorrow, I will take some photos and post them.

And I almost forgot-my SAQA Auction quilt sold for $250.  Of course, there was family politics involved-it was purchased the Aunt of my daughter, Kristin's, fiance.  All the same it sold for a good price and I wasn't shamed by having it sent back like last year. 

Yesterday

I did my first dying of the summer, yesterday. I posted some pics of the scarves tha Olivia and I dyed yesterday, but I managed to be patient enough with my cotton to wait until morning to rinse everything out. I was so anxious to get started that I began as soon as I got out of bed. I got caught in my jammies, hair not combed, and very colorful hands, by some old friends who are visiting Kodiak.



My Northern Lights piece.  this piece was stitched.  I used to thick of thread which left thread marks which could have been avoided with thinner thread.  I think.  I had alot of trouble removing the thread from a wet piece of fabric.  Perhaps on the next stitched pieces I should dry it before I try removing the thread.  I ended up with some small hole that, although they are unfortunate, won't matter because the piece will be cut up.

Pole wrapped shibori.  Water...






 

I used aquarium stones and baby rubberband to bind this piece.  I tried to stitch the stem and leaves but that does not show up very well.

This is another stitched piece.  It didn't turn out as I had expected but I like it alot.

Pole and rope wrapped shibori.  More water...

And more water...






 

I came home from work and mixed up dye for tomorrow.  I am going to dye a 12 step colorwheel gradation.  I learned last year that if you want them all to turn out similar, you need to use the same size of container.  I had a friend in a restaurant save 1/2 gal sour cream containers for me and I found some pitchers at Walmart, so i am set.  I want my gradation to have the same mottled appearance.  I want to dye yards of fabric so I had to mix up lots of dye.  Had a near disaster.  I bought a cheap blender to mix my dyes.  Even though I had it in a washtub, I made a big mess.  For some reason turquoise foams up alot in the blender.  I had turquoise dye all over the place-including my new shirt that I wasn't smart enough to change when I came home!  But, I got the shirt sprayed and into the wash right away so it is fine, and the dye was cleaned up before Nick got home.  He would not have been happy!

I have been having trouble with Blogger tonight-doesn't want to upload photos, and stuff keeps disappearing, then when I preview, its is there more than once.  I need my bed....

More Current Work

Two more small quilts that I have completed recently.  I usually don't put words on my quilts, but, as I was carving the fish stamps, I was thinking about why all the great things are considered male. So, I was driven to carve some words from erasers.  I have some other prints that I used different combinations of the words, but have gotten no further than that.  The second picture is a recuction print I made in a workshop with a local printmaker, Lix Mitchell.  Unfortunately, we used Speedball ink, which is not at all permanent.  I was the only participant working on fabric.  I had textile medium with me, which is the really stupid part.  This print skipped the first stage of the reduction print because I liked the look of the hand dyed fabric.  Also, three layers of ink was too much.  I have yet to try to stitch through one of those.  Also, after the first of these pieces, I sprayed the rest of the prints with something to make them permanent-can't recall what the product was, at the moment.

You can see what I worked on today here:

http://sallysartquilts.blogspot.com/2011/06/progress.html.

More Small Work

I have been experimenting with some different finishing techniques with this latest group of small quilts.

This rockfish is, once again from a printing workshop I took last Spring.  I fused the purple organza before printing the fish.

I wish I had used a darker and heavier thread for the branch quilting on the outer part of the piece.  I got good texture, which I attribute to the wool batting.  I also thought the spray of beads across the piece is effective.

The fabric in this quilt is one of the first pieces of fabric that I dyed.  The mountains were printed.  I really fell in love with my Bernina quilting the sky.  My Viking ate metallic threads like this.  I was so happt with the way the machine was reacting, that I forgot to stop and change color of threads where I had intended. The image in the sky comes from petroglyphs of drawing by Kodiak Island's earliest residents.

Another Northern Lights quilt from the same piece of dyed fabric in the quilt shown above.  I quilted differently and followed the quilting motifs with beads.

One more very small Northern Lights quilt.

I did the same quilting on the outer border of this quilt as I used on thea bird quilt shown above.  Once again, a heavier thread with more contrast would have been more effective.  I am scared to use threads with high contrast.  I grabbed a piece of cotton batting when I layered this quilt and I think that the difference in loft is amzing.  I prefer the look of the wool batting to the cotton.  This quilt I sewed on rickrack to the quilt before I faced the entire quilt with a piece of backing prepared for fusing.  I am not entirely happy with the way the corners turned out, but with more experimentation, this will improve.  All of these pieces have fused backs, and with the exception of the final quilt, have fused bindings, which i have decided are great for very small pieces, but in the future, I will put a traditional binding on pieces that are 6" x 6" or more, like the larger Northern Lights pieces and the bird pieces.