Does this ever happen to you? You work and work and work on a piece and feel sure it's just right...and go to all the trouble of quilting and binding and sleeves and all the rest of it...only to then realise when it's been hanging on the wall for a few days...that it's a complete DUD!!! Or that you don't need it any more...it was a piece on the way to something better and bigger. So...What do you do with the quilt? You can just roll them up in the cupboard of course! And I did that for many years...but...the pandemic has lead to an epidemic (!) of death cleaning in my house! And I found severa ..read more

Time Management for Artists Like everyone, I never seem to have enough time to do all the things I want to do. So I’ve come up with a Time Management checklist for myself so see if I can’t just squeeze a little more juice out of those 24 hours!! 1. I definitely have to have a diary/planner/appointment book. This is especially helpful for combining appointments and errands since I notice that leaving home even for something as small as picking up more supplies somehow seems to waste a whole morning. If I can combine my art supplies, office supplies, shipping, library and dentist appointments et ..read more

Above are some of the many photos I shared with popular French Vlogger Liana Voia....also there's a long interview with yours truly! You can see my new covid hair do (i.e. nothing done except washed!), and Power points of many quilts and watercolors and photographs over the years. The top photo is a book a friend and I self published back in the '80s!!!! Next is one of many local newspaper clippings..... the third one is to commemorate me donated the two quilts hanging behind us to the public library....they are they to this day...and I added a third. So much better than malingering in a c ..read more

Recently I was hospitalized with a disorder caused (or at least aggravated) by stress....and when I got home I decided to add in several more stress relievers to my day (as well as the damned pills they prescribed!!! And I discovered that giving myself 30 minutes of time to do NOTHING but sew, no tv, radio, podcast or (most importantly!) people! Just me and the cloth and the scissors, pins, needles and sewing machine. I discovered that this was the most calming thing of all... The important thing is not to feel guilty for taking time for yourself, nor to have any sense of "having to " reach a ..read more

While in art quilts our main medium is shape, pieces of cloth cut into shapes, most of us usually design using line. And this can often be misleading, because our lines simply delineate the edges of the shapes! to me, this creates two difficulties... First, we're designing one thing...but making another! So it's really hard to see what the quilt will look like finished. so many times people say to me - but I know what I want in my head, but what comes out is nothing like it!! I know we've all felt that. My answer is that if you want your quilt to be a beautiful and exciting arrangement of shap ..read more

A friend asked me yesterday why she wasn't getting into local art shows when her paintings were actually much better than several that had been accepted. I went down to the show...and realised that the juror just didn't like traditional landscapes...everything she had chosen was about rawness, ugliness and distortion. Protest was another major theme. In fact she even expressed surprise in her remarks in the catalogue that landscapes were still being painted!!! So I advised my friend that if she wanted to get in, she would need to change her subject matter. BUT, I felt strongly...that one shou ..read more

I keep reading about all the amazing things people are accomplishing during this time of isolation - like teaching your children to tap dance! Well I don't have the oomph for that! or the child who wants to learn...but I have got quite a few things done. Decided to try to learn spanish ....again!!! it is much easier than English...but I can't get out of the habit of pronouncing words the french way - sort of high in the back of the palate! exercise! what to do ? As a swimmer I was a bit stuck with the pool closed, hard to swim on dry land after all! but I did discover a couple of parks very ..read more

d'you find it really hard to start work again after you've been away from the studio for a few weeks? I know I do...I futz around tidying fabric, getting the scissors lined up, picking up pins, replacing thread and so on...but once you start refolding fabric from the bottom of the pile...you know you're stalling!!! Time to get some action going! In order to be creative you need to be experimenting, playing, having fun, trying out possibilities in between major pieces...this is what leads to discovery. Looking at art - preferably very good art that has stood the test of time...and then thinkin ..read more

When it comes to dispaying art quilts at home, it's impossible to get a really good idea of them as you'd need a huge house to put them all up on one wall. I've loved it when I've had a solo show in a gallery somewhere, because that's what it takes to really get a sense of where you are going with your work. But alas, at present, gallery opportunities are not available! However, it struck me that I could clear a wall in my basement studio and hang my paintings. First I had to mat them - well the mats got hung up with covid! But eventually arrived....so that took several weeks. Then I ordered ..read more

I've always loved screen printing...it's such magic when you lift the screen up ...very slowly....and see what's happened!! REcently I came across some images of prints I'd made in my first surface design class which was on screen printing....in those days(35+ years ago) I used textile paint rather than thickened dye, but either works. You can learn screen printing with dye (thickened) and many other surface design techniques in my www.academyofquilting.com class Dyeing to Design. The class covers simple dyeing, arashi (storm!) shibori, and several types of screen printing including deconstr ..read more