Thursday, September 20, 2007

Lots of quilting

"I like that when you're making art, that you're taking energy out of your body and putting it into a physical object. I like things that are labor intensive. You make a little thing and another little thing and eventually you see a possibility." Kiki Smith. I found this quote from a favorite woman painter/sculptor on a blog called Judy's Journal which is by the Judy Martin who is an art quilter in Ontario. I believe there are three Judy Martins who are well known in the quilt world, although at the moment I can only think of the one who has written at least a couple of books about scrap quilting. I was surfing the Artful Quilters Web Ring by going to a favorite blog, and after perusing it, clicking the "Random" on the Artful logo. Often a person who is on that ring is also on the SAQA ring and I jump to random surfing on it. I love the sense of knowing there are literally hundreds of women out there making art quilts and many of them write about what they are doing and post pictures of projects in hand, write about shows and teachers amd so on. They post interesting quotes like this one and write about new books and techniques. I recommed surfing starting with the logo on my blog and just wandering on. It's not all about quilting, it's real people with real lives who digress from quilting like I do [though some are more focused than I am].
Here are a couple of pictures of the quilting I've been doing on my jacket pieces all week. It is labor intensive but it's also creative in that I don't know how I'm going to quilt a section until I get ready to quilt it. I'm using a fair amount of gold thread because the quilting will be a large part of the embellishment, although I'll add other things too once the quilting is done -- whether I'll do much other embellishment before I sew the pieces together I haven't decided yet. I love working this way, making decisions as I go along. I hope I can have it done by the end of the coming weekend but I have some doubts - that will depend on how much embellishment I can do on the machine and how much must be done by hand. But it's coming along. And the brain is racking up three or four other projects to start -- except I've got two time consuming ones to finish... so it goes...

No comments :