My Work, in Quilting Arts Magazine's "From Sketch to Art Quilt" Reader Challenge!

Back in November, when I received the beginning of my Quilting Arts subscription, I was excited to see a reader challenge called "From Sketch to Art Quilt." Exactly the perfect challenge to start with! At the time I was drawing a lot of adorable monsters onto the yellow lined paper pads available at my job, so I decided to turn one of those sketches into the basis for my quilt.  I had been having fun for a while already with quilts based on various monsters and "fictional animals."

My work, featured in a magazine!

I scanned the sketch at high resolution and printed it out in cotton in two sections, just for fun. The size of the quilts in this challenge is 8 by 10 inches, so in theory I could have printed the monster all on a single piece of cotton, but I knew I was going to be monoprinting on top of the inkjet, and I wanted to have the option of an image in which the underlying monster drawing appeared to flow seamlessly across the whole quilt while its background broke abruptly into two sections.  In the end, the monoprinting that I did, with a Gelli Arts reusable "gelatin" plate, ended up looking similar on both parts of the image. I created a mask for the monster from freezer paper, ironed it into place on each piece of the monster body, then had fun playing around with my Gelli Arts plate. Once my printing was complete, I put the quilt together, with all kinds of added details including embroidery and laminated images.

Quilting Arts June/July 2012 Issue

I was super excited to have my quilt accepted into this particular Reader Challenge, and sent it off to the folks at Quilting Arts, along with the original sketch. They do their magazine photography in-house, and took very good care of my quilt which they eventually returned to me along with a copy of the issue. 

"Monster Portrait: Reginald"

Title: "Monster Portrait: Reginald"
Materials: various commercial fabrics, inkjet printed cotton, acrylic paint, laminated imagery, metal eyelets, embroidery floss, buttons
Dimensions: 8" by 10"
Date: 2012

New Quilt: "Fictional Animal: White Bird of Legend"

This long-necked bird ended up being my first ever whole-cloth quilt.  The background fabric is heavily disguised with textural elements, but it started out as a sleeve from a green plaid button-down shirt (you can see the cuff opening with button hole on the quilt's bottom right).

To make the outline for the bird, I traced one of my drawings onto the fabric using the "Look Ma, I Invented Carbon Paper!" technique (tutorial coming soon!), then painted inside the lines with white fabric paint.  The painting process took FOR EVER, and I am going to have to look for quicker, easier methods to fill in an outline on textured fabric with a flat, opaque color.

After the bird was painted, I had fun adding random cross-hatching using regular Crayola crayons, and even did a little bit of rubbing using a colander for texture.  You can see that part right above the bird's knobbly knees.  I also added black fabric paint to the bottom of the quilt with a roller.

I chose a very high-loft polyester batting to accentuate the quilted texture, and finished off the design by adding a small amount of white, blue and gold oil paint stick on the raised areas. 

"Fictional Animal: White Bird of Legend"

Title: "Fictional Animal: White Bird of Legend" 
Materials: cotton shirt fabric, oil paint stick, fabric paint, crayon
Dimensions: 11.25" by 12.75"
Date: 2012

"Meet the Supplies" #4: Shrinky Dinks

When I first started planning my "Meet the Supplies" series, I was particularly excited to do a post about my collection of Shrinky Dinks.  Yes, they still make Shrinky Dinks!  And they are even cooler than I remember from when I was a kid! You can buy bulk packages of blank sheets, and at 50 sheets for 22 bucks, it's a fairly cheap art material especially since you can literally use every last scrap.

Okay, enough shameless shilling!  Once I was reintroduced to them, I found that Shrinky Dinks are a perfect mixed media quilting element for one important reason.  Oh, they're fantastic on a number of levels, but the thing that makes them IDEAL for attaching to quilts is that you can use a 1/8" hole punch to create holes which will shrink during the curing process to be just the right size for stitching the piece to a quilt by hand.  I imagine you could also use your machine to attach them using the same stitch you'd use to attach a button.

Sadly, I have actually been prevented from making new shrunken artwork for the past two years by the fact that the oven in my new apartment does not have a window in its door.  It's been super annoying, but fortunately I was able to make a whole lot of tiny beautiful objects before moving.  Here they all are!

Leaves traced from a book called "Kbach: A Study of Khmer Ornament," which I got for free and which has proven to be a wonderful visual resource when I'm trying to come up with patterns

I keep them in this box, which as room for SO MANY more!  Time to get a toaster oven just so I can shrink more art?

Teeny tiny stars.  These things are about 1/4" across

Here are a few of the stars that have already made it into a quilt.

Shield designs in various shades of blue and purple

More leaves traced from the Khmer Ornament book.  These were outlined in silver, which didn't look quite as nice once it shrunk - turns out silver pen can lose its sheen in the oven.

Star buttons

Little petals or leaves - I haven't figured out yet what to use these for.

Fun pastel buttons with red leafy designs in red Sharpie

This is an example of the cool effects you can get when you use a pair of decorative scissors to cut out your Shrinky Dinks before shrinking them.

Bold buttons in red and yellow

Some striped Shrinky Dink buttons in a quilt, arranged to form six-pointed stars

Two of the Khmer leaf designs ended up in my SAQA donation quilt.

And, the best thing in my collection, MONSTERS!  I spent an enjoyable several evenings while visiting my parents drawing all kinds of little monsters.

So Many Monsters!

MORE Monsters!

My Donation for the 2012 SAQA Benefit Auction

"The Art of Inclusion #1"

Title: "The Art of Inclusion #1"
Materials: commercial cottons and sheer fabrics, hand-dyed cotton, inkjet printed cotton, wood, fabric pen, embroidery floss, beads, acrylic paint, polymer clay, laminated images and text, postage stamp, 6B pencil, metal eyelets, piece of a gold-leafed book cover, plastic parts, Shrinky Dinks
Dimensions: 12" by 12"
Date: 2012

This year, as part of my progress towards actually trying to sell my work, I joined the Studio Art Quilt Associates, which, for anyone not familiar with it, is a large professional organization for art quilters.  I was thrilled to see that I had joined literally just in time to make a quilt for inclusion in their annual Benefit Auction. The rules for this auction are simple: Make one original 12" square art quilt, and get it to the auction folks by the first of June 2012.  I immediately swung into action! 

Detail showing hand embroidery, free motion quilting, Shrinky Dinks (!), and pieces from pinball-style party favor games I had picked up years ago at a dollar store

For my very first donation to the SAQA auction, I decided to jump in and make the debut quilt in a series I have been thinking about for a while. The quilts in this series will actually all share the title of my blog, because they will hopefully be the best possible expression of my dedication to the Art of Inclusion.  The goal is to make a very large series of quilts, sized either 12" or 15" square, that will be created purely to provide homes for the zillions of little details and bits and pieces I am always creating.

In the bottom left corner, a my drawing of a numbat, inkjet printed onto fabric, plus a laminated postage stamp

In addition to my main goal of Include-All-The-Things, this series will have two other interesting elements.  First, my approach to the design of these quilts will not be based on a landscape or portrait based way of working with my available space, but instead on the concept of filling in the space with existing elements as I go along, and creating small custom pieces to fill in gaps.  This is probably the way I work best, and has always produced beautiful results. A great example of the fill-it-in approach is this quilt from 2008.

"Filling Spaces: Eye, Tomatoes, Patterns"

The second idea behind the "Art of Inclusion" series is that these quilts, because they are square, will be able to work either separately or together as "blocks" in a larger wall installation.  I have always worked small, and that is not likely to change, but most quilt shows would prefer larger work, and I do like the idea of my quilts being able to command a room.

A photograph of some kelp from an old science textbook, glued onto plywood and cut out on my scroll saw, plus laminated random lines of text and a monster

I've included a number of juicy details in this first Art of Inclusion quilt, and many of them have been with me, waiting patiently, for years! There's the painted polymer clay monster mask with the broken ear, the free motion quilting sample of leaves stitched onto a scrap of plaid shirt, the laminated postage stamp, the traced Shrinky Dink leaves from the book of Khmer Ornament, and the drawing of a numbat inkjet printed onto fabric.  There's the scan of a marble I found on the street, the chunks of an unfinished cross stitch project my mother donated to my efforts, the random laminated lines of text from long-forgotten books, and the plastic covers from dollar store party favor games that used to be filled with ball bearings and now contain piles of beads.... And that's not even a fraction of my stash!

New Quilt: "Pale Spaces Unexplored for Centuries"

Hand printed fabric (sort of!) The main blue and green textures in this quilt were made using hand carved foam stamps to apply ink from Sharpie markers to muslin.  Sharpie ink dries very quickly, so if you stamp multiple times after inking the stamp once, you get a series of appealing, increasingly ghostly images.  The animals on the upper left were drawn onto brown fabric using the Pentel Gel Roller for Fabric, and the bottom half of the quilt features hand-made laminated sequins. 

"Pale Spaces Unexplored for Centuries"

Title: Pale Spaces Unexplored for Centuries
Materials: various found fabrics, muslin, ribbon, laminated images, Sharpie, fabric pen, embroidery floss, beads, yarn
Dimensions: 11.375" by 16.625"
Date: 2012

Click on details below to view larger versions on Flickr.

New Quilt - "Following the Dragon"

Unlike a lot of my other recently finished quilts which had been waiting for a very long time, often years, to be finished, this one basically came together over the course of three industrious days.  It started with the pink dragon, who was my very first airbrush experiment years ago, and who used to be on a shirt that I wore constantly, but eventually the shirt became old and not attractive enough to wear anymore, so the dragon ended up in need of a new home.

This quilt ended up being very much of a "use up the stash" project, and several things went into it that I am very happy to find homes for, including the velvet fake leaves in the upper corner and the little holographic laminated triangles, plus the inkjet printed fabric in the center with the pink and black plants.  The other half of that piece was used in this quilt. 

"Following the Dragon"

Title: Following the Dragon
Materials: various fabrics (including commercial cotton, inkjet printed cotton, knit fabric, velvet, synthetic sheers, tulle and brocade), sequins, acrylic paint, airbrush, iron-on transfer, laminated holographic paper, embroidery floss, holographic yarn, fake leaves, fabric marker, chalk pastel
Dimensions: 20" by 12"
Date: 2012

The pale pink paint from the original airbrushed dragon image had become so faded due to repeated washings that I decided to add a black outline using the Pentel Gel Pen for fabric, which produces a super smooth and even line.

The leaves are attached to the quilt using dark blue tulle and stitching with embroidery thread.  The tulle disappears beautifully into the background and makes it very easy to cause somewhat dimensional pieces to be flush with the quilt surface. 

Laminated triangles of holographic paper and iron-on transfer, plus acrylic paint.

The person in this quilt was created using my method of leaving the backing paper of iron-on transfers temporarily attached as a mask for applying paint, in this case with a hand carved rubber stamp. The sparkly yarn around the figure was couched to the quilt by machine using zig-zag stitching.

New Quilt - "Fictional Animal: Five-Legged Tambat #1"

I've been working hard lately on making new quilts, but haven't been getting them up on the web because mysterious camera problems are preventing me from taking good pictures of them.  I finally managed to get this shot, which does a pretty good job of showing the texture in this quilt, which you can of course purchase from me over on Etsy!

"Fictional Animal: Five-Legged Tambat #1"

Title: Fictional Animal: Five-Legged Tambat #1
Materials: various natural-fiber fabrics, fabric paint, fabric pastel, decorative thread, colored pencil
Dimensions: 12" by 10"
Date: 2012

I chose the name "Tambat" for the animal in this quilt because I am in love with wombats and numbats and figured there should definitely be some sort of animal called a tambat. 

"Tambat" in green fabric pastel, with fabric paint block printed onto a mix of fabrics on the left and bottom edges

The tambat is drawn on a piece of a button down shirt I found at a thrift store, which has fine silver threads woven into it.  The background behind the tambat was painted using fabric paints thinned with an actual fabric paint thinner product, rather than just water.  I had read that this would produce better results than water alone, and I did find that the paint flowed beautifully on the fabric. 

Thinned fabric paint used for sky behind the animal.  The panel on the right hand side incorporates colored pencil on fabric combined with white fabric paint and embroidery.

I have a plan for a whole series of "fictional animal" quilts each featuring a different drawing of an impossible creature.