Archive

I’ve decided to switch to biweekly posts to the blog, in part because my non-art life has been terribly busy lately but also because I’ve found myself spending what I feel is too much time thinking about what to write about. I’d rather spend my time making art and have the blog post be a […]

One thing about growing up in a small town where your next door neighbors were your grandparents, you had 5 sets of great aunts and uncles within a few blocks and countless numbers of your mother’s cousins spread throughout the town; you really couldn’t get away with much. By the time I made it home […]

I decided to use an old baby knit and crochet pattern book for the trim around Lib’s quilt. When thinking about Lib I always remember her working on a quilt and to me she always seemed to be carrying around the absence of her daughter. I was a bit of a sickly child so I […]

Now that I’m getting a better hang of the whole free-motion quilting thing I’m liking the look of the look of the line it produces even more: I tell you no lies, this is difficult work, but I consider myself lucky. Whenever I want I can push away from the machine and take a break, […]

Not a new punk band, rather a description of my week. Started the week out at my mother-in-laws in Connecticut to attend the funeral of my husband’s aunt Gloria Outwater (Schrader). In addition to the strong women in my birth family I’ve had the pleasure of knowing a number of other strong (and strong-willed) women, […]

Most of the quilts I have done to date have actually been quilt tops, that is they have just been the equivalent of the top layer(s) of fabric of a quilt without the layer of batting or backing that makes up a traditional quilt. The last quilt I made involved the trapunto technique and therefor […]

I cut out all the pieces for Lib’s Bumble Bee quilt; 25 yellow squares, 20 yellow bodies and 40 brown wings. Then came my favorite part with a new project – problem solving. How was I going to figure out how to place them accurately on the square? Geometry to the rescue. I cut 4 […]

I did a little printmaking and a lot of mulling (without the wine – though that sounds like a great idea!) working through ideas for Elizabeth’s quilt. I didn’t come up with any workable prints, though I did have a lot of fun printing (haven’t done that for a while).   More importantly I figured out […]

I finished threading the ribbon through the trim on the latest quilt! This seems like quite a victory, and it was certainly a lesson in patience. I found that if I rushed it at all the ribbon would start to fray and the trim would start to tear. I did what I usually do, I made […]

I got a lot of great suggestions from friends on how to tackle the issue I faced last week with the fragile catalog pages crumbling. I forget sometimes that I’m not the only person who does what I do. I also forget sometimes that it’s ok to ask for help or ideas if I get […]