Art @ The Hermitage: October 2011

Saturday, October 22, 2011

A Baker's Dozen From PIQF...

'All Roads Lead To Jerusalem' by Shani Leser

'Grass Valley' by Jan Reed

'Dancing Circles 2' by Lyn Gonzaga

'Beauty of Life 2' by Julie Haddrick

'Mistaken Identity' by Susan Wessels

'Dreaming of the Northern Lights' by Helen Granville

'Shattered' by Betty Busby

'The Tsar's Decree' by Megan Farkas

'Calamari Time' by Karlyn Bue Lohrenz

'Garden Whimsies' by Jan Hirth

'Portals / 7' by Mimi Wohlberg

'Hear the Color See the Sound' by Helen Kusnitz

'Free Fall' by Ann Rhode

Thursday, October 20, 2011

When I first started photographing the quilts at PIQF, I was very good and took photos of the info sheet for each quilt so I'd know what the title of the work was and who created it. That lasted for two days, then I just started snapping the quilts without the info sheets. How rude!!! I'd certainly want to have my efforts acknowledged if someone posted a picture of one of my quilts on their blog. So now I'm busy doing research, and am finding the information for some of the works I missed. Thanks to Sue Dennis, whose tastes must echo mine, because she had photos of many of the quilts I'd photographed! I'm going to be adding titles and artists as I find them, so if you really, really liked one of the quilts I've posted, please be patient - I'm doing my best to identify them all!

'Magic In Times Square' by Janet Fogg

'Picked By Hand' by B. Lynn Tubbe

And some details of Lynn's fabulous applique...

'Towards Infinity' by Sally Scott

'Nature - Please Don't Let Them Disappear' by Sandy Turner & June Hollister

'Maranantha' by Sue Anthony

The silk ribbon wedding bouquet...

'Dawn Prayers on the Ganges' by Meri Henriques Vahl

Again, thanks to Sue, here are a few more pictures from "Opal Fever", the fun class I enjoyed with her on Saturday...

Here's Dorothy...

and Ginny...

and Hjilda's piece...

and Cyndy's...

and mine, with the Angelina added, and Bronwyn Wolfsong, who attends all of my classes with me...

... and the whole class...

Monday, October 17, 2011

Home again, and back to work!

The Vallejo Artists' Open Studios weekend (November 12-13) is in my face big time, and I still have a lot of work to do on my main piece for the exhibit. It was very warm today, and the last thing I wanted to do was sit under a heavy quilt and a hot sewing machine lamp. I would have much preferred to be back at the hotel in Santa Clara... in the pool, or, at the very least, sitting on the edge of the pool, with my feet in the water, sipping a Jack & Coke. But, alas, that wasn't an option, so I turned on all of the fans and set to work here in my studio at The Hermitage. Every time I sit down to machine quilt these days, I thank The Goddess for my new Pfaff Expression with it's 11-inch arm and huge extension table. It makes my life so much easier, even in hot weather. At this point I'm about 40% finished with the quilting, and will probably finish that phase by the weekend. At that point I can make the hanging sleeve and bind it and be done with the grunt work. Then THE FUN starts... embellishment! I'm going to embellish this quilt to within an inch of its life, and if I'm not finished to my satisfaction by Open Studios weekend, I'll just keep working on it over the weekend, and let studio visitors see "The Artist at Work!"

Another thing for which I'm hugely thankful is The Pomegranate Seed, Vallejo's fabulous bead store located in the art district downtown. Let's take a moment for a plug here... this is a wonderful shop, with a wonderful array of beads, friendly, knowledgeable staff, and lots of classes. I'm particularly excited by their small, but high-quality selection of African beads, which is what I need for this quilt in progress, as well as the quilts in my head. So... PLEASE... if you're a beader in the Vallejo area, check them out and support them. I want to see them SURVIVE!!!

Lastly, I'm thankful for the new M&Ms peanut butter pieces. Not only are they beautiful, but they're melt-in-your-mouth creamy and delicious! I couldn't get through my quilting day without them!!

For those of you who want to see more quilts from the PIQF show, I have lots more photos to post, and will do so over the next few days. They all need editing, so it's going to take me a while to process them. For you critter fans, to my delight, I found a few critters I'd missed, so I'll share those as well.

Saturday, October 15, 2011

PIQF - Day 4

Today was the last day of classes for me, and it ended on a very high, almost coloratura, note! After two very stimulating and challenging classes, today was a relax-and-totally-enjoy-yourself class with one of my favorite teachers ever... Sue Dennis. I took three classes from Sue at last year's festival, and had buckets of fun... mostly behaving like a kid and making colossal messes with paint! In today's class we transformed batik fabrics, already beautiful in their own right, into something extra special through the use of paint sticks. We then cut and pasted pieces of our "new" fabric onto a dark background and added a touch of some totally cool stuff called "Angelina", which has to be seen to be believed. Here are pictures of Sue's class samples...

The shiny stuff going across the quilts is the Angelina... sort of a brightly colored, iridescent angel-hair wannabe. It sticks to itself when ironed, and then is stitched to the quilt after everything else is completed, including the quilting. When the iridescent Angelina is added to the iridescent paint sticks, you have Bling of impressive proportions!! Everything we did today was so cool, I can hardly wait to play around with it all again. Lani and Dale were in the class with me, and we had too much fun. I'm looking forward to seeing their finished work. Here's my piece - just the top and without the Angelina...

... and here's a few pictures of some works in progress in the classroom...

After class, I did another two-hour stint of walking around the show looking at quilts. For whatever reason, I'm enjoying the show more than ever this year. There are some incredible quilts to see - over 800 - and a great many of them are contemporary, or inovative, which is my preferred style. However, having taken Didi's classes this year, I now have a far greater appreciation than ever for the traditional, hand quilted and hand apliqued quilts, though I know I'll never make one, nor do I want to.

I had dinner with Jan, and then we went to "Show and Tell", where all of the teachers were presented and showed a bit of their own work, and invited their students to come forward and show off the work they did in their classes. In honor of the festival's 20th anniversary, the Mancuso Brothers, who have been at the helm of this event since the beginning, presented a slide show featuring highlights of the last 20 years. Since this is my 15th year, it was fun to see a lot of quilts and teachers I remembered. This was followed by an incredible ice-cream buffet out in the lobby. What a spread it was, and a great way to wind down the week. I'll be heading home tomorrow afternoon after I take just one more trip through the show and take pictures of the quilts I missed today when my camera batteries went south.

Here's today's quilt show...

'African Idiom 7' by Jenny Hearn

'Pismo Beach' by Denise Killingsworth

'Dreaming of the Northern Lights' by Helen Granville

'Celtic Persian' by Suzette Ehlers

I think this may be "it" for the critter quilts...

'Desert Life' by Hilda Koning-Bastiaan

'It Came From Beneath the Sea' by Roberta De Luz

Silicon Valley sunset from my hotel window...

Friday, October 14, 2011

PIQF - Day 3

As expected, after a day in Dierdra's applique class, I feel I really know how to applique... as in, I've learned the techniques for a whole bunch of procedures, and have managed to perform them, with varying degrees of efficiency. The basics are there, but the skills have a ways to go! But, as it's ever been with my life as a musician, the requirement is practice! practice! practice! I'm truly excited to have learned so much theory, and to have finally "gotten it" in some areas that had henceforth been pretty fuzzy. Hopefully, I'll be able to retain much of what I've learned over the past two days until such time as I can seriously get back to it. As soon as I return home, all of my energy is going to have to go into completing my major new quilt for the Vallejo Open Studios, which is coming up way too soon (November 12-13).

In the meantime, while still here at PIQF, hours of fun remain to take my mind off such pressures! After class, I met up with Dale, Lani and Rosalie, for a fabulous dinner at the hotel restaurant. The place was jammed, and since there were a bunch of us from various aspects of the show - teachers, vendors, students, and spouses, standing around waiting for tables, we were all seated together at a giant round table in a special nook, and we had a great time getting acquainted and re-acquainted, swapping stories, passing out cards and fliers, etc. After dinner, most of us went to the Fashion Show. This is always a much anticipated event of the week, and tonight, in celebration of the Festival's 20th anniversary, the show co-ordinator and good buddie of mine, Karen Boutte, really outdid herself. There were five featured artists... Sandra Wagner, Nick Coman, Cathy Hoover, Lorraine Torrence, and Noelle Tamborini-Olson. Amazingly, in a show featuring over 70 outfits, I only found 3-4 of them to be in the ho-hum category. The rest were drop-dead wonderful! Kopius Kudos to Karen!!

After a brief stop at the bar for a keoke coffee and an affogato, I've crashed in my room - staying up long enough to post the day's activities, and then it's crash time for me. Tomorrow's class is with Sue Dennis, and I've been waiting for this class for a year! After taking three classes with her last year, I definitely wanted more. I wanted to take her class yesterday, but I've been waiting three years for Dierdra's quilting class to come back, so opted for that instead. Hopefully, Sue will be back again next year and I can get caught up on her great classes.

Here's the eye-candy for today...

This one ties with Jack Nicholson as my favorite so far...

'Swan Lake de los Muertos' by Nancy Arseneault

Three totally awesome pieces from the South African quilters of the World Quilt Competition XV tour...