Andrea's Refraction Quilt

Hommage To Freddy Moran

"She's A Rainbow"

11" x 14" fused cotton, rubber stamps, tulle

 

I know I am stretching the theme, more like 'refraction by association'! The quilt I was intending to make was based on a photo I took at a Friendly's restaurant a couple of years ago. I was served a large glass of water with a red straw that visually both refracted and distorted the straw, which was fascinating. Even though it was the perfect subject matter for this theme, I really didn't feel like representing it in fabric. My next thought was to do something with a rainbow, as they are an "optical phenomenon caused by refraction" ( Wikipedia ), but I didn't want to work with rainbow imagery either. I'm sure I have mentioned before how intrigued I am with the creative process and for me, one thing usually leads to another. Just after dismissing the rainbow concept, I had a few errands to run and the first song that was playing on the car radio was The Rolling Stones' "She's A Rainbow".  I not only took this as the universe telling me to stick to the rainbow concept, but when I thought of a rainbow representing a person, I immediately thought of Freddy Moran, who sadly died in August at 94. Literally within a 10 minute timespan, I had the beginning of an idea that I couldn't wait to start!

Freddy's quilts were colorful, joyful & whimsical. She loved polka dots, stripes and considered red to be a neutral color. Black and white fabrics became her signature, as I think her large red framed glasses.

I wanted to incorporate a house block ( Freddy's first book was called Freddy's House ) and I made it into a fascinator hat.

I am truly grateful to Linda Hicks for asking me, in 2011, if I would be interested in joining a new art quilt blog started by friends in Texas.  I was most honored that Alice Beard accepted me! Being a member of The Material Mavens has an amazing creative experience that I will miss.

Nedra's Refraction - Blue Velvet

 

I did a bit of research about refraction and learned that blue flowers and animals are very rare in nature. Part of the reason is that there isn’t really a true blue color or pigment and both plants and animals have to perform tricks of the light to appear blue. For plants, blue is achieved by mixing naturally occurring pigments, very much as an artist would mix colors. The most commonly used are the red pigments, called anthocyanins, and whose appearance can be changed by varying acidity. These alterations, combined with reflective light can create some spectacular results: delphiniums, plumbago, bluebells, hydrangeas, morning glories, and cornflowers. 

Instead of pigment mixing or alteration, blue is achieved in many animals by making structures that change the wavelength of light or refracting it. For example, the blue morpho butterfly gets it's color from the fact that its wing scales are shaped in ridges that causes light to bend in such a way that the only wavelength that reflects is blue. If shaped differently the blue color would vanish. I thought the butterfly was stunning and decided to depict it for our refraction challenge. 

The butterfly is made collage style and then attached to the background. I used machine stitching, watercolor pencils and paint to add the identifying marks. The background is a batik which I used to make 3 dimensional leaves that are machined stitched. Sticks were gathered from nature to make the setting for the butterfly. It is machine pieced and bound and attached to a canvas. My husband made the sycamore frame. I very much enjoyed creating this piece for our final reveal.  I compared it to my first reveal and realized how much my creative process has improved!!  I must thank Andrea for inviting me to join this group and for Alice who was our original and fantastic leader!!

Tricia's Refraction

Tricia's Refraction of Sankaty Lighthouse 

Even though refraction was my chosen word I struggled with what to create. I must have forgotten what I intended to create. We have a hanging glass star that I photographed with the sun coming thru. I wasn't completely happy with my image but was going to work with it. Then I opened the Nantucket newspaper and saw the photo below by Dan Lion. The caption said "East End Light Show. The beacon of Sankaty Head Lighthouse shines and refracts in the fog Sunday night, creating a strobe-light effect." I thought this is just perfect. I contacted Dan Lion and he was happy for me to use his photo.

My base fabric was cherrywood's hand dyed grey. I used tulle as one or two layers over the white fabric to create the fog. I also painted with a Sharpie paint pen on the edges of the white fabric to soften the edges to help give the image of the glowing fog. 

I have enjoyed being part of this group. Thanks for all the inspiration!

Alice's Refraction: Wine glass with Red Pen  

I confess I had to look up the definition of "refraction" in the dictionary.  Not that that helped me much!  I was still confused about just what this word meant.  My next step was to Google "images that depict refraction."  Aha!  That did help immensely.  I saw a photo of a glass of water with a straw or something similar in the glass.  Suddenly the definition made sense to me.

So I filled a wine glass with water and placed a red pen in the glass.  Then I "posed" this still life on a table with a blank wall behind it and photographed it.   (Wish I'd posed it against something to make the wine glass more obvious!)   This photo was then printed off onto  some cotton fabric which I had adhered to paper with a fusible product.  

I pulled some red and brown fabrics from my stash and cut them into strips and did some fun string piecing.  I then pinned the photo of the wine glass and its red pen and appliqued it to the background.  I bound the little 12" x 12" quilt with more of one of the red fabrics.

So, fellow Mavens, this group that began over a decade ago has come to an end.  Endings are always sad, and I'm sad about this blog's last postings.  It's been for me a mind-stretching experience to come up with little art quilts that depict scores of different themes. How very appropriate that this current theme was one I had to struggle with!  Talk about mind stretching!

 I've met some wonderful fellow quilters from places as different as Massachusetts and Arkansas!  I remember with delight the various times we've gotten together for retreats and reunions.  Once most of us met in Houston during Festival, and then there were the fabulous times we had together in Nantucket and Arkansas.  Thanks again to those of you who made those gatherings happen.  I will miss 'seeing' all of you on the blog!  I plan to be in Houston for just one day in October; I hope to see some of you there!

The steering committee who came up with the idea to start this blog was made up of Judy Steward, Rita Schormann, and myself.  How I miss Rita, who died suddenly and unexpectedly in October of 2022.  I'd like to dedicate this final blog in her memory.  Without exaggeration, Rita was the most talented, meticulous,  and creative quilter I have ever known.  I will always miss her!

Happy National Quilting Day

 

Fall Composite

 

Here is the Fall Collage 

Participants Nedra, Tricia, Karen, Andrea

Andrea's Fall Quilt

 

OOPS

( or Fall, Falling, Fallen! )

11"-ish x 14"

Hand-dyed and commercial cotton

Anytime I can use shoes in a quilt or art project I will.  Not really wanting to make the season of Fall my focus, I went with a tongue-in-cheek ( or dark, think Agatha Christie or Hitchcock! ) interpretation, where a pair of shoes could represent someone who has taken a fall!  Slipped on a wet leaf perhaps?  Or maybe the person is sitting and watching the fall leaves flutter in the wind?

Karen's Fall

 Bare Tree 111

The tree is constructed with many different strips of brown batik which I heavily stitched in place. 

The leaves were made from double sided batik. I stitch the veins in with smoke colored monofilament thread. I let them curl and stitched them onto the back ground in just a few spots 

so they would keep the curl. 

The back ground was a perfect commercial fabric that I strategically quilted. 

This is an old piece that I pulled out and added the fallen leaves to the bottom of the tree. 

Added more quilting in the ground. 

It's nice to revisit old pieces!!

Tricia's Fall Scalloping

 Fall Scalloping

Last month I used a tree and leaves for my ancestry so I struggled with a new idea for fall. As I usually do when I'm stuck, I ask a family member for suggestions on the theme word. My daughter's first reaction was we always go scalloping in the fall. On Nantucket Family Scalloping opens on October 1st. 

Scalloping on Nantucket is a treasured tradition for families but also the commercial fisherman. These are  the sweetest and tiniest bay scallops. The bay scalloping industry is dying everywhere. Nantucket has put a huge investment into saving and keeping the industry. This past year the investment has been paying off. The amount of scallops that are being harvested and seed that is in the harbor has increased. We have reason to be hopeful for the continuation of the bay scallop in Nantucket Habor.

Now to my journal quilt. I find it difficult to portray people and especially faces in my work. The first weekend in December our friend Nick and his family came to Nantucket for the Christmas Stroll. (so technically not fall). I had mentioned to Nick that Nantucketers very often go scalloping on Thanksgiving morning to have a scallop dish for Thanksgiving. It was the first weekend in December and Nick said lets go! He put on our wet suit and went out to Jackson Point. My quilt is from a picture of Nick coming in with a basket of scallops. Even after a hot shower he was cold for a long time! We enjoyed a delicious scallop dinner that night.

I printed the photograph on fabric, free motion stitched the grasses, created the basket from wire and filled with real tiny scallops shells that I have collected over the years. The scallops rake was made from tulle, metal and a dowel. It is 10"wide x 13"high

Nedra's Fall - Vermont Gems

 

Vermont Gems

Raw edge applique, hand painted, commercial cottons, machine quilted

12' X 12"

I moved to Vermont in 1979 and was thrilled to experience many "firsts" there. Some of these included seeing many feet of snow, below zero temperature, snow skiing, sugar on snow parties, snow shoveling and of course Fall Leaf Peeping!! The colorful leaves looked like gems on the branches to me after having seen little more than brown leaves in Louisiana.  

I choose to spotlight the leaves and their glorious hues in this piece.  I hand painted most of the fabric.  I did use one commercial batik for the sweet gum leaves but dabbled a bit of paint on those.  The leaves are machine stitched onto the background.  The larger ones that extend beyond the edges are double sided and 3 dimensional.  I used a commercial fabric for the background and scattered them over it to look like they were on the ground in the woods.  

Tricia's Ancestry

 

Tricia's Family Tree

In thinking about our word "Ancestry", I kept going back to the image of a favorite photograph that I have from my grandparent's backyard. We would travel to our grandparents' house for holidays. Someone would photograph the grandchildren in the tree in the back yard. I am the girl with dark jumper sitting in the middle but at the back.

I have two ancestry books on my father's family - The Purrington's.  I have never really read the books before. This project gave me the incentive to read through them.  What I learned was that the Purrington's were from the town of Puddington, England (near Tiverton). When my ancestors came to the US, their name was changed from Puddington to  some form of Purrington -- some spelled it with two R's, some with one R, some with a G, and some without the G. The different family members landed in different parts of the country. My father's family ended up in Western Massachusetts in a tiny town named Haydenville. This is where my grandparents house was with the tree behind it.

I decided to create my family tree with the eight branches of my father's family. My father, Wilbur Purrington, was the youngest of eight children. On the trunk of the tree the two large leaves represent my grandparents, Wilbur and Eleanor Purrington. On the branches are leaves that represent all their children and families. The pointy leaves are males and the rounded ones are females.  Starting from the left the branches have leaves for the parents, (and their children):

Frankin Purrington and Ruth, (Edwin, Frankin Jr.)

Alden Purrington and Marjorie, (Eleanor, Barbara, Alden Jr.)

Donald Purrington and Polly, (Jack and Jean)

Rollo Purrington and Marion, (Barry, Bruce and Richard)

Esther Purrinton and Chet, (Neil and Eleanor)

Philip Purrington and Ann, (Katharine and Nancy)

Wilbur Purrington and Patricia, (Robert, Sarah and Tricia (me))

The small green leaf on the left is for Helen Purrington who died at the age of 2

I used fusibles with my fabrics and free-motioned the quilting.

Andrea's Ancestry Quilt

 Ancestors: Relatively Speaking

11" x 14"

linen, cotton, stencil, silk screen, beads

Scotland, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland, England, Belgium, Germany, France, Mali, Norway and Wales. These are the countries of my ancestors, according to Ancestry dot com.  Red, white, blue, yellow, green, gold & black are the  common flag colors for these countries and most of the flag designs are striped.  

  

I'm always fascinated with where the creative process / ideas start and where they end up.

The original starting point for this quilt was a background of solid fabrics in the flag colors with abstracted figures representing my ancestors.  I cut a stencil for the figures and then fused together horizontal  'flag' fabrics. I stenciled the the figures on to the fabric, but to my disappointment, it looked dirty, especially on the yellow fabric.  Next I tried stenciling on pale grey linen, starting at the bottom with black fabric paint and proceeding up towards the top with lighter shades of grey.  That was better, but a bit depressing!  It needed color and because my favorite is purple I decided to stencil a few single figures in purple on top of the black & grey figures.  Better, but it still needed more color.  At that point, a narrative started in my head that my love of purple, black & white, bright colors, dots, checks and stripes must be part of my DNA, handed down from my ancestors, so I cut 5 figure shapes out of some of my favorite fabrics.  Playing with their placement was fun and it seemed like they belonged.  As a nod to my great grandfather, I screen printed the purple figure from a 1906 letter written by him in Swedish.

Luminosity Composite

Alice            Andrea

Nedra

Tricia

Alice's Luminosity Quilt: St. Louis Arch at Night

A friend from Missouri posted on Facebook a photo of the St. Louis arch taken by a professional photographer.  I immediately thought of basing my luminosity quilt on this photo.  I contacted the photographer (Larry the Photographer) for permission to use his image in this way, and he graciously agreed.  My first attempts disappointed me, primarily because the fabrics I brought from Texas to Michigan, where we are for the summer, just didn't all work.  They were solids, and though lovely ombres, they came off looking too flat.

I purchased some batiks here and, discouraged about the arch quilt, I then made a second quilt for the theme, basing it on a memory seen last winter from our front porch here in Kalamazoo--a full moon behind a bare tree.  BUT then all the other quilts were posted, and I felt mine was too reminiscent of several others!  But this quilt was done, so why not make a two-sided quilt, both of which would work for the luminosity theme?

So try number two of the St. Louis arch quilt began!  Those batiks I just purchased would work better than what I had brought with me, and I was able to combine these with the ombre fabrics from home.  The batiks formed the water and the foliage at the base of the arch.  The ombres I used were in shades of orange and yellow for the arch itself and its reflection in the water below the arch.  I also used the ombre for the sky, as I was particularly eager to capture the pink of the sunset that caught my eye in the photo.  No, the sky wasn't purple, but I could live with a purple sky that is fading into pink!

The most challenging aspect of this quilt was how to make the reflections of the arch in the water look right.  My daughter here suggested that I cut the orange and yellow ombre fabrics for the reflections with "wobbly" edges.  She was right; this worked much better!

After fusing with Wonder Under,  I secured edges of the appliques with a tiny zigzag stitch. I did this stitching and minimal quilting through the batting in order not have stitching show on the backing quilt. But I goofed!  When about to bind the quilt, I noticed an area of my Arch quilt that needed more quilting.  Improvise, improvise!  The stitching that showed on the back of the quilt I hid conveniently with some Pentel dye sticks!  The quilt is bound with the same blue batik used for the water in the Arch quilt.  

Here is Larry the Photographer's photo of the arch:

And here's the back of the quilt

Tricia's Luminosity

I created this piece from a photograph I saw of Sankaty Light House at sunset on Nantucket. I thought the moon behind the light house is a great example of luminosity. 

I used raw edge applique, fusibles and free motion quilting.
 

Nedra's Luminous - Grahams' Giraffe

 When my kids visited us in Georgia this past April vacation Graham, my 8 yr old. grandson,  slept in my "studio". He knew I made quilts, but it was the first time he got to see my workspace and design wall.  Many of my favorite MM quilts are pinned to the top of the design wall.  He called me in the room and asked what they were for and if I could tell him about them.  I explained our blog and themes and he asked what was our next theme. I said luminous;  he smiled and his eyes sparkled!!  "Could we help you make this one", he asked eagerly!!

I was touched as this was the first time he expressed so much interest in my work, even though I've made him and his sisters several quilts over the years!!  I of course took him up on it!!  He and his twin sister Noelle spent the next 2 hours with me planning what to do.  "It needs a moon", he said.  I agreed that was a great idea and asked what else we should do.  "Well we could have a giraffe too"!!!  (These kids know their Grandma I thought.).  I let them pick the fabric we would use and draw the giraffe and moon .  I helped them cut out the figures which we fused to the background.  I let them stitch down the pieces on the machine, with my help guiding the fabric.  We added the spots on the giraffe with pearlescent paint and glitter to it and the moon. for more shimmer.  Graham then decided we needed grass since the giraffe was "kind of above the ground".  (Very good design sense I thought!)   I gave him some inktense pencils to add blades of grass.   That was as far as we got since we had plans for a dolphin-watching boat ride later.  We didn't find more time to complete it as they were busy and left a day later.

After they left, I added the acacia tree and embellished the blades of grass as they were quite light and not very visible. I machine quilted the background and added a few beads as a finishing touch.

It was very exciting to work on this together!!  Without their ideas and enthusiasm I don't think I would have made a quilt for this theme!!

I 

Andrea's Luminous Quilt

"Glow"

11" x 14" 

Cotton, Dupioni Silk

How colors can dramatically change when placed next to each other has fascinated me for years.  When I started to think about how I wanted to approach Luminous, I decided I wanted the quilt to be a simple design using only solid fabrics and the title would be "Glow".  The "pop" of silk was added because of the luminous  quality of the fabric ( and I was getting a bit bored with just the greys and greens!!! ).  I think I achieved the glow I was hoping for, but I'm sorry that I did not fuse instead of piece.  That ugly little voice in my head is shouting that my seams are not straight, and there are many wrinkles that should be flat!

Flour/flower Composite

    Carolyn             Nedra    

Tricia                Karen

                  Andrea               Judy                    

 

Judy's Flower Rabbit

22" x 26"

Flour/Flower. I have a funny picture from the beginning of the pandemic that I thought I might make into a quilt. The store shelves were totally empty of flour because everyone started baking, but someone who helped us get a laugh had put some pots of Flowers on those shelves.

I just didn’t get that one going, but I have been working hard to collage a rabbit. It turns out the year of the rabbit just might be my year of a series of rabbit collages. This is one of 3 that I have been working on. When I completed it, I realized that it fit the theme perfectly. It’s spring, it’s floral, and it’s a rabbit which covers this year and this season.

The background fabric is an ombre so it goes from light to dark and there are more dots in the dark area. I used the middle of the fabric, which is the lightest part, as the backing. The fabric is Moda “Ombre confetti metallic” by Vanessa Christenson of V and Co. On the selvage it says, “Spread Kindness Like Confetti”. I believe that wholeheartedly.

Carolyn's Flower -Dancing Flowers

 Of course, being the gardener that I have always been, I just HAD to do flowers for this theme.  I am not a cook or a baker so for me, this was the right and only choice! 

I tried to use just one flower, but it looked lonely blowing in the wind.  I ended up adding a second flower and 5 leaves floating by.  The quilt is fused with scraps of Kaffe Collective fabrics that I have used in previous quilts, as is the binding.  I tried a wavy stitch for the polka dot background.  In my mind, it imitates swirls of wind.  We just had a super windstorm full of West Texas sand, so wind was on my radar.  

I am recuperating from 3 + months of health issues, so this was my first time "back in the saddle".  It feels good!!!