Color, like cake, is delicious. Stripes are vibrant; I use a lot of them in all my quilts. Here, they delineate the layers of layer cake. The stripes also create the appearance of three dimensions, jutting forward where they converge.

 

The color and hand stitched marks are the important thing about this quilt. I love the Ralle's from India, and the new interest in Boro boro hand stitching in Japanese recycling old clothes. The fabrics in this piece are the brocades from Africa, and some commercial cloth that I over dyed. Very fun!

 

The pink O's are some hand dyed brocade cotton from Africa. All of the fabrics are either hand dyed by me or brocades from African traders.I love the process of cutting up the beautiful colors and sewing them back together, giving it several planes. The hand stitched hand dyed quilting threads change colors depending on what color fabric they are laying on. I could look at the color varieties for hours.

 

After photographing melting icebergs in Antarctica, I was inspired to create a quilt that highlights the alarming effect of climate change. I ran a filter on a photograph, and then hand pieced with a new method: California (not English) Paper Piecing. Only one piece of solid white ice remains, the lighter pieces represent the melting ice with the linear lines, and the darker pieces with curved quilting represent the surrounding ocean.

 

Blossom Burst is an original quilt design created for the 2019 Riley Blake Designs Modern Quilt Guild Fabric Challenge. I used geometric shapes including triangles, diamonds, and parallelograms paired with organic straight line quilting to add contrast, texture and interest. I was able to challenge myself in several ways while creating this quilt, including design in Adobe Illustrator, freezer paper piecing, and the use of color and scale.

 

This quilt was inspired by a visit to the Fushimi Inari Shrine in Kyoto, Japan and its pathways of torii gates. These gates are commonly found at the entrance of a Shinto shrine. They symbolically mark the transition from the mundane to the sacred. As you pass through, you ask yourself not only "where am I headed?", but "why am I going?"

 

The design for "EpiQuilt" was created via code. This means that I provided constraints (in the form of a simple nested "X" shape) and I instructed a computer to create random pieced sections within those constraints while applying a color gradient. The result is a soft color gradient and quilty texture mixed with the strong geometry of lines. The quilt was pieced using traditional methods on a domestic machine and quilted on a long arm.

 

More is More is based on the overwhelm I felt after attending QuiltCon in Feb19. I wanted to illustrate everything in one quilt; to explore new techniques; quilt-as-you-go, hand appliqué, mixing quilting types. From all the quilts displayed in 2019 my take-away was: Dark, Bright, Bold, Contrast, Unexpected, Texture, and Depth. I hope I have captured even just a fraction of the beauty the quilters of the MQG stitch into their projects every day.

 

Dispersal - sending small pieces out over a wide area. This quilt is free-cut and improv-pieced with no squaring up. Only the largest Baptist Fan curves were marked for quilting; smaller curves were filled in by eye in keeping with the spirit of improvisation and organic lines.

 

This quilt was very loosely inspired by the pattern of slubs on a rug. I enjoy having a handwork project to work on when watching TV or otherwise away from the sewing machine, and appliquéing these circles kept me busy for some time. The matchstick quilting is my preferred uneven version, interspersed with unquilted circles to echo the appliqué pattern in the negative space and tie the design together.

 

Sonder celebrates color and movement, inviting the eye to discover endless shapes, paths, and colors. The name refers to the realization that each stranger we pass lives a life as vivid and complex as our own, creating continually expanding paths and networks. It is strongly inspired by the art of Andy Gilmore.

 

This quilt was made as a project for STEAM (sci, tech,engineering,art,math) day at Zoe's school. She designed the quilt, chose fabrics, did the applique work and even helped with some of the quilting. The design was inspired by Zoe's love of space and the solar system.

 

Whirlwind was inspired by a newfound interest in curved piecing. I wanted to design a block that interacted with adjacent blocks, rather than being self-contained. The arrow heads add movement (and a bit of fun).

 

This quilt represents the pure joy of playing with color, rhythm and pattern. Improvisational piecing is all about saying yes to the possibilities.

 

People, objects, and the natural world are all more complicated than they might appear on the surface. I have represented this idea with abstract shapes inspired by Mid-Century Modern design. This quilt was originally made for the Central Oregon SAQA challenge theme "Beneath the Surface".

 

The Offset series is a graphic representation of my perspective on balance. Work, rest, movement, and creativity all require a level of input and yield results. Balance doesn't always require symmetry. Sometimes lack of balance drives change, represented by the color gradation woven into the steady shade of wasabi. Offset Radial is an asymmetrical graphic quilt design, the second in a series, represented by offset but balanced radiating wedges.

 

This project is our first collaboration between mother and daughter. We combined our stash of solids and designed a simple triangle quilt that let us play with different colors. We focused on balancing the colors and scales of the triangles as well as the ratio of solid and pieced triangles. We chose light to medium colors and experimented with different scales of triangles and strips within the triangles before settling on their final size.

 

"Justice Everywhere" spells out Dr. Martin Luther King's famous quote "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" using the Braille alphabet. I am forever inspired by this quote. It entreats us to not rest until there is justice everywhere and for everyone. Trapunto, with two layers of wool batting, is used for the pink squares to emphasize the tactile nature of Braille.

 

Cool and warm, curves and corners create interesting tension between the foreground and background. The quilting, especially in the white areas, points, like a spotlight, in search of "corners". The color-matched pieced binding brings the foreground all the way to the edge and maintains the relationship of the composition without creating a frame.