penny-studionotes-2

I spent a week earlier this month in a workshop with Dorothy Caldwell at Nancy Crow's Barn.  The name of the workshop was "Human Marks," and we spent the week making a variety of marks on paper and fabric, with all sorts of implements/methods.  The final project was to make a small book with the products of some of these exercises, plus anything else we wanted to add, and to do that we also learned a simple book-binding method.  The workshop was both stimulating and fun, and it was a great group of people--more diverse than most workshops, as it drew people from a variety of backgrounds, including people whose main work was in weaving, collage, installation, dyeing, quilting, and more. The small pieces on the left (the shorter ones, about 4x13") were done by putting soy wax as a resist on fabric and then discharging color with bleach.  The four smaller pieces all started out as black fabric (top two on a black that discharged to tan, and the bottom two on a black th...

I'm working on two projects right now that are both based on the traditional "rail fence" pattern, but that go in different directions.   The first one, above, had its origin in an improvisational quilt class back in February, described at the end of this post .  This quilt retains the notion of each block having parallel pieces, with a common layout that staggers horizontal and vertical blocks.  But I did improvisational curvy lines instead of straight, and made the strips of uneven width.  I'm about 2/3 of the way done with quilting this one, straight lines going horizontally across the quilt (which you can see at the top and bottom of the photo; as always, double-click to see in more detail).  To choose colors for this quilt, I looked at African textiles, which often combine gold, red, blue, green, and black.  As mentioned in the earlier post, the darker colors are commercial Kona cotton, while the lighter values are mostly fabric I dyed to widen the val...