Judy's Paint the canvas

Painted canvas
I kept seeing paint dripping down a canvas so that’s what I made. The yellow and green fabrics are some that I hand dyed with my friend, Ellis Bennett. We did it in her garage in JULY in TEXAS. That tells you how much we wanted to dye fabric! Nobody would do that if they didn’t have a passion for quilting and creating.

The orange, blue, and purple are Cherrywood fabrics. They hand dye their own fabrics and are the ones who have a challenge every year. Last year was the Bob Ross challenge and this year is Diana.

The other part I couldn’t get out of my mind was the paintbrush. I wanted to be able to paint with it. All of these fabrics were in my stash and it was fun to rediscover them and make a paintbrush from them. I just cut out a section that looked like paintbrush hairs from McKenna Ryan’s line called “At Home In The Woods”. I had a little piece of gray that looked like metal and then the handle is a piece that I purchased from the Waco quilt guild president when she moved to Arizona back in 1995.

The paint was cut from a fun fabric called “Effervescence” designed by Amelia Caruso for Robert Kaufman. Sometimes it is so hard to use a fabric because you want to save it for just the right project. I’ve decided that now is the right time. This week I have cut into it 2 times and I still have some to use on other projects. I sewed squares of the right colors together and fused Bosal knit interfacing on the back to prevent it from fraying too much and to give it body so that it would paint nicely.

I sewed a vinyl sleeve to hold the paintbrush and paint. Enjoy.

Sara's Doodling - Doodling around with Thread and Paint

When we got this theme I initially thought about free motion doodling. I talked myself out of it and thought I of a seismograph and the seismic field workers but then this happened! In preparation for my class at Quilting Adventures, I had to prepare an 18 inch square of quilted muslin. I responded to this task using my general overkill approach. I loaded about 2 1/2 yards of muslin onto my quilting machine and spent several days quilting on it in every way I could think out using up almost all of my partially filled bobbins. I cut out my 18 inch quilted sandwich and took it and the rest of the quilt with me to class. The class was taught by Leslie Tucker Jenison using a combination of her techniques and those of Yvonne Porcella. Leslie brought a large variety of paints and surface design tools. She showed us the difference between applying paint to a dry quilt and to a pre-wetted quilt. I was really pleased that I brought the entire piece; I got to experiment and share with my friends. This quilt is a 12 inch piece of my quilted doodling that was painted dry with acrylic paint.

Sara's Comfort Quilt

This quilt speaks to the theme of Comfort on several levels. I spent a good deal of time reflecting on what I find comforting. One of the first things that comes to mind is keeping my hands busy. Quilting has been my method of calming myself for 20 years. It also occurred to me that quilts offer comfort to others and the touch of a loved one is a major comforter that reminds us that we are not facing life alone. I never throw away my scraps and rummaging through them is a comforting trip through many memories.

These thoughts swirled around during the last 2 months. I attended a guild lecture by Alice Kolb in which she described the meaning behind crazy quilts. I found her out of print book on the subject and decided to make a crazy quilt using her techniques rather than the stitch and flip method that I've used previously (I'm still trying to explore different ways to create a quilt) in this case I brought order to a little bit of my scrap and life chaos. Digging through my scraps I found a little log cabin piece leftover from one of my early quilts, a heart log cabin quilt I created for my daughter. She dragged it all over and I remember being upset when I actually had to repair it. After my daughter's death I kept that quilt near and dear to me. The quilt also has scraps from a family portrait quilt that I made for my dad and also pieces from one of the more recent things that I made ( an Eiffel Tower zip travel bag). Two of the class that I took at IQF this year involved quilting a quilt and then painting in the quilted area so that technique  to be included too. (The classes were with Lisa Walton and Anna Buzzalino ). Since crazy quilts often carry embroidered messages, I added one from a calendar my cousin gave me after my daughter's death- "she who laughs lasts", a message that I have taken to heart whenever I find my stress meter starting to overload. I had my husband take a snapshot of my hands and I traced them in my IPad during an IQF presentation about IPad apps taught by Susie Monday