Today's Guest Blogger: Barbara Lardon! (YAAAAAAY!)

First I want to thank Carmen for asking me to be a guest on her blog. Let me introduce myself. I am an art quilter. I live in Plymouth Wisconsin which is a small town of 7000 about 60 miles north of Milwaukee.

I have been quilting for about 30 years now and mainly do raw edged fused appliqué. You can see my work on my blog at bslartquilts.blogspot.com.

Today I would like to share with you my experience recently when I decided to look into a basket I keep in my studio of unfinished projects. I had totally forgotten about some of them. While going through them I became amazed at how they are almost a recording of my “evolution” in the last 10 years.

In this one you can see I am still in my traditional primitive country phase. It is a queen sized piece with lots of stars in the border and oh I was so in love with stars in those days (still am).

Then I needed more. So I moved into paper piecing and much more elaborate and complicated patterns. Here is my Japanese Fan quilt. However, as you can see, I am beginning to do some raw edged fusing on the backing where I placed my own design of a Japanese woman in traditional garb. This is also in queen size.

And finally I transitioned all the way to doing raw edged fused appliqué. Here is an example of one of my more recent pieces.

 It is amazing to me how we travel through stages in our creative world, trying new styles and evolving into the artist we are today.  It is an adventure to me and I hope for you too.

Thank you Barbara Lardon for guest posting!  It is a treat to see how your work has developed over time! 
Thanks so much,
Happy creating,
-Carmen Rose

Guest Bloggers

Hi All, it’s a beautiful day here at Studio B. The sky is bright blue with white whispy trails of distant jet engines trailing across the sky in parallel rows. The golf course is green and the birds are visiting the bird feeder now and then. The temperature is perfect and I have the back door standing open so that the dogs can come and go as they please. It’s quiet and beautiful!

Two weeks from today I’ll take two weeks off to attend to some health issues and would really love some guest bloggers in my absence. Since I’m so prone to hopping between art media, I thought it might be interesting to hear from my lovely guest bloggers about creating in a media they aren’t used to, or perhaps sharing a time when you blurred the lines between two art media and how it turned out. Photos are very welcome of course! So if you are interested in being one of my guest bloggers, please drop me an email at carmenrose at comcast dot net.

Thanks and Happy Creating!

-Carmen Rose

Mini Quilts *updated to include prices*

Mini Quilt, hand dyed fabrics, batik and commercial cotton,
Machine quilted, 8x6 inches
Available unframed $33
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Mini Quilt, hand dyed fabrics, batik and commercial cotton
machine quilted, 6.75x8.5 inches
Not For Sale - this one is framed and hanging in my bathroom =)
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Mini Quilt, batik and hand dyed cotton
machine quilted, 8.5 x 5.5 inches
Now framed to 17.5 x 14.5 inches behind glass. $84.
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Mini Quilt, hand dyed cotton and batik
machine quilted, 6.5 x 4.75 inches
Unframed $21
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Mini Quilt, hand dyed cotton, batik
machine quilted, 6x6 inches
Now framed in a killer floating frame for $185.
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Mini Quilt, commercial fabric, hand dyed cotton, batik
Machine quilted, 5x6 inches
Now framed in a shadow box frame plus some crystal and glass embelishments. $99
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Mini Quilt, hand dyed cotton, batik
machine quilted, 4.5 x 7.5 inches
Unframed $23
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Mini Quilt, batik, hand dyed cotton
machine quilted, 4.75 x 5.25 inches
Framed and behind glass to 13.5 square for $69
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Mini Quilt, batik and hand dyed cotton
machine quilted, 3.75 x 4.75 inches
Framed in an 8x10 shadow box table top frame, no hanging hardware, $45
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Mini Quilt, batik, hand dyed cotton
machine quilted, 3.25 x 4.5 inches
Unframed $10
I picture these framed behind glass, I think they'd look great that way. So here they are until I have a chance to go frame shopping. Perfect for a small spot in the home that needs a small splash of color!

Somewhere over the rainbow...

We’ve been back a little less than a week and I still have not had time to get back into the textile studio. While traveling I did a good bit of hand work quilting with embroidery floss through all seven pieces from the series. I’m also adding a line of hand dyed silk through the series and I’ve got three of the seven of those sewn on. Beyond this point I don’t know what is next. It is an improvisational series, that is certain.

This is "Green" before quilting:

With some machine quilting and some hand work plus the row of silk:

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This is "Blue" but I'm thinking of it more in terms of "Cyan." This is before quilting: This is what it looks like with machine and hand quilting plus the row of silk.
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This one is Indigo before:
After adding some pieces to make this piece the right size, plus some machine and hand quilting. (The top photo's colors are showing more true than the lower one.) This one also has the row of silk along the horizonal line.

I hope to get back to these soon but I don't get the hand work done very quickly when I'm at home. Being stuck in an auto for hours is the perfect time to do quilting, that or mid winter in front of the fire. But this time of year it just doesn't seem like the work I gravitate toward. It will come.

One Quilter's Heritage

I wanted to share my first quilt with all of you. It’s on our bed now, now that we live in a house where we can fairly easily keep the dogs out of the bedrooms. It’s a double wedding ring and the fabric is all commercial cottons in teal, cobalt, blue-violet, purple, red-violet, and magenta. I designed the color ways, the layout and cut all the fabrics. My mother-in-law sewed and I think my sister-in-law may have helped by ironing. The three of us have made a number of quilts together in this way, I design and cut and keep the process moving and the two of them (or maybe the Mennonite grandmas instead of the SIL) keep the assembly line moving.
It’s pretty intense but we’ve made some pretty cool quilts this way and we can come pretty close to making a full bed sized quilt in a day. That’s important since we live in different states and very rarely get together. This quilt was quilted by my mother-in-law and my husband’s Mennonite grandmothers, some of their friends may have added some stitches here and there as well.
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This quilt is one made by my father’s mother. The colors are washed out by direct sunshine, an overcast day would have made better photos. My grandmother was a beautiful Mennonite woman with her ultra conservative dress, a covering with strings and wire rim glasses. She made many beautiful quilts, always with an amazing degree of excellence. Her corners were always perfect and her stitches were tiny and ultra even.

I remember as a child that there was a gathering in Ohio where the quilts were distributed, one for each grandchild. I was the youngest child of her youngest child, and so I got the first choice though I have no idea why they did it that way. I may have been about five or six and when they asked me to choose I pointed immediately at this one. Someone muttered that I had good taste and had chosen the prettiest one. I guess even at that age I responded to colors like these. I have a variety of old quilts, some really amazing examples of Mennonite and Amish artisan design and execution and they are among my very favorite things. I count these quilts along with my heritage as part of my development as an artist and a quilt designer.

Dying for Color

In between all the adventures of the last week or so I dyed some fabric. It was stolen time in between everything else, just me in my studio playing with the things I love best... colors and more colors. I ended up with 22 silks:
24 white on whites, these were an afterthought and just tucked in to containers that already had fabric in dye so they only got the leftover dyes and attention. Some of them actually got some color and others are much softer but they make nice contrast with the vivid ones.

I also came out with 32 cottons; none of them are perfectly solid which makes me happy because I really wanted the hand dyed look. They are completely delicious!

I have 14 multi colored chunks of fabric in a bunch of different color ways. Some of these are really marvelous and I can't wait to sink into them.

I have 20 chunks of a heavy woven linen that took the dye in marvelous swirls and blends. These are so pretty and I even like the frayed thing that started to happen around the edges.

As all of these went through the dryer I also ended up with the most beautiful dryer lint, bet you think I'm joking. I've saved it, it will turn up in something but I don't know what yet.

I need to spend a little time mixing up the colors that are missing in these color ways. It was a good experiment with the 26 ready made procion dyes I was working with, now I need to see what can be done about mixing up the other colors that I would like to finish out the blends.

Plus, I have the seaweed and flowable paints and I'd like to try marbeling some fabric. Sometime soon, but not likely today. I'm still trying to recoup from last week. Seems like I feel every one of my forty years right now. So I am trying to take it easy. But color... nothing restores my soul like color.

Tutorial

How to make that star? Instructions now available as a slideshow here.

Five Point Quilt Star Pattern Tutorial Part One

Quilting patterns are full of eight point stars but if you are looking for a pattern for a five point star they are hard to come by. I was working to create an unusual star for a quilting project I was designing and so I decided to try making a five pointed star. After a variety of tries with disappointing results, I settled on this approach. There are similarities here to the log cabin method of making a square block, layering on rows of fabric to build the design. This pattern uses a backing fabric that should be a plain white or light colored fabric so that it does not show through the fabric when the quilt is finished.
Start with a 14 inch square of plain cotton fabric and mark a center point, but it does not have to be exactly in the center.
Make five lines through the center, all the way to the edges


On every other line mark a point five inches from the center point. For a funky look, make points of various lengths.
On the alternating lines mark a point two inches from the center point.

Connect the dots to form the outline of the star.
Number each section of the star. This will be very helpful later on to keep the sections straight.
Flip the star over and mark the same numbers on the back to keep them straight once they are covered in fabric.
Carefully cut in to the center of the star between the points of the star cutting the square into five sections.




Choose ten coordinating fabrics for the body of the star and cut 5.5 x 2 inch rectangles of each.

1. Combine five pairs of these star fabrics, right sides together.
Place one pair of fabrics over the central line of one section of the star and carefully sew leaving a .25 inch seam allowance.


Iron the two sides of the star open and repeat for the four other sides.

For the conclusion please check out the next post