Deer Crossings

Deer Crossings 2015

Deer Crossings detail 2015


Deer Crossings is a piece I made in 2014. My daughter frequently has deer visitors in the yard. They are so accustomed to people coming and going that they often hardly look up from their feeding when we pull in the driveway.


I embroidered the face and ears and appliqued scraps of fabric on the neck and face area.


The border is made of blocks that have been randomly slashed and inserted a thin strip of striped fabric.

Picasso's Swimming Pool

I went to the Museum of Modern art in NY in the spring. One of my favourite spots at the museum is the swimming pool installation by Picasso. It's a little alcove in the gallery and all of the walls are lined with paper cutouts-blue on white that suggest swimmers in a pool. You can stand in the middle of the room and just rotate around. the shapes just change and evolve and suggest water, waves swimmers--whatever you can imagine.

in the pool

Splash

a detail of Splash.

I made this quilt long before I saw Picasso's swimming pool and I have shown it here before but I think I will post it again today. Maybe I need to do another one or two. Most of my work has been more colourful and brighter but sometimes the simplicity of two colours and simple shapes says more!

This quilt celebrated the birth of my third grandson. It's a group of little boys surrounding a pool and sending up a big splash. The apple represents the apple of my eye. The heart shows my love for all the little boys.

Next blue and white quilt will be a little more suggestive and a little more shape on shape.

Thanks for stopping by.

Karen

At the Park

in an attempt to simplify my work, I have decided to try some very abstract work. I used Kathleen Loomis's fine line piecing technique and made it my own.

at the park 2015

at the park detail 2015

I used three different fabrics plus a bright orange for the binding. Lots of machine quilting. It's an attempt at abstract. It really can mean anything that you want it to mean. A trip to the park, a day at the beach, sitting in a big chair??

You decide.

Self Portraits

When I was at a friend's cottage this past summer, we tried a little experiment with software on our computer. We took a recent picture of my face and applied a few different filters to my pic.

Here I am!!

and here I am again, in black and white with heavy shadows.  Do you see a quilt here?

Yes I do, too. But as of right now, it's just in my head. it is on the list. But the list is a loooong one!!

Thanks for visiting. Karen

Finishitup Month

I have always made January my finish it up month. I force myself to revisit the work that I abandoned and try to finish a few pieces before starting a new one. It works sometimes. Often the  piece that I choose to finish requires very little work done to be called finished.


Wolf Pack@2016

This is one of those pieces that I started not last summer but the summer before.  I wanted to try some complicated stencil patterns. I made three different stencils by tracing designs from a patterned tablecloth that I have had for a long time. I used clear plastic-the heavy kind that you can buy at the local hardware store that my mother- in-law liked to use for table cloths. I chose three colours from the multicolour paisley table cloth and  copied one colour on each stencil.


Then I spent my Thursday evenings at the local park listening to music and cutting out the stencils.


When that was finished, I spread a piece of muslin on the table and ironed on three freezer paper cutouts of wolves and a few straight cutouts to represent trees. They will act a resists. Then one by one I place the stencils over the muslin an applied a different colour of acrylic paint to the muslin.
After the paint was dried and heatset with an iron on the back, I layered the muslin over thin quilt batting and a backing.


Machine quilting came next. I quilted the trees heavily with variegated thread. Then just outlined the wolves and did a little bit of quilting inside the trees to look like the forest.
This is where I fell off the wagon for a little while. The quilting was heavy in some areas and very light in others which causes the fabric to pucker in spots. I was not sure what to do about that--so I left it in the to do pile where it stayed for almost a year.


I showed it to my fibre arts group (the Fabrigos) and they encouraged me not to abandon it--just keep going. (that's what I love about the group--lots of encouragement and good suggestions.) They told me to embrace the puckers and so I did. There is no way to avoid them so accept them .


 Well it did sit for another good while but I recently got it out and had another look. Better to have a mediocre finished quilt than an unfinished one in the queue.

Wolf Pack @ 2016 detail

So that's done. All it really needed to finish it was another backing applied(to hide all the bad stuff) and a faced edge and it was done. It took me eighteen months and one hour to finish it up.


Now to the studio!!! more finishing to be done.

Merry Christmas

School Project

My friend is a teacher at a local school. She invited me to her classroom to show some of my quilts. While I was there, I asked the children to help me make another quilt. I gave them each a 4 inch square of muslin and crayons and they coloured blocks for me. I put them together like this.  The top one is from the kindergarten class. Around the outside I stitched symbols that say. One day Mrs. Sirianni came to our school to show us her quilts. The children loved them and helped her to make this quilt. 2015.
The bottom one is from the Grade 2 class. The stitching in the corners says the children at this school made this quilt with love in 2015.
The children loved the quilts. They all had a little story to tell about their block and we had a great afternoon together.
What a great project for a group.!!