Mandala Challenge Met for Quilts Around The World Blog

The group Quilts Around The World is a group of women art quilters from around the globe, (Australia, The Netherlands, Europe, USA)...who take up a challenge every three months to make a small art quilt and post it on our blog. http://aroundtheworldin20quilts.blogspot.com/
Go there to see ALL the quilts as they are terrific...The most recent challenge was to make an art quilt in the theme : Mandala!

Mine is this machine felted velvet butterfly on a substrait of hand painted muslin, machine sewn free motion style and using some fancy machine stitches. Embellished with glass beads.Click on the photos to see the texture and detail close up.

Let me know if you can FEEL the velvet!
I often like the backs of my pieces as much as the fronts.

Happy New Year!

Simply Dreadful

I made this portrait art quilt for my 19 yr old grandson for Chanukah. He does wear his hair in dread locks, and leads a hippie-like life style.

This is the photo I started with.

I took artistic licence to color the dreads brightly. The dreadlocks are made from rolled up hand dyed repurposed dryer sheets. The face is made up of layers of cotton fabrics, the base is hand dyed cotton by Chris at Dye Candy.

The substrait fabic is brown felt, bound in cotton. I have top sewn the entire background in swirls using brown varaigated and gold metallic threads. Some of the swirls are painted with paint sticks. I love the 3-dementionality of the piece.

click on photos to enlarge

The head and hair are hand sewn to the background piece, as

is the binding.

Let me know what you think.

It's 17" X 19".

I will probably make this again, as I would love to enter it into a show.

Solo Art Show A Huge Success!

On November 13th, I had the honor and excitement of seeing my art hung for the 2nd Friday Art About at the Paint Chip in Davis, CA. We had a nice reception and a very good turn out.
Maia, the owner of the store, said I'd had by far the biggest turnout of any artist she had hosted to date.

Friends and strangers came through and spent long periods of time looking at, talking about and asking questions about each piece.

It felt so good to have other textile artists there whose work I admire and respect giving mine so much attention and affirmation.

I was invited to hang my art at another studio (Mojo Flow Studio) by one of the visitors that evening. It will go up there this Friday!

What a joy it is to see my art traveling this way and being seen by so many.

Earth, Water, Air and Fire

I recently made four art quilts using hand dyed paper towels and dryer sheets. I then stitched the small paper quilts to painted canvas. These represent the four elements of Earth, Water, Air and this one is FIRE.

Click on photos to see details.

Earth SOLD

Water

Air

These are for sale in my ETSY store, but could go on display before they sell.

How Does Your Garden Grow? Sold on ETSY Today

The woman who purchased this art quilt from my ETSY store left me this thank you:
"oh my gosh, this piece is such a BEAUTY, i can't stop holding/looking at it. it is bringing me joy!!!!thank you so much!!!!"

Well, what a joy it was for me to find this feedback. There is nothing greater than making something and having it appreciated by the reciprocate. I made this sweet quilted wall hanging using remnants of fabric from curtains, ribbon, muslin, Terry Busse's "Woolly Bits", metallic, cotton and rayon threads.

It's partly machine felted, partly top sewn machine free motion style

It's 27 and a quarter inches by 17 inches in size

It was fun to make and such a compliment to have it sell so quickly.

Thank you buyer!

"!"

UPDATE: May 2010 Changed the name to Mono Madness, entered it into the juried art show at the Vacaville Art Gallery and it not only got into the show, but also won 3rd prize!!!! This is my latest art creation and for now I am calling it: "!"

This is two three day weekends of mono print painting, cutting, sandwiching, sewing around each piece, top sewing each piece, then painstakingly sewing each to the other to get this wall hanging. I'd guess I put in approximately 65 hours into this baby.
In person it is full of texture, bright color and sparkle!

Size: 26" height X 34" width

To see a video I made about the mono print making
go to http://lynn-nonameblog.blogspot.com/
and scroll down to August 5, 2009 post or

click on "short movie" in the next line.

The mono printing shown in this short movie was done following my reading an article in Quilting Arts magazine (pages 14-17) by Frances Holliday Alford called 'flight of fantasy' a gelatin monoprint process. I took up the challenge and taught myself to do this.The printing process with gelatin plate and paints took two days to complete.
Above photos show the end result of this work.

Click to enlarge and see details.

3-D stuffed Fish Quilted Wall Hanging

This fish has been "caught" by Sylvain in my recent blog Give Away on Lynn-Getting My Feet Wet Blog.
I had great fun yesterday constructing this 18" stuffed fish! I used cotton fabrics left over from my Gold Mountain Wall Hanging Quilt seen below(some hand dyed) and ribbons with lots of frayed edges and sewed them on thick felt with a felt backing.

Here it is in it's "Look what I caught!" position!Here it looks like it is swimming in a stream (sort of, use your imagination)!

Ribbons swim behind him.

Layers of ribbons made his eye and nostril. Do fish have nostrils? LOL

And look closely it is smiling!

(click on photos to see more detail)
I love that one piece of fabric in this and my Gold Mountain Quilt below

is from my very first ever quilting class sampler. (circa 2007).

Wait till you see what I am working on now!

Gold Mountain Art Quilt FOR SALE IN ETSY SHOP

This colorful art quilt wall hanging is made from hand dyed fabrics, some other cotton fabrics, and hand dyed ribbons which I bought from another artists ETSY store! It is embellished with Chinese coins from the era when gold was discovered in California. This group of coins includes one with the Ying Yang symbol.

click on photos to enlarge to see more detail

colors are somewhat brighter in person

This quilt measures approximately 17 1/2" X 18" in an uneven square.

The layout of ribbons and fabrics gives a sense of depth

as if you are looking through windows, perhaps into the window of your soul.

The various ribbons have different textures adding yet another dimension to the work.

This piece is both machine quilted and hand quilted using metallic threads in gold and red and some rayon threads.

It is for sale in my ETSY store which can been found on the left sidebar of this blog.

Sun Flower Art Quilt Finished and SOLD!!!

I will be entering this art quilt in the NAMI-Yolo Seeds of Hope Sunflower Art Show & Competition this Friday in Davis, CA. Nami-Yolo is a chapter of the National Alliance for Mental Illness. As a mental health counselor (MFT) I have a special place in my heart for this organization.

The name of the quilt is: Sun . Flower . Life . Energy

This first photo shows some detail in stitching. I cut the stamp of the sunflower that borders the quilt on Styrofoam. And the buttons that add texture represent seeds. The leaves of the sunflower are repurposed hand dyed with acrylic paint dryer sheets.



The central flower is made of pieces of craft felt, cotton fabric and wool roving machine felted then machine top stitched free motion style.


The light green frame around the central flower is tissue paper. Click to enlarge for details. There is thread painting done around the sunflower and top sewing free motion around each stamped sunflower on the border.


The cotton orange fabric was all torn by hand and edges purposefully left frayed.
My hope is that the whole piece looks like a seed packet.


Size: 24" X 27"

Juried Art Show 2009

Last night was my night to shine! Three of my pieces had been selected by judges for the 32nd annual juried art show in our local art gallery. And all three brought home awards: Best of Show, First and Second! Needless to say, I feel very overwhelmed, proud and very very humble. You've seen the pieces before as I made them, but here they are one more time being honored! Thanks for coming to "my show" here. ;~)











My best friend from childhood, Patty, came to see the work the day before and my brother came the night of the show to support me. It felt so good to have both at my side. Thanks Patty and Richard.

To learn more about each piece scroll down to earlier posts. They are in order of recognition: Hard Times, Desert Cactus and Snake, and Living Green.