I had a chance this week to take a class with fabulous quilter Jane Sassaman.  I’ve admired her work for a long time, she has a strong graphic sensibility, and she likes bold color.  I decided to do this at the last minute because I wasn’t sure how she would be as a teacher.  I needn’t have worried, she was wonderful.

http://janesassaman.com/

This wasn’t a sewing class with a pattern provided, it was a design class.  So we brought in images that we liked on the first day and had a discussion of selecting shapes to abstract into our images.  The next day we worked on developing the shapes into a quilt.   I wasn’t quite ready to commit to an idea, so I brought in some quilts that I’ve made over the years and we looked at the images that connect them.   She was complimentary about my most recent piece about words and said I should continue on with this series.

The trouble with doing something in a workshop is that you never have the right stuff, especially if you change your mind.   I started with a giant box of solid color fabrics, and decided that this was not the way I wanted to go.    I had used the image of sky birds in a two older pieces, so I went back to this idea.    It’s just another ufo (un-finished object) at this point, but I’m excited about continuing to work on this.

Maybe it will look something like this, maybe not.

I think that it is fairly obvious at this point that I am not much of a writer.  I tend to write short, choppy sentences and to be rather terse.  But, I did go to this blogging course and I feel that I owe it to my fellow students to at least try.  I also confess that I just wanted to meet the brilliant teacher of the course, I had no idea that I would actually have to write anything.  And that it would be personal.

Instead of writing I express myself in fabric.  Many of the pieces I have made over the years are fairly conventional, the art is in choosing the fabrics, how they go together.  Sometime things work, and sometimes they don’t, but you don’t know until you try them.  In the course one of the exercises was to write down some words as a starting point.  I have always wanted to do a piece with words, but this was an unfocused idea, I had no idea how to turn it into a reality (and in truth I still don’t).   I made a new list of words and played around with it to make this piece.   I wanted the background to be grey and to have the words in low contrast variagated thread.  It is machine pieced and hand embroidered and quilted.  I used wool batting, which is perhaps too poufy, it has a lot of texture.  I think it is somewhat successful.

The second piece was a continuation of the idea, but with overlapping instead of concentric words.   This piece was started in a fever and is not very successful.  When I was working on it, the words seemed to be readable, but I used low contrast threads. It’s going to be seen from a distance, so the words disappear.  It is a single piece of fabric for the background, perhaps this is not the best choice either, but I wasn’t sure.  I added the buttons so that the circle would stand out, again I’m not convinced that it was a good idea.  I wanted it to be flatter that the other piece so I used a thin cotton batting  (wadding) that was a bear to quilt through.

Both pieces are being submitted to a show next week, I’ll find out if the judges like either one, or if there is room for them to hang.  Judging is always very subjective, but it was great to be working on something new.  I have gotten into this particular show many times, but my piece for last year was uninspired and did not make the cut.