A Week in Class Heaven...

This Wednesday, I'm headed off to PIQF for four days of classes, lectures, viewing some 800 quilts and items of wearable art, cruising through 150+ vendor booths, and schmoozing with hundreds, if not thousands, of Quilt Types... and I can hardly wait!!! Pacific International Quilt Festival is a reward I give myself every year because I'm a wonderful person and I love myself! This year, because of my Life Turn-Around, I feel particularly deserving of this very special reward, and I intend to enjoy it to the max.

"Class Week" got off to an early start yesterday, when I took an absolutely delicious class with Fiber Artist, Marlene Glickman. It all began several months ago when, from a source I no longer recall, I stumbled across this picture and my life changed.

Please allow me a moment of digression here... For years I did a lot of fabric art in the form of banner-making for First Presbyterian Church of Vallejo, where I also worked for many years as organist. After over four years of being away from the responsibility and, alas, the sometimes pure drudgery, of being a church musician, my enthusiasm for making liturgical art has been revived in recent months. Together with my good friend Caroline, a pillar of FPCV, who has become the pastoral stole "Maven" (Yiddish for 'Expert') there, I attended a Sewing Expo a few weeks ago, and we got ourselves all riled up about doing a "Banner Bombing" at the church starting sometime after the first of the year. We haven't told anyone of our idea yet, and this rather amorphous timeline was set in order to give ourselves plenty of time to think about this concept and decide whether or not it was cooked up in the excitement of the moment, and is something we really want to do.

Well, after seeing Marlene's picture, I decided a return to liturgical art is, indeed something I want to do, so I set about trying to find out how to make it happen. Fate quickly intervened, as Fate has done so often in my life. I recently joined another quilting guild in my area, and at The Very First Meeting I attended, there was a flyer announcing Marlene's class.  Her name didn't click immediately, but the class description sounded intriguing, and when I got home I Googled her and the first thing I saw was The Picture.

In yesterday's class, Marlene taught us how to think small, and how to create a complete piece of art in a  5-inch square using a variety of techniques - some familiar to me, and others, not. Most exciting, I learned how to use foils... a technique I've wanted to learn for years, but was too timid to try on my own. While my initial attempts were pretty sorry affairs, at least I have the hang of it now, and practice will make it better, as practice always does. I also learned a lot about dying sheer fabrics and how to use various kinds of fusing techniques to hang everything together... things I already knew a little about, but now I feel like a bloody expert, and can hardly wait to forge ahead into new worlds of creativity! 

Everyone received a goody bag full of pieces of fabrics - cottons, silks, fancy glitzy stuff, lace, trims, fusing materials, foils... a fun selection to play with.

Here are some of the squares I made, and you'll see plenty more in the months to come.

A random placement of pieces, resembling nothing in particular...

A tiny landscape...

An experiment in fusing metalic textiles...

As you can see from The Picture, the squares can depict just about anything the creator wants, and can be made in any color. For a piece of liturgical art, an ideal situation would be to have members of a congregation each create their own square, or two or three, but where that process isn't practical, the artist is in charge. In a house of worship, religious themes, nature scenes, and sentiments of thanks are the obvious choices. For secular works, as in a wall hanging or piece of wearable art, anything goes! For an artist who is experiencing a creative "block", making a square a day is a good way to get the juices flowing again!