Friday, December 20, 2013

KPFA Craft Fair


 Say Hello to Margo and the EBHQ booth at the KPFA Craft Fair.  These are our 2 Raffle quilts Big Blue and Rebecca Rohrcasts beautiful Red Quilt to raise money for our Voices in Cloth Quilt show in March.
Here is the postcard table that I sat at on Sunday to raise money from the sale of our Postcards.  Can you believe we sold more than half of the postcards that we brought.  Amazing fund raiser for our Quilt Show.

This is one of the postcard boards that Sue Fox lent us to display our postcards.  Some comments from people who bought the postcards were:
What a great gift idea.
Will this really go through the USPS? Yes.
Need Better Graphics for the postcard sign
Put something like : Handmade by East Bay Heritage Quilter on the postcard back.
Now we need to replenish our stock of postcards.  We only have 3 months to go for the Quilt Show.
 I had 5 quilts to showcase the workshops that EBHQ offers to promote quilting.  This is a quilt that I made from Marjan Kluepfel.  I started with a black fabric which was discharged and shibori pole wrapped.  The other fabrics used were my hand dyed fabrics.  The dragonfly was a pattern that she provided.  I used a metalic sheet for the bottom wings and Angelina fibers for the top wings.
I wanted to show the backing of this small quilt.  I didn't think to put a sleeve on these quilts, because they were my workshop samples.  Thank you Mabry or Sue for putting on the sleeves with safety pins.  It works.

Hexagon triangles

 This is the hexagon triangle quilt that I am working on.  The hexagons are made with 3 jelly rolls of Kaffe Fabric and Rowan 2 1/2 inch fabrics.  I matched one light with one dark and sewed them together on the top and bottom.  Cut them into 2 1/2 inch triangles and sewed them together into sets of three.  The fabrics are very psycodelic.  There are 7 rows of 7 for a total of 49 hexagons.  At first I thought the green fabric would make a nice background for the bright colors and tone it all down.
 Then I put the 8 gradation yellow to red color hand dyed fabrics from Cherrywood fabrics in the mix.  The yellow in the middle looks like the sun with the gradation colors spiraling out.
Toned down would have been all right.  Bright looks much better to me.  The weather has been so cold and grey that working on these bright fabrics have really brightened my day.

Freddys Spikes

This is my Spikes quilt from the Freddy Moran workshop.  Isn't it spectacular.  The words I would use is bold and graphic with the red black and white.  I don't know why I don't use more of the black and white fabric in my quilts.  It is such a eye catcher.  This was also a very improvisational piecing.  The other quilts in the class were purple, yellow, brown, some with japanese fabrics, batiks and prints.  With all of these different fabrics and styles, they all came out beautiful.

Freddy quilted feathers and stylized quilting in the red rows and borders.  I quilted straight lines in the borders.  I think I used white thread to outline stitch the spikes.  Much more simple, but just as nice.  The red fabric was a JoAnn special when they had a bolt of red fabric for sale.  The white is mostly muslin with some white on white fabric.  I was able to find some black on black fabric.  The color spots were leftovers from other projects.  There was 1 fabric of black and white dots that made gradation dots.

I liked Freddys easy going style of teaching.  She kept us all on track and yet allowed us to use our creativity on a great pattern.

Friday, December 13, 2013

Sebastopol Center for the Arts

These are some pictures I took from the Sebastopol Center for the Arts.  The exhibition was CALL FOR ENTRIES--Innovations in Fiber Art VI.  It ran from Oct 24 - Nov 30.  Wonderful show.

 4 pieces displayed on a table at the start of the exhibit
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Freddy Moran - Red Sticks

Red Sticks was one of the workshops that I took with Freddy Moran.  She is famous for her color choices.  Some of the things I learned:

Red is a neutral
If its too long, cut it off.  If its too short, add on
10 fabrics is good 100 is better

Can you tell this was very improvisational.  The picture should actually be turned 90 degrees.  The red bamboo fabric was placed in the middle, because I got tired of making more pieces. This was all pieced in 2 days and the quilt was put together in quilted in another 2 days.  I was very surprised to see all the workshop students show their quilts at Freddys lecture.  They worked all weekend and some finished their quilts by Monday.

The border on Freddys sample quilt had red on red squares bordering the whole quilt.  It added an extra depth to the quilt.  She also used a focal fabric in the middle of her quilt.  It was not as large as my bamboo fabric.

Red Bamboo is going to be a gift to Lola and Jason for their baby Casper.  The back is a patterned red fabric.  I quilted it with a Red Aurifil 12 wt thread on top and red gutterman 50 wt thread on the bottom.  I used the walking foot and followed the lines of the sticks to stabilize the whole quilt.  At first I thought this quilt was too bold and red to be a baby quilt.  Doris convinced me that they will love it.  Its bright, lively and will endure many washings.

Shirting Scrap bag

 Here are two scrap quilts made from a shirting scrap bag.  Deanna always stops by the factory outlet store when she is in Monterey and offered to pick up scrap bags for our mini group.  Three of us took her up on her offer and gave her $20 dollars.  She came back with 3 bags full of mens shirt scraps.
Isn't it amazing how wonderful these lap quilts came out.  Just in time for gifts to some coworkers who are retiring soon.  There is still a lot of scraps left over.  They are very high quality cottons that almost feel like silk.  I really haven't done much quilting on these.  I used an Aurifil 12 wt white thread for the top and used my walking foot to keep the stitches from puckering.

David is one of my coworkers who is retiring at the end of this month.  He will have 40 years working for the post office.  This material is perfect, because he won't have to wear his dress shirts and ties anymore.  We are planning a pot luck lunch with gifts.  I was planning to bring some Sharpie marking pens, but I think I'll ask him if he wants his quilt without everyone writing all over it.  There is a poster size picture we made with his picture that we are writing all over.

Thank you Deanna for getting the scrap bag for me.  I can think of at least three more coworkers who are planning to retire soon.  They keep talking about it, but are holding out for an incentive from the USPS.  I'm glad I have the resources to make these small gifts.  Now I have to sit back and see who the second quilt will go to.  Loreice..Gary...Sonny...Ed..Rana..