Not to minimize design….BUT….the perfect fabric is so important for an art quilt! The other day I was looking for fabric to redo pillows and a throw blanket for our bedroom when I came across an abstract cream with pale grey and pale dusty rose fabric. One of my poppy designs is created on an
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In Studio
New art quilts with curved piecing
One of my signature styles is the use of curved piecing in art quilts. I use these techniques exclusively with my landscape quilts and also with any abstract quilts I create. There are so many varieties of designs for which curved piecing is a great choice. This week I made three new quilts and used
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A year with fewer arts festivals
I took a year off from doing festival shows in 2017 except for a few very local, one day events. This was due to a variety of things from the physical activity required for packing, set up and tear down along with the unpredictability of selling, often influenced by the weather. I think if I
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Two New Tree Quilts
I have had a summer filled with custom orders so not much time to create art quilts for my shop. The past two weeks I decided to look back at some quilts that sold quickly and use those as inspiration for some new quilts. Because I don’t use patterns and often I don’t have the
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Free Motion Machine Quilting Landscape Quilts – Mountains
One of the things most fun about free motion quilting is the freedom to do so many different designs with thread, your sewing machine and your creativity. It really is boundless! If you work in the abstract arts as I do, these freedoms allow you to pick and choose how to accentuate colors or designs
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Free Motion Quilting TREES in Landscape quilts
I’ve created about 30 different art quilts with trees, some birch but many just brown/grey trees. In some of my earlier quilts I would try to quilt each tree in the quilt differently. THAT became a challenge I couldn’t maintain and I wasn’t sure it was necessary for the artistic quality of the quilt.
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Curved quilt piecing
CURVED PIECING is one of my favorite characteristics of contemporary quilting. Traditional quilting relies almost completely on straight edge piecing but unlimited options open up when you begin to sew curves. Curves can be small wiggles or whole circles though often whole circles are made with four blocks of quarter circles (see quilt in photo). Curved
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New Art Quilt Hanging Sleeve Design
Gallery hanging systems have always created a challenge for my art quilts which hang from the ends of the dowel inserted in a sleeve on the upper back (all hidden from a view of the quilt). I’ve received some invitations to submit quilts for gallery shows but they require a split sleeve with a dowel.
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Designing and Planning a Landscape Quilt
I’m not a sketcher or very good at drawing.but I do make some rudimentary sketches for most of my landscape quilts. These are very broad and simplistic ideas of the way I want the art quilt to flow and appear. Much of what I use the sketches for is to figure the proportions of the
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