For our last reveal of the year, members came through with so many beautiful quilts.  The challenge topics were obviously very inspiring.  

Birds

Penelope, the Perennial Pageant Contestant
by Tracy Visher
17" x 34"

Artist Statement:  This is a whimsical take on a long-legged bird of rare breed.
Inspiration for quilt/Source of design: I was in the middle of a miserable, months long project, making a t-shirt/jersey quilt for my grandson. I hated every minute of it. I just wanted to be making things I enjoyed. Fun things. I took a break and in a couple of days crafted Penelope. She was so very much just for fun. I enjoyed her irreverence immensely!
Materials (fabrics, batting, threads, embellishments, etc.) Satin, batik, feather boa, Inktense pencils, little plastic “moths”, buttons, perle cotton, brocade fabric, jewels, velvet, glitter, cotton/poly thread and 80/20 cotton-wool batting
Description (may include creative opportunities, challenges overcome or any special comments, memories, or other quilt information you wish to include):
I had no serious objective, other than as a stress reliever. Her life, as I depicted it, reflected the exhaustion I felt about the t-shirt quilt. And yet, she continued to persevere. Been there, done that! Her jewels may have dulled and her boa be moth eaten, but the girl shows up, and I love her for that!

How Big They Think They Are
by Kathryn Madison
30" x 41"

Artist Statement:  The inspiration for the quilt is the hummers in my yard.  I used PFD cotton, polyester, raw silk, batting, a soldering iron, Aloe Vera gel, Tsukineko inks, Inktense blocks and pencils, sponges, Tyvek, perle cotton thread, machine embroidery poly thread, metallic embroidery thread, cotton thread and monofilament thread.  I've wanted to try to do a large hummer and thread paint her with metallic threads for a few years.  So when this challenge came up, it was time.  This entire quilt is hand painted.  the hummer was painted on polyester with inktense blocks, feather by feather, then free-motion thread painted with poly and metallic threads on the iridescent feathers.  Then I added batting under her and quilted each feather.  I painted the smaller hummers and the heliconia flower and appliqued them to the background, my imagined Costa Rica.  The large hummer was appliqued to the background and quilted a second time.  Last added was her branch, raw silk couched with perle cotton covered with painted Tyvek lichens and free-motion thread painted lichens and moss.  Of all my art quilts, this was my most technically challenging quilt so far.

Vanished
by Karle deProsse
42" x 24"

 Artist Statement:  This quilt honors the birds that have lost their habitat or lives to wildfires.  I kayak Solano Lake where Green Herons populated one of the tree-shaded streams feeding into the lake, until wildfire destroyed all the trees and their habitat. The beautiful little greenish birds have vanished from the area!  I used cotton fabrics & batiks, thread, netting, and feathers.  Cutting a hole in my quilt and inserting netting was a new scary yet exciting experience.  The feathers layered in the netting were stressed while I quilted the piece, resulting in feathers that looked more like the birds had not survived, which is what the hole represents.  Although I used the shape of the Green Heron, this is meant to represent all birds struggling with the wildfires in California and elsewhere.  

Not Today! They Got Away!
by Stephanie Bennett-Strauss
36" x 30"

Artist Statement:  The inspiration was a hawk video sent to me by my daughter Jessie, showing the Hawk's disappointment at the kitten getting away.  Both hawks and owls are predators of small animals and I wanted to make an owl missing his several targets.

Scottish Cow & His Hawaiian Bird
by Bonnie Ellering
30" x 24"

Artist Statement:  This started as a dog in Jane Haworth's collage class, but it wanted to be a cow.  The background was dyed in Michelle Peerson's class. The little Hawaiian cardinal was added based on one I'd seen while on vacation.

Evening Attire
by Julie Berry
26" x 23"

Artist Statement:  I have always been intrigued by Grey Crowned Cranes. Their plumage is spectacular. I have collected pictures of them for years.  This quilt is constructed with cotton, velvet, wool and tulle. I used cotton, rayon and metallic threads. I also used gold paint. It has Quilters Dream Bamboo batting.  I have wanted to try this crane for years and having the Bird Category motivated me to do it now. The tulle with metallic thread was particularly hard. I heavily quilted it which made it ripple. It still didn’t have enough gold so I used paint.  As a life-long birder I have loved having this category. It was really hard to choose one bird!

Summer Cottages
by Mary Stori
13" x 13" 

Artist Statement:  For my brother’s 70th birthday he received 3 bird houses which inspired me to create fabric cottages for the birds.  I used Mono printing, iced dyed, fused motifs, machine appliquéd, quilted, framed without glass.

Tweety
by Janene Powell

Artist Statement:  The inspiration was Halloween.  I used Silk, cutup dress, beads, dye & wax on pumpkins

Fantastic Fungi

Magical Mycelium
by Kathryn Madison
38" x 29"

Artist Statement:  This features underground mycelium and fungi (mushrooms).  The inspiration was Merlin Sheldrake’s book, “Entangled Lives” and Netflix documentary, “Fantastic Fungi”.  I used >PFD cotton, polyester, batting, soldering iron, Tsukineko inks, Intense blocks and pencils, rubbing alcohol, Hand embroidery floss, Perle floss, machine embroidery poly thread, cotton thread, metallic couching thread, monofilament. After reading the Sheldrake’s book I started sketching abstract tangled things and after 14 of them, I realized that my subconscious had been totally captivated by mycelium and all its forms and functions. So I chose one of my abstract fungi and enlarged it to be the centerpiece of this quilt, bordered by two trees with actual mushrooms. For the underground mycelium, I spray painted stretch velvet. Black poly velvet tree roots are joined by “mycelium” of sparkly couched threads. I covered the seam joining the top and bottom with various thread painted mosses.  I must’ve been on “magic mushrooms” when I designed this quilt. It’s way too busy and there’s far too much going on.

 

Bioluminescent Fungi World
by Robin Hart
27" x 28"

Artist Statement: I am fascinated by mushrooms and fungi.  They are so exotic and other-wordly.  When I saw this theme for MAQ, I googled exotic mushrooms and found several photos of bioluminescent ones.  Then in May, we had our first Northern Lights aurora in Nevada County in over 20 years.  Both of these inspired me to create an alien world with bioluminescent mushrooms and an aurora sky.  This is why the colors are so fantastic beyond our reality.  I did the painting in Photoshop and had it output at Real Graphics on Percale cloth.  I thoroughly enjoyed working on this art quilt.  Doing all the detail free motion thread painting made this quilt come to life. 

Orange Mountain Mushrooms
by Sandra Mollon
31" x 27"

Artist Statement:  The inspiration was a photo (copyright free) on Pixabay.  I used cottons both Hand dyed & commercial batiks. Bamboo batting. Various threads.  This represents the renewal of life.

Fungi No. 1
by Jane Haworth
23" x 29"

Artist Statement:  I purchased mushroom clipart from Etsy Shop Artist SVGIRLPLUS for personal & commercial use.  I used commercial cottons, silk and vintage fabrics.  This was my first quilt on this theme. I followed the pattern pretty closely. I wish to expand on the theme and create my own designs.

Sunrise/Sunset

Solstice Sunrise
by Tracy Visher
23" x 36"

Artist Statement:  This depicts the sunrise over a semi-frozen stream.  The inspiration came strictly from inside my head.   I had the sunrise on snow image come to me as soon as I read the category title.  I used liquid acrylic hand painted sky. Metallic and acrylic paints, shiva paint stick, Inktense pencils and blocks. Melted Lutradur, beads, metallic fabrics, hand painted silk fabric, perle cotton (bobbin work), metallic threads. Batting to stuff the tree trunks. Batik backing. My challenge was to create a piece of sufficient depth, where you felt you were inside it. A place where you could feel the quiet of an early morning, the cool temperature of the snow and air, and the burbling of the stream as it passed over rocks nearby. A place of solitude and peace. 

Answering the Call
by Jan Reed
37" x 26"

Artist Statement:  The small part of my Native American DNA urged me to eventually make an art quilt about their culture.  The photo of the man reaching extending his arm and the photo of the sunset that had a dark area that would work for a spirit's image were the beginning of the process.  All photos were found on Google and redrawn with pencils.  I used white pfd fabric for the sky.  Miscellaneous commercial batiks, one hand dyed tan fabric for his base garment, hands and face.  Beads and cotton string for details.  Diluted Tsukineko inks for the sky.  Heat set Prismacolor pencils for the spirit, the man's hands and face, and shading details in other areas.  Light and dark monofilament thread.  I viewed a youtube video on how to render a sunset with watercolors.  That took 3 tries and still wasn't perfect.  I researched Native American garment materials and construction.  I needed to create a different left hand.  The last step was drawing the spirit face and headdress, while knowing if it came out poorly, the whole piece was toast.  It was also a challenge deciding on a quilt motif for the sky.  I found a favorite new tool:  an electric eraser with a tiny head solved how to remove the chalk transfer markings needed to begin the spirit's face.

Flowers

Flowers and Horses Oh My!
by Maria E. Brower
30" x 32"

Artist Statement:  This quilt has a profusion of flowers from very tiny in the background to the focus flowers at the bottom of the quilt.  The inspiration was the fabric I used to cut out the flowers from.  I used all cotton fabrics and the rust dyed the fabric for the horses was created from a metal rusted outdoor ornamental piece I bought in Tucson.  The background is a batik I also bought in Tucson and I used a green batik for the cactus and added the flowers from my stash and part of a flowered print for the background hills.  The backing print has most of the colors on the front of the quilt.  The small binding was a challenge, but I didn't want to detract from the quilt with a larger binding.  

 The program for our September meeting was a trunk show from our very own Marylee Drake.  She showed so many beautiful quilts she has created over the years.

Our Show & Tell was wonderful as always.  Jane Haworth shared a recent quilt she just finished. She just was notified it was juried into Quilt National.  

Dianne Ingalls shared some fabric she created using thickened dye.

Michelle Peerson shared a quilt that Jane Haworth just made for her, of her house.

Robin Hart shared a quilt that she made after seeing the 2024 solar eclipse.

Mary Stori shared one of the framed quilts she has finished.

 We had a wonderful potluck for our August meeting.  We also had a show & tell that was any craft we wanted.

Lynn Tubbe shared her quilt that was started as a block of the month in her guild with patterns by Jane Haworth.

Marylee Drake shared a Halloween quilt.

Marylee Drake also shared her quilt that was made with block of the month fish.

Lynda Lasich shared a wool applique quilt.

A new member, Sondra, share some quilts she make for granchildren.

More of Sondra's quilts

Michelle Peerson shared a quilt that she made using fabric created in her thick dye class.

Ann Sanderson shared a quilt that just came back from traveling internationally.

Bonnie shared a quilt made for a new baby.

Karle deProsse shared some weaving.

 Yesterday was our 2nd reveal day of the year.  It's always a visual delight!

Try an Abstract

'Foothill Fog' by Sophia Day
16" x 19.5"

This is an abstract of a photo of the fog in the valley in front of my house.  I used curved piecing, commercial fabrics, blue tulle and wavy straight-line quilting.  The original quilt was relatively easy to complete, but it needed something else.  I thought a misty tree in the foreground might help.  I tried printing a tree on lutradur and burning it to get wisps.  That didn't work, and the lutradur was not transparent enough to just print the tree on it and overlay the quilt.  I tried painting the outline of a tree on the quilt, but that just ruined the bottom and I had to redo.  I finally decided to print the tree on fabric and impro piece it into the quilt with the fog running through it.  I learned a lot about what didn't work.  I'm eager to continue experimenting to try to find the perfect solution.

'Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones, But the Words You Sent May Kill Me'
by Tracy Visher, 16.5" x 30"

This quilt qualifies as abstract, by default, as it is non-representational. It is created of shapes, that, while they work together, they do not look literally like anything recognizable in the world.  This was inspired by a painful fallout with a decades long friend who sought to express a difficult time in their life solely through electronic written word, rather than a face-to-face meeting where our history might have assisted with the resolution of issues. I used linen, fused and non-fused commercial cotton fabrics, embroidery pearl cotton thread, hammered copper wire, millinery lace, labels printed on cotton, cotton/poly thread and 80/20 cotton-wool batting.  I wanted a way to express how the emails and text messages I received, and the words therein, created a visual memory that I find much harder to recover from, than had words been spoken out loud. As a very visual person, the electronic memories have left statements in the ether that are not resolved in any way. A personal interaction, while difficult, allows you to see facial expressions and hear voice inflection that carry the remainder of “the story”. I found the abstract format to lend itself much better to the emotions of the exchange than I felt I could have done w a representational image. The floating “stones” inside the copper wire depict the accusations and the fact that they are “caged” in my memory.

'Aqua Motion' by Carole Rossi
19" x 46"

It has helped me to think of abstraction as a continuum, with representational or realistic images on one end and purely non-objective images on the other end, where the image is coming from "the art itself" - it's about color, design and the shape.  That's what I wanted to do with this piece, but in a more orderly fashion than with my earlier improvisational pieces.  I created a drawing, thinking of shape & design flow.  I used a variety of commercial cottons - solids and batiks, quilters 100% dream cotton batting and I machine quilted with mettler's 40 weight poly-sheen threads, using simple straight lines.  I challenged myself to create a completely non-representational image, but not with improvisational piecing.  Rather, I drew a design and created a pattern which I pieced.  This is more laborious than improvisational piecing, but I think it is helping me make abstracted designs which are more balanced and have a better flow.  The circles are appliqued.  I wanted to depict joyful movement throughout the piece, while also managing to play within one color range.

'Morning Rays' by Jan Mitrovich
21" x 31"

Abstract art uses visual language of shape, form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world (Wikipedia).  My inspiration was an article in Art Quilters magazine showing how paper can be stitched to enhance an art quilt.  I used a piece of floral paper as the inspiration for a color palette, then tore various papers and added stitching and fabrics to add texture and variety to create a garden feel. I used scrapbook paper, image tranfer to fabric, brown paper, heavy art paper, black batting, velvet, tulle, wool roving.  All fabrics except the batting and maroon dot print are hand dyed.  This was definitely an off the cuff project.  I first played with tearing and stitching paper to various fabrics and experimented with transferring images onto fabric.  I then pulled out my hand dyed fabrics, created a color plan, then attached and adhered as the spirit moved me.  I decide early on to leave the edges raw to create an organic feel.  The final touch was to add the tulle and roving to the upper left corner to emphasize the sun rays.  The challenges were adjusting the machine tension for stitching on paper and balancing texture, color and design.

'Ghana Village' by Ann Sanderson
25"x19"

I created an abstract design from these very inspiring African fabrics.  I used fabrics from Ghana Africa and some of my fabrics that I printed and a few commercial fabrics.  I also used embroidery and beads.

'8-seconds' by Janene Powell
3'x5'

This is an abstract of a rodeo horse.  I used paint, colors and neon thread, silk, fabric and net.  I used items I had not used before.  

'Sunrise in the Woods' by Marylee Drake
36" x 44"

This is an abstract of the view I imagine I see when I squint my eyes at sunrise through the trees.  I love the colors of sunrise and sunset.  I used thickened dye on cotton using stencils and multi-colored dye.  This piece was started with scraping thickened dye, using stencils, then compressions with rollers and a final paint of dyes over the whole piece.  

From a Song or Poem

'Oh Moon of My Delight' by Elisabeth Baratta

The inspiration is from Omar Khayyam's 'Man Talking to the Moon'.  

Ah, moon of my delight, who know'st no wane

The moon of heaven is rising once again

How oft hereafter rising shall she look

Through this same garden after me - in vain

This was created with cotton and faced with tulle.  My husband collected Rubaiyats his whole life and this was inspired by one of the illustrations.  

Wild Card:  Flowers

'Flower Power #2' by Michelle Pearson
18" x 33"

This is a 2nd flower quilt in a series made for my colorful breakfast room. I used cotton fabric and Steam-a-Seam Lite 2.    This is the first time I quilted the main piece before adding the vase and flowers. Making the flowers was really fun.  

'Moonlit Flowers' by Elisabeth Baratta

These are flowers in a Midnight Garden.  I used all cotton fabric.  The flowers are made out of kaleidoscopes.     

'When Georgia Met Jackson' by Lynn Tubbe
23" x 23"

 O’Keeffe’s carefully crafted flowers do battle with Pollock’s paint throwing Inspiration for quilt/Source of design.  This piece was made for the SAQA Regional call for entry “Art Movements in Fiber”. I used handprinted and commercial cottons, painter’s drop cloth acrylic paints.  I had a very hard time choosing ONE art movement, so I combined two of the most renowned, but wildly different, 20th century modern artists. 

'It's Not Pink, It's Fuchsia' by Tracy Visher
20" x 22"

This is clearly a flower blossom.  On a trip to Tahoe with my nephew, I was fascinated when I happened to pass by this fuchsia plant. I loved how the shadows and folds of the white petals seemed to hold nature’s secrets.  I used Prochem liquid acrylic, Linen, poly satin fabric, rat tail cord, fused commercial cotton fabrics, fused batik fabrics, embroidery pearl cotton thread, iridescent organza, velvet, dupioni silk, Inktense pencils, cotton/poly thread and 80/20 cotton-wool batting.  I always enjoy putting unexpected things you find when you view my quilts up close. The text fabric for the shadows in the white petals gave me that. I also fused irri. organza over linen for texture you could still see. I painted the wet linen background, then sprinkled rock salt over it to give some interesting texture once dry.

'Field of Surprises' by Carole Rossi
33" x 38"

The dominant feature of this quilt is flowers – some crazy and some more realistic!   Hence, it fits the Wild Card Theme.  I used my own hand-dyed fabrics, commercial fabrics, piece of dyed white wool from colleague Linda Waddle; Inktense pencils, Textile Medium, rayon threads (40 weight Mettler Poly-Sheen) and cotton threads (Superior King Tut), Quilter’s Dream Cotton Batting. I challenged myself to create a piece with surreal floral images, inspired by artists such as Salvador Dali who sometimes transformed flowers into surreal creations.  My piece contains realistic & fantastical floral images, placed randomly in vases in a field.  The vases are oddly shaped.  I hoped to create joyful reactions & to make people smile!  I challenged myself to use my Derwent Inktense pencils to paint the sunflowers.  Now I can’t get enough of Inktense pencils. 

'Take Peace' by Pat Gillings
26" x 26"

 The source of the quilt was a picture taken by me at the Crystal Hermitage Gardens in the Ananda Village (Buddhist retreat) The pictures were manipulated in a computer program and assemble in grid. Printed by Spoonflower. The title comes from a plaque in Oregon that says “There is no peace in the future that is not present in the present moment so TAKE PEACE.