Fiberworks 2019 Opening

Fiberworks 2019, the annual show put on by the Fiber Artists of Oklahoma opened last weekend.  I had a piece in the show, my large abstract flower bouquet, you can see it here. Betty Busby was the juror this year and last week I blogged about the workshop with her.  The show is always fabulous, it incorporates all different types of fiber art.  I didn't take pictures of everything,  I didn't even take pictures of all my favorites, but I have pictures of some that really stood out.

The first thing I noticed was how much hand embroidery was in the show this year.  I love seeing that, and it's definitely something that I've been seeing more of recently.

This piece is a sculpture made mostly out of dyed gut.  It has several layers, and it really glowed (hence the title I suppose) there in the gallery.  So luminous and fragile looking.

Glow, by Barbara Morrison

This beautiful kimono was covered in hand embroidery and reverse applique.  The artist sat next to me during the workshop so also got to hear a little more about her process and inspiration.

My passage to India, Janis Updike Walker

I thought these three embroidered portraits were really wonderful.  The artist is a new one to our group, but I loved all the texture.  Many of the elements are dimensional, really taking advantage of some of the flexibility that comes from using fiber, and the breadth of stitches and forms you can achieve with hand embroidery.  She won an award, but I can't remember which piece it was.

Life Drawing in Thread (top), and Nude in Velvet (bottom), both by Sean Tyler

Seated Nude, Sean Tyler.

I didn't get a very good picture of this piece, but it was tiny,  maybe 4x6 inches, and solid hand embroidery.  The artist is Darci Lenker and I love following her instagram, she shares tons of great pictures of her embroidery (@darcidolls)

Big Raven-Emily Carr, by Darci Lenker

I loved this quilt-  It has a modern sort of edgy design vibe but is filled with traditional piecing and tons of hand quilting and embroidery.  Really fun.

Inked! Or the Quadriga of Quilting, by Agnes Stadler

This quilt jumped out at me too-  lovely improv piecing with gorgeous resonant fall colors and just a pop of print. 

Cheryl Gebhart, Liberated Log Cabins

My good friend Charlotte Hickman had two pieces in the show as well.  Her quilts include collage, applique, tons of felting, and tons of embroidery/surface embellishment.  They're pieces that get more and more interesting the longer you look and it's always a treat to see them!!!

Azaleas in the Park, by Charlotte Hickman

Look at the beautiful embroidery and gorgeous beads? shells? on the trunks.  Such depth of color and texture!

And finally this giant stuffed fabric sculpture made me smile.   I love the neon colors and graphic shapes!

Stub Toe, by Sam Kennedy

The show is hanging at the AHHA gallery in Tulsa until November 24th so if you have time, go by and see it.  And many thanks to the organizers,  it's a ton of work to put on.

I Like #134

Welcome to another week of things to like.  Overall this was a psychotically busy week and emotional week, but it was filled with good things.

1.  I loved being able to participate in my dear friend's funeral.  My friend Trish died a couple of weeks ago and it's been a rough time.  She was super involved in our church, a really central part of our community in addition to being someone I was close too.  And of course her family is grieving.  But the funeral was wonderful.  A beautiful service with all the liturgical features she would like and tons of music.  She was a professionally trained vocalist (which made it even sadder that she died from complicatiosn of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and hadn't been able to sing for several years), and music was always super important to her.  We had a lovely soloist, and a saxophone quartet to accompany the organ.  And we had a large full choir.  Every time I heard the harmonies of our whole group singing around me it filled me with joy and sadness and hope and faith.  Lots of crying, but it really felt like a good memorial for her.

2. I loved going to the Fiberworks opening and workshop!  I'll share some pictures from the opening next week, but this week I blogged about the pieces I painted/embellished at the juror's workshop with Betty Busby.  She's great and the workshop was fun.  Click over to see more of what we did in the class.  Here's a closeup of one of the pieces I was painting.

3.  I loved this exhibit of art by Liz Whitney Quisgard.  She had a solo at 108 Contemporary and her work is phenomenal.  I'd never seen anything like it.  She makes huge wall installations with tons of small pieces as well as individual pieces.  They're all made from brightly colored yarn and the way she combines the colors to generate the overall field is just amazing.  I was so glad to get to see it; my pictures do not do it justice.

This piece was about ten feet long

This piece was about 20 feet wide by 8 feet tall

4.  I love my dahlias!  I think we might be close to the end for them this year, it's cooling off, but I cut another bouquet to bring in the house.  

5.  Here's a weekly picture of Blue.  He was playing crazy ball, wherein I throw the ball about three times over the course of fifteen minutes and he spends the rest of the time running around, wriggling excitedly, and throwing the ball for himself.  I tried to get a video but was unsuccessful, so this picture of wriggling will have to suffice.  I always throw the ball once for Bentley-  it has to be really close and bounce loudly so he can hear and find it.  He gets really excited to play, but then grabs the ball and immediately runs inside with it, so the game is sort of over.

6.  I got a kick out of this giant snake monster Halloween blow up I saw in the neighborhood while walking the other day.  It was bright and colorful and very very weird.

I hope everyone had a great week!  For more things to like, head on over to LeeAnna's.

Surface design workshop with Betty Busby

Last weekend was triple booked with all kinds of things (including a funeral), but the main thing was the opening of fiberworks (which I'll share pictures of next week) and a two-day workshop with Betty Busby.  Betty's absolutely fantastic-  I've known her for a long time and she's the one who organized the invitational show at the NM State Capitol last summer.  Her work is phenomenal, you can see some of it here.

She does several workshops, but this one was for surface design.  We did a bunch of silk painting using different approaches, did some sun printing using custom cut vinyl, and then spent a bunch of time doing what she calls post-processing.  This is surface embellishment with all kinds of things, colored pencils, inktense pencils, fabric markers, paint markers, shiva paintsticks, gel pens, and many more.  She had tons of tips and tricks to share, and huge bags of different things to try.  It was a lot of fun and I have lots of notes of things I want to incorporate going forward,  particularly with regards to her overall approach.

I did a lot of testing different fabrics during the class just to see how well her approaches would work on different things.  She uses a lot of silk, and I did a fair amount of that, but I also used a bunch of my shiny bridal-type polyester and some polyester velvet.  Usually I'm all about the candy colors- and Betty brought every color of paint you can imagine, but you can see from what I did that I was in a sort of muddy orange mood!


This is a piece I "sunprinted"  It's not traditional sun printing, but you wet paint the fabric and then put down the vinyl shape and as it dries a print is left behind.  The black star, white spiderweb, and black cambrian shell are all vinyl cutouts on the wet fabric.  This was shiny white polyester.

After they dry, and you peel back the vinyl, it's lighter underneath.  Here's the shell after I removed the vinyl and started coloring on it with paintsticks and markers.

Here's the lily pad after I started embellishing it and its background.  I used painsticks and markers and paint markers and colored pencils and gel pens.  Just to experiment!

This one was printed onto a chunk of an orange sari-  I liked the formal gold woven edge contrasting with the organic feeling of the prints.  No post-processing yet.  I might piece a halloween quilt with this and the one above

Here's another one I sunprinted-  this one is on silk, but no embellishment yet, this is just what it looked like after I peeled off the vinyl.

This was painted silk over rubber bands

And this one was silk painted over a place mat.

This started out as some sort of tablecloth-  it was beige, but it had flowers woven in it a sort of jacquard weave so it had a lot of texture.  I wasn't sure whether the printing would work but it did!  

And this one was polyester velvet, painted using a faux-shibori technique.  Came out with lots of great lines and organic stripes even in the velvet which doesn't pleat well.  The next picture shows what it looked like as I was painting it.

And of course the side of my hand was covered in paintstick, paint, and marker after coloring for a while!

The workshop was really great and I had a good time.  It was nice to just be creative without any particular project in mind.  Definitely take a workshop from Betty if you have the opportunity!

I like #133

Welcome to another week of things to like.  This week has been a bit better than the last few, still crazy at work and this upcoming weekend will be stressful, but plenty of things to like along the way!

1.  I like the bunny that lives behind my air conditioner!  He always comes out when I mow the lawn, but seems to go back to his little spot afterwards!

2.  I like that my dahlias are still going!  One of the only good things about having the summer that is still summer in October is that the dahlias are still blooming away!

3.  I like quick projects!  I crocheted up this potholder today,  apparently it's a pretty common way to make a potholder, but I'd never tried it before.  You make one long chain and then crochet around and around.  That becomes the diagonal and it sort of naturally folds into this double sided square.  I don't really like this yarn, but it was the only cotton I had and I do enjoy using things up!

4.  Caught this nice sunrise out my window this weekend.  Pretty colors!

5.  I discovered a place here called the Tom Love Innovation Hub.  It's a big maker lab that is free and open to the public.  They have a laser cutter, so I took a quilt down there the other day to see how it would cut.  It worked great and now I'm experimenting with things!  I love that.

6.  I love my pups! (Duh).  We got to walk several times this week, and they're always so excited.

7.  Finally, I saw this at the grocery store and the incongruity made me smile.

I hope you've all had a good week!  Click on over to LeeAnna's for more people finding things to like!

I Like #132

Hello blog friends and welcome to another week of things to like!  I missed last week; a dear dear friend died unexpectedly and I didn't have the energy to pull out the positives.  But I'm back on a more even keel this week and ready to share some of the good things around. 

1.  The sinkhole in my backyard came back.  That's not actually a good thing, but luckily due to some pressuring from Mike they were able to come out and fix it again the same day!  Hooray!  (and THANKS to Mike).  And very kindly Mike also mowed my lawn and took pictures of my two finished quilts.  What a great great friend.  Hopefully this also means I'll get blog posts up about the new quilts sometime soon.  They're very different and I can't wait to share them.

2.  My pink dahlias are blooming away.  This was a bunch I cut to bring into the house.  So lovely.  Worth the painstaking watering all summer!

3. The pups are doing good!  Bentley's back end seems to be doing better than it had been so we've been able to go back to our normal walks.  And I managed to snap a picture of Blue at his most Dobby-like.  Those ear flops just bring to mind the funny little house elf!

Blue was pouting because I wanted to sit in his chair.

Bentley thought there was space to come around that side of the chair.  There was not. Poor guy, I unstuck him promptly.

4.  I love my new work table!  Part of the reason I re-did my big work table was so I'd have a large ironing and painting surface.  This week I got to test both out and really enjoyed having the great space.  I painted and then quilted two sets of fabrics for new abstract quilts,  the one below started as white crushed velvet.  I alwasys love seeing how different things take up paint.  And always shout out to Georgia whose fabric stash I will be enjoying forever!!  I painted this one while the fabric was sort of intentionally crumpled, and I love the little undersea volcano patterns that emerged.  Not sure where these pieces will go, but somewhere interesting I hope!

5.  While the paint was drying and I couldn't really sew,  I took the opportunity to work a bunch on my complicated shawl knitting.  I'm making slow but steady progress on it, helped along by my trusty cable needle and cable needle minder (thanks Melody!)  I also started a quicky idiot crochet project.  My friend Melody had what I thought was a fairly clever way to make a potholder; evidently it's pretty common but I'd never seen it so thought I'd give it a try.  More about that later!

 5.  I saw this cool large spider while walking the dogs!  It was quite big- his body was probably about 1.5 inches?  I was actually glad he was so big because his web was between the tree branch and fence where we were walking and if I hadn't seen the big spider I'd have walked face first through the web and that's always gross.

6.  I got a new car this week!  My trusty old prius (there below) has served me well for a long long time, but has reached that age where things have started to go wrong.  I had a really hard time letting go of it; I've driven it since 2007 and was very wrong, but my new car (a subaru outback) is lovely and hopefully will facilitate some of my long term plans.  Of course car technology has changed in the years I've been out of the market so I'm still trying to get used to the new whizz bang features!

I hope you're all having good weeks!  For more good stuff to like, check out Lee Anna's!