Tag Archives: Eye of the Storm

My First Gallery Opening

January 17, 2010 5:35 pm by Ebony in Art

Good thing I’m a better quilter than I am a photographer. Here are a couple of pictures of my pieces hung in the gallery during the opening. This first picture is a collage made from all of the 5″ x 5″ pieces from the 12 artists in the show: And this one is of the larger quilted pieces hanging on their own: I had some very interesting discussions with some of the visitors to the gallery during the opening, and have some improvements that I know I would make if I had to do all over again. The mounting of the quilts on the wall in particular. They should have hanging sleeves at both the top & bottom to distribute the weight & hold the piece taut. I really had to think about the “art” part of my work… it’s a new avenue that I am exploring, and I think this year will be more of a focus on my “art” vs. “craft.” Happy quilting!

Peace Be Still – A Day in the Life of an Art Quilt, Part 2

January 12, 2010 5:02 pm by Ebony in Art

Eye of the Storm

This post is a continuation of where I left off yesterday, taking you through my process to create an art quilt using Raymond Houston’s “Beyond Symmetry” method. Having selected the fabrics and printed a plan for the blocks, it was time to start cutting fabrics! One of the documents I created is a color chart, which tells me how many of each unit needs which color fabric. With this information in hand, I am able to cut fabrics en masse. Now, Raymond’s method is to cut pieces to the exact size needed, and I’m more of a “rough cutter” when foundation piecing. I prefer to cut fabric to the size of a standard rectangle so that I can use my shape cut rulers to quickly cut out the pieces. I measured each template to determine the size I would need, and then I laid out all the pieces according to their positions in the unit: I then laid out the blocks according to the numbers I assigned them. What you can’t see in the picture is that the drawing is also numbered, to show the position of each block. So if I have a block colorization that I named “S”, it is located & numbered on the drawing as “S” wherever it appears. This allows me to quickly locate and assemble the pairs later! From here, it was just a matter of sewing the units onto the foundation (align, stitch, finger press, trim.) I didn’t take pictures of this process, but it is pretty mundane. I was too excited to see a panel finished to wait until I sewed every unit, so I did the main panel with the “Eye” first: I love it when a plan comes together! I’ll unveil the finished piece on Friday when the show opens. Tomorrow, in addition to my Word “LESS” Wednesday, I’ll give you some insight into the other three pieces I made. Happy quilting!

Peace Be Still – A Day in the Life of an Art Quilt, Part 1

January 11, 2010 1:21 pm by Ebony in Bloggin'

Eye of the Storm

My gallery exhibit at Flourish Studios opens in 5 days, so I thought it would be fun to give some insight into my process for developing the 6 pieces for the show. There were 12 artists invited to participate in the show; all of us have different viewpoints and media in which we work. I am one of the few fiber artists and the only quilter; the other fiber artists work with paper or mixed media. The six pieces were divided into two sets of 3; one set was to be 10″ x 10″, and the other set 5″ x 5″. You would think that with such small pieces, they would be relatively simple to make, and fast since they are so small, but you would be surprised at how much time & energy goes into making small pieces. They took overall about as much time as a regular quilt! It took me months of deep meditation to come up with the designs (ok not really, but it’s scary sometimes how there’s nothing for months, and then BAM! an idea.) For the 10″ x 10″, I decided to do a series called “Eye of the Storm” which is based on Raymond Houston’s Beyond Symmetry book. I was playing around with the design and thinking about how orderly and calm repeating patterns can be, and that if life were like that, it would be peaceful – but life is never like that. There is always some small change. Sometimes there are big changes, and it takes a while to get back into the rhythm. I introduced you to the first panel in this piece in my Symmetry Saturday series. It takes a lot to go from sketching to actual execution; once I had the design, I had to select just the right fabrics. I was committed to using fabrics that I already own. Since the pieces are small, I probably could have used scraps, but I wanted every piece to be the same except where I planned changes. Because of all the small pieces and the angles, I decided to use a paper foundation for the blocks. When you are paper piecing, you have to remember to print the foundations as a mirror image; this was a little complex because I had some blocks which actually were a mirror image, so I had to print the mirror of a mirror. In total, there were 48 blocks (2.5″ square finished). Some blocks had the same colors in each position, but there were a lot of blocks that had individual color schemes. I tried to solve this complexity first by printing out a full color copy of the quilt, labeling each position of the block on the reverse, then cutting apart each block, and matching like blocks together. I then came up with an Excel spreadsheet to define each block color scheme, the location & position of each, and match the blocks together. That plan you can see on the far left; in the center you can see the colored squares clipped to their paper foundations. Down front, you can see the paper templates. getting organized for this project was one of the most time-consuming aspects of this project. Tomorrow, I’ll show you what I did next! Happy quilting!