May's Art Group Meeting

Just a few things from my art group's meeting this week. I took my book in progress and latest leaf cluster with quilting completed to share so am not including pics since you've already seen them. Last month Terrie shared a grid round robin challenge she is involved in and here is the last one she'll be working on. Picnic is the theme and she is considering adding a couple of glasses of ice tea or water and eating utensils as well as filling in some areas with fabric. The "reveal" is coming soon so she will see what the others in the challenge have added to her starter piece. One aspect of the grid challenge that is unlike regular round robins is that the owner doesn't have to sew hers together in the way it has returned to her. She can rearrange the individual pieces and even relegate some of them to the back of the quilt if she wants.

Terrie is close to finishing up another challenge, one where she was given three vintage Dresden plates to work into a design any way she'd like, as long as all pieces of the plates were included. Terrie chose to disassemble the plates into 3, 5, and 9 petal sections and back the pieces so she could use them in a three dimensional fashion instead of attaching them by stitching along the edges. I particularly like the three-petal one at the top that forms an opening bud like a calla lily.

And how clever is this use of a zipper? The flower centers still need to be added, probably yoyos. She will be facing this one.

Busy Terrie also got this Judy Niemeyer pattern started in a class. She showed a diagram with the different looks you can get by changing the colors and value placements of the star diamonds. Scroll down the Twinkle Star Pattern page to see them.

Robin has spent the winter in Arizona so we were excited to have her back. While away, she experimented with Laura Heine's fused collage technique using the Hen Rietta pattern which called for a lot of floral fabrics. She loved the technique so much that she started work on the Abilene Cow pattern. Here is one of the background fabrics she is considering.

This time she used all geometric-patterned fabrics and is planning to quilt "Buttercup" using a grid design.

Meg has been working on building her website and has hit upon the idea of letting her little fabric birds and animals and kids do the talking and marketing, since she herself, like many of us, is quite uncomfortable with selling herself. So she will be talking through her quirkie creations, which we all feel suits her style and her art really well. She also wants to produce a time lapse video that shows how the pieces of her big tree go together up on the wall. She says one of the most difficult things has been to explain what it is that she makes and how a buyer could "use" or display them. She's hoping this video plus the newly vamped website will help. Go take a look - it's really cute! megmarchiando.com