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It is almost six months since I participated in a week-long workshop with Claire Benn at the Crow Barn in Ohio.  The workshop gave me a chance to work on multiple ways of producing graphic shapes and lettering on fabric.  Most of the examples above will reappear below, as I describe the work. The workshop was called "Graphics and Graffiti."  Most of the sample work that Claire took us through had to do with ways of using letters/words, but we were also encouraged to do graphic work more broadly.  Most of what I did falls into three categories:  writing/marking with ink (on both paper and fabric),  screen printing with shapes drawn from my "Regret" quilt, and using a paper lamination screen to print a large block of narrative text. Writing/marking with ink : The first day of the workshop was devoted to working with paper, using markers and then various implements with India ink.  Many of the exercises we did were inspired by the work of Denise Lach , wh...

I have long admired the work of Paula Kovarik , which features extraordinary, imaginative stitching on a variety of surfaces--sometimes abstract blocks of color, sometimes re-purposed linens.  A few months ago, Paula put out a request for people to send her children's drawings of robots, monsters, and beasts.  She had been using drawings from her own family in some of her quilting, and was looking for more images to work from.  I sent in a number of my son Jeremy's drawings, made when he was between four and six years old.  To my delight, Paula has posted one of Jeremy's drawings in the left side-bar of her blog, and another in a recent post about the project; you can see both drawings here .  It is lovely to have these glimpses of Jeremy out in the world. Here are some of the other drawings I found as I went through the big envelopes of things I'd saved from Jeremy's childhood.  It was striking to see what a narrow window there is for drawings like th...

When I posted a few months ago about "Self-Portrait, Year 2: Beneath the Surface," I didn't include a photo of the full quilt, for reasons I explained in the post . Now that the quilt has been shown at QuiltCon, and many people have seen it, I wanted to share it on my blog also.  Bill Kerr kindly sent me two photos, and let me know that many people were looking closely at the quilt, and talking about it.   I also received several e-mail messages from people I didn't know, who had seen the quilt, and took the time to track down my address and write heartfelt words of appreciation and support, which touched me deeply.  Then yesterday, through the thoughtfulness of Weeks Ringle, I learned of a Facebook posting on the quilt by Bill Volckening , a quilt collector.  His post, and the many many comments on it, leave me somewhat stunned.  For many years I lived with this quilt in private--years of working on a design and then months of executing it.  To have i...

I've finished making the blocks for this quilt, and settled on a layout.  The next decision is what color sashing to use between the blocks and as a narrow border around the edge (1/2" wide, the same width as the narrow strips within each block).  This is narrower than in the " G lyph " pattern that I used for the quilt, but I'm going for a look closer to the " Mod Mosaic " quilt I made a while back.  I may well go with white sashing (which would give a look close to the blocks on my white design wall), but I have tried out many other possibilities as well:  various greens and purples, black, dark blue, tone-on-tone green, green batik.  I'll be near a fabric store on Tuesday, so will take a look for candidates there. In the meantime, I thought I'd play around with the many scraps I have left from the fabric cut for the narrow strips in the blocks.  I use the " mile-a-minute " method for piecing scraps, and put them together into this s...

Back in May, I made the decision to quilt my shot cotton "Plain Spoken quilt with embroidery stitches .  In the months since, I scoured embroidery books for a variety of usable stitches and began the stitching.  I enjoyed learning the embroidery stitches; it is quite amazing how holding the thread one way or another, or placing the needle here or there, can create a wide variety of designs.  But after doing about 80 different stitches, I decided I didn't like the way it looked on the quilt.  Too much variety of color, value, and pattern--all of which distracted from the flow of color in the quilt.   (Ignore the loose white stitches--that's just basting that will be removed when the quilting is done.) And a close-up, with basting stitches removed.  No better.   So I decided to go back to something simpler, and did trials with various weight threads in either a simple running stitch, or the "conversation" stitch that I used on my Regret quilt.   I ...

About a year ago, walking in the woods of rural Illinois, I made the drawing on the right above.  I was struck by the relationship between the three trees.  I also think of the drawing as "The Three of Us."  I don't think of it as each tree representing a specific one of us--we're somehow interchangeable in my ruminations on it. I thought for a long while of translating the drawing into a large quilt.  I imagined swaths of dark fabric against a white background.  I made several thermofax screens from photos I'd taken of bark (first row of prints below), and I also scraped thickened dye on fabric to get other textures (second row): I talked with Bill Kerr about these ideas last spring.  He asked, "Does it need to be so literally like trees?"  Right, no need for bark texture--more abstract is better.  "The line drawing is very nice as it is."  Yes, agreed, I really like the line drawing. So, I started thinking about doing a line drawing with th...

I'm making a quilt for Ashley, who picked out a color scheme of green and purple.  I had fun dyeing a range of colors.  I'm using a pattern by Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr called "Glyphs," which incorporates improvised piecing; I've really been enjoying cutting and piecing this pattern.  Here are the first 24 blocks (out of 64 that I'll need for the quilt); I've made each block to finish at 6x8-1/2".  Ashley prefers a bluish green, so I may have too much yellow-green.  Some is fine, but I'll probably re-balance as I make more blocks. Here's a photo of the pattern, available in Modern Quilts Illustrated , no. 9. I've changed the size of the block while keeping the proportion of width/length.  I plan to use a narrower sashing, and a border the same width as the sashing.  I haven't decided yet on the color for the sashing.  I'll wait until the blocks are done and then audition fabrics.  I'm thinking it might be a light green, or po...