Nice Surprise...Two State Fair Ribbons!

We went to our cabin in the North Carolina mountains again this weekend.  Beautiful weather and beautiful foliage, although it was a bit colder this time.  Our son Bryson and two little grandkids were with us- so much fun.

Tonight I was going through all the e-mail that had piled up since Friday, since we do not have Internet up there.  I got some good news from my friend Donna Sontag that she spotted ribbons hanging on both of my N.C. State Fair entries!

Japanese Garden won a blue ribbon in the Other Techniques category.  It is a quilted, painted, and beaded wholecloth quilt made from a piece of Oriental-looking batik.

 I think this is the first time that one of my State Fair quilts has been hung up on the wall surrounding the quilt exhibits.  Here is Japanese Garden in a better picture, and you can read my post about it here.

The other quilt I entered was the recently revised Maggy Trees a Coon.  It appears to be hanging sideways in this display.  Now why would they do that?  Anyway, it got a third place ribbon in Wall Hangings.

 Here it is, right-side up, for those who have not seen it before.  The night before I turned it in at the fair, I decided to paint the tree trunks, branches, and foliage that I had quilted in the background.  I think that made a big difference. You can read about this quilt here and here.

Donna also got recognition at the fair for her entries.  She did not enter any quilts, but got a blue ribbon on a hand-knitted sweater, and a second place for this beautiful Christening gown that she made for her granddaughter.

I have some great mountain photos to share, as well as some pretty customer quilts, which I will get to next time.

Maggy Quilt Gets a Paint Job

After showing my art quilt, Maggy Trees a Coon at my two bees and at the Carolina Longarm Quilt Show, I decided to revise it a bit.  The quilt had lots of freehand outline quilting in the negative spaces to represent trees and foliage, but the stitching really did not show up well unless examined up close.

Out came the Tsukineko inks, Fantastiks applicators, and Fabrico markers.  I tinted many of the quilted motifs and then heat-set with an iron.



Before painting



After painting


It is always kind of scary to take a finished quilt and start applying paint.  What if you mess up?  I wiped the applicators off on scrap muslin until they were fairly dry before touching them to the quilt.  No blobs, seepage, or errors occured.


After painting

 All the little branches and twigs were traced and filled in.

I hope the use of lighter colors for some of the trees gives an illusion of depth, which I think was lacking before.


Before painting




After painting



Painted tree trunks, branches, and foliage

Now Maggy is on another excursion.  I dropped her off at the North Carolina State Fair in Raleigh.  The Fair starts Thursday and will last ten days. Maybe I will go visit her there before it ends!

Mountains and Crafts

Charlie and I went back to our mountain place this weekend.  We had a much smaller crowd- just the two of us, our neighbors Ricky and Mary, and their two grandsons.  Very quiet!  Saturday was rainy, so we went to the Northwest Trading Post on the Blue Ridge Parkway in Glendale Springs.  They had some nice quilts, like the dramatic red and white stars above, and the red and blue floral quilt below.

This hydrangea fabric quilt is being sold as a fundraiser by the Ashe County Piecemakers Guild.  They are asking $750.00.  I am so sorry that I will miss their annual show in Jefferson Station next weekend.

In addition to the quilts, there were split oak baskets

some floral brooches that had an actual stem from nature

some colorful aprons

and lots more.  I bought my first Christmas gifts, as well as some banana-walnut bread that we enjoyed for breakfast this morning.

On the way back to Laurel Springs, we had some spectacular views of Mt. Jefferson shrouded in clouds (this shot is just above Ashe County High School...wouldn't you love to go to school with such magnificent beauty right out your window?)

The clouds were right over the fields

and continued all the way home to our turn-off at the Upper Mountain Research farm.

Sunday morning dawned bright and sunny, with a crisp autumn feel to the air and a nice breeze.

We were dismayed to find that a giant oak tree near the bridge over our creek had come down during the night.  This tree had a bent trunk that formed almost a bench that you could sit several kids atop.  There was a hollow place in the trunk that I always peered in to see if there was a small animal inside.  When we used to camp down by the creek, the tree was kind of scary because it looked like a man with giant arms.  When I gave my husband one of those tree faces for Christmas, he climbed on a tall ladder and mounted the face on this tree.  Then it really looked like a man!

This is what was left of the tree this morning.

You could see right through the hollow in the stump.

Fortunately, it fell into the creek, and not across our driveway.

I have taken pictures of the dam from our bridge countless times, but this was all you could see from the bridge this morning.

Before we left, Ricky had pulled the tree out of the creek with his backhoe, and onto the grassy field for the neighbors to cut up for firewood.  We are sad to see it go.

Another Quilt Finished

Maggy Trees a Coon, 2010, 22" X 37.5"

I have finished another one of my personal quilts in time for the Carolina Longarm Association quilt show in September.  This one is called Maggy Trees a Coon.

I began this quilt in February during my third online class with artist Pamela Allen.  It began as a garden quilt.  After making several fabric studies of various flowers and trees (to avoid the ubiquitous elliptical leaf and daisy-shaped flower), I created a narrative of an event that actually happened last fall at our mountain home.  Our old dog, Maggy, patiently sat at the base of the tree which a raccoon had climbed to escape the mighty Maggy jaws.  It was amusing to watch as the raccoon slowly sneaked down the opposite side of the tree, peering out to check on the dog every few minutes.  Eventually, she meandered safely back into the woods while Maggy still stood guard at the tree.

The backgrounds and all of the elements of the quilt are scissor-cut raw-edge applique with embroidery floss or Pearle Cotton thread, mostly in the ladder stitch.  That is why I have working on this piece since February!  I had to keep adding background pieces and batting to grow with the quilt.

I used black thread on my Gammill longarm machine to quilt it once it was all stitched down.  I did a lot of thread-sketching to add more branches and the illusion of more trees in the background.  The actual trunk of the prominent tree is gnarly like the trees on the mountain that have had to compete for sunlight and deal with wind, snow, and ice.  I added some raggedy brown flannel to give some texture to the trunk.

I like the ferns and flowers the best.  The foreground flowers are similar to those I made in my study of Georgia O'Keefe's poppies.

I used a shiny metallic-looking green floss for the ferns.

On these narrative-type of quilts, I often use black thread to contrast against the backing.  You can almost see the scene on the back as well as the front.

I made a label with the story of the quilt and some pictures of Maggy enjoying the mountains.  She always hated the ride up and back to our mountain place, but loved the freedom of roaming the hillsides, trails, Christmas tree farms, and creek.  We do miss her.

Garden Quilt Departure

Here is an update on one of my Pamela Allen online class projects. The subject of Lesson 2 in About Style was gardens and foliage. We were to try to create new shapes, imaginative flowers, a variety of foliage, as in the flower/tree sketches I posted here.

Then, the assignment was to create a garden composition. I put some flowers together, and tried to think of a focus for the piece. It hit me that I would like to set my "garden" in the landscape of our mountain cabin. Then, I thought I could put my "late" dog, Maggy, somewhere in the garden as a bit of memorial.

So, I started out with these exuberant flowers and rhododendrons on the right, a blackberry bush, and Maggy sitting at the base of a pine tree and looking at the raccoon she had "treed." No, don't squint, the raccoon was not in this scene yet.

Pamela loved the right side of the composition, but thought Maggy looked like a rodent, and the muted color of the tree and the background was too confusing.

By then I really wanted to make this a story quilt featuring Maggy and the raccoon, so I decided to go much more vertical.


I changed the boring pine trunk to a gnarly, twisted mountain tree, put in a raccoon with personality and lots more colors of foliage in the tree. This one got the nod from Pamela, and I have started stitching down all these pieces with hand embroidery.

Not exactly what I would call a garden quilt, but Pamela says that was just a starting idea that we could take in any direction we chose.