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Thursday, September 17, 2015

Summer Goes Fast

This has been the summer of quilting frenzy.  I made it a goal this year to enter more shows than I have ever done previously.  So far, I have kept to that goal very well with the unfortunate exception of the entry I thought I submitted only to discover AFTER the deadline that I apparently never hit the Submit button at the end of the form.  Oh well.  Live and learn. It is a mistake I probably won't make again.

For many of the shows I have been able to use previously made pieces.  The last few years of producing an abundance of work has paid off.  At the SAQA conference this Spring, one speaker talked about how you have to spend time "doing the work" and have a body of works available before you can start entering shows and applying for grants.  I have finally made it to that level, however, many shows still require new work.

The piece pictured above is one of those new pieces.  Titled, Rolling In, it is another of my attempts to depict landscapes more in the abstract.  This was my accepted entry for the statewide SAQA show, Blending Poetry and Cloth.  It is inspired by a Walt Whitman poem called The Voice of the Rain. 
  

 When I first finished it, two people asked what the big rock was in the upper corner.  Now, if one person had said that, I probably would have blown it off.  When the second person said it, I knew I had not succeeded in making the focus of the piece entirely clear to the viewer.  I added couched lines of a heavy metallic blue thread.  I think it succeeds now and has the added benefit of pushing the background further to the back.  Here is another detail shot of the stitching.


The next piece that I made did not turn out as well as I envisioned but it was accepted into the High Fiber Diet show, Making Our Mark.  We were required to incorporate a specific "chop" design somewhere in our piece.  I included mine as part of the stitching of the bark in one of the trees.  This is not my favorite piece I have ever made but that happens sometimes.  As stated in the book Art and Fear, the more art you make the less failures you will have so I will push on.  This piece is called Fresh Fall.  You can see the "mark" in the lower left corner of the detail image.