Triptych Trio

 

Here are the final three quilts I've been working on the last few weeks. 

Hung up all together in their intended triptych form. 

I'm going to be quite happy to hang these up in my home if they don't make it into the Prism Play SAQA show that I made them for. 

I gave all three quilts Latin names based on their color and position in the triptych for some reason I couldn't express at the moment. Mostly it's because the Latin word for left hand is *Sinister* which I've always loved very much. 

Chartreuse Sinister  - The Chartreuse Mountains are where Carthusian monks have traditionally made the drink of the same name and color. The outlines of the curves of the mountain range inspired the curving lines and shadows. The Latin word for left is sinister. This is the left-most piece of a triptych.

Aqua Centrum - The curving lines and shadows echo the color changes in the open ocean water at various depths. The Latin word for center is centrum. This is the center-most piece of a triptych.

Aurantia Dextera - The curving lines and shadows evoke the rolling hills covered in orange groves. The Latin word for right is dextera and for orange is aurantia. This is the right-most piece of a triptych.

Quilting Blue

I buckled down and got the quilting done on the blue Prism Play quilt yesterday. All thanks to a library book on CDs, the latest Stephen King book, Billy Summers. The story is non-supernatural or horror, it's about a military sniper turned hired assassin and as per King's usual a great character study. The performer reading the book does very engaging and realistic voices for the many characters.

As you can see here, I had a lot of fun with free-hand, non free-motion quilting.

I went for making as much texture as possible and got pretty good results.

These are all still un-trimmed, and just roughly pinned down to size, but give a good general idea of how they'll look. Now on to the cutting to size and adding the facings. And then the photography and completing the entry (due on the 10th eeeek!)

 

Everything Is Blue

On to the third and final Prism Play quilt, this time I had to choose between three color cards. I settled on Aqua Blue because I had the most fabrics to choose from. Here's the start of the quilt and the fabric pull I was working with. I ended up pulling out that very dark green one that very much was not in the correct color range. It happened to be one of those shot cottons, so under one light it was absolutely spot on, but under another light or at another angle, it came off very differently. More like: why is this obviously green fabric in here?

I again encountered the colored head of my pin exactly matching the fabric. Like playing "chicken" except with a sewing machine instead of a car. Slightly less dangerous.

This song was of course running through my head as I was stitching on this one:
 

Two Down, One to Go

 

All done with quilting two out of the three Prism Play quilts for the SAQA exhibit. These are such an odd size, 15" wide x45"high. This is the green one before quilting.

The blue one that I'm working on goes in-between the green and orange pieces:

Here they are with their corresponding color cards.

These aren't cut down to size quite yet, the edges are just pinned. I'm really pleased with how the quilting turned out. Because of the odd size it's going to be a real challenge to light these well enough for photography to enter the show.

International Conference Time

I'm so glad that the international SAQA conference, 'Oceans Apart, Connected by Art' is happening virtually this year. Because I"m really out of it after getting my second vaccine shot yesterday. Feeling flu-ish and if I had to get up and go somewhere, it would not be happening. Instead I'm resting comfortably and reading and looking at great art quilt pictures.

It's being held entirely on this app called WhoVa which is pretty slick and works very well for this type of event.

And for non-participants in the conference, there's something you can go check out, The Spotlight Auction, a fund-raiser for SAQA of 270 small works for sale.

Threads of Innovation

 Last week was the SAQA conference, Threads of Innovation. It was held locally for me, so I drove over to San Jose for two out of the four days. It was very well run and well worth the time and money. We even got swag bags, with some Misty Fuse and fat quarters.

I attended two break-out seminars, one on photographing quilts which was very useful. All kinds of great advice which I'll put to use the next time I'm trying to get my work photographed well enough to enter a show.

The second was about doing art on your iPad by Susie Monday. It was all about using your photos, even photos of your own work, and putting them through various art apps to make them into art. Or into fabric designs to get printed out on spoonflower, etc.  Very interesting, I'd used several of the apps she talked about, but it was the combining of them that I hadn't considered before. It was fun to see the examples of her work and her students in the presentation. And I liked that she had some examples of printed fabrics to see.

While in the class I noticed the ceiling and took a picture of the grid with the light and shadows.

And then I used an app to manipulate the photo. Maybe I should add this to my proposed series of shadows quilts?

I wish I'd taken pictures with some of the people I met, but I was so engaged with talking to people I'd only ever known online so I neglected to do that.

We had great talks on Friday from Pokey Bolton - on the rise and fall of publishing and Lisa Congdon on using Instagram. The next day there were presentations from RoCoCo an art collaboration, very interesting out-of-the-box kind of stuff. Social Justice Sewing Academy gave a wonderful and moving presentation, including some of the quilt makers telling about their experiences of making their first quilts through the program.

The last thing is the picture above, three views on critique, Susan Else, Judith Content, and Delores Miller each took their turns critiquing SAQA member's work. Very useful to see this in action, and to get the participants to repeat what they heard from the critique.