Introducing North Carolina Artist David Starbuck

We are spending a rare weekend at home instead of in the mountains, and yesterday was a wonderful day.  Friends Tom and Pauline, Charlie and I went to the Fourth Annual Art Fair at the Dockside Marina at Lake Gaston, North Carolina.    Usually I would never include the words Art Fair and my husband in the same sentence, as that is much more "my thing" than his.  However, we especially wanted to see our friend David Starbuck's original artwork on display at the fair. 

David is a very successful engineer who has recently developed a passion for painting in acrylics.  He is self-taught, and has rendered amazingly realistic paintings of North Carolina lighthouses, mountain and lake scenes, houses, and wildlife. 

In the picture below, David is standing next to a gorgeous painting of a sunset at Lake Gaston.  This painting is also featured on the home page of his website, dstarbuck.com.  I am blocking the view of his painting of a lake house, but you can see it here.

His newest painting was displayed on an easel in his booth.  It is a sunset painted on a topographical map of Lake Gaston.  He will make more of these types of paintings available by commission on your choice of six maps.

In addition to his newly-discovered talent as a painter, David has mastered the art of carving wooden duck calls.  He demonstrated the duck call for us in the tent, and I fully expected all the ducks on Lake Gaston to come flying over to check us out!   Here David is showing one of his duck calls to Tom, Charlie, and Pauline.  I am not interested in duck hunting, but I would love to own one of these works of art!

 

Some people are just good at everything they try, aren't they?  David would love to do a commissioned painting or duck call for you.  He also has some limited series signed prints available for sale.

And of course, you are wondering about his last name.  No, David does not own a coffee shop empire.  He is, however, descended from the Starbuck family of Nantucket, whose last name was given to a character in the famous Melville novel Moby Dick, and it was first-mate Starbuck whose last name was borrowed for the famous ubiquitous coffee house chain.

You can learn more about this very personable and talented Raleigh artist on his website, which also lists his contact information. 

A Customer Quilt and a Charity Quilt

Here is a rather awkward photo of a quilt on my kitchen table, taken with me standing on a chair.

This is my latest finished customer quilt...yes, another die-cut flower quilt!  This one is in red and cream/white.  The quilt-maker is another student of Martha Armstrong of Zebulon, NC, who has brought me several of these types of quilts with appliques from the Big Shot die-cut machine.

I like the crisp color combination, which looks fresh and clean, although the prints are somewhat old-fashioned floral designs. 

These require 189 trips around the flower shapes to attach them to the quilt, as they are just basted on.  Sometimes the little petal edges flap up when you are progressing from circle to circle, so I quilt basically with my right arm while my left hand is smoothing the petals.

Good bicep exercise, but I am so ready to NOT do another one for awhile!  The backing was a red fabric with white swirls, and again, I felt like the lines of quilting competed somewhat with the lines on the fabric.

Last night my Cyberbee group met and had a wonderful time.  Five of us ate dinner before the meeting at Cafe Caturro in Cameron Village, Raleigh.  I liked the restaurant very much- nice fresh food and not too noisy.  I had a raspberry-walnut salad.

I thought you might like to see an easy group quilt that Martha Bragg showed us.  Each participant cut strips of varying widths.  They made squares with similar-colored fabrics and at least three strips.  Here is the one Martha made, to be donated to our Quilts on Wheels charity.

Sort of a rail fence, no?  Very cheerful!

It was quilted by someone who just got a long-arm, but unfortunately, I did not catch her name.   I still have about nine charity tops to quilt from last year, but got so busy with customer quilts that I fell behind.  That's okay, I think I did thirty charity quilts last year!

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.

Quilt Bee and Mountain Weekends

Last Thursday, I hosted a second quilt activity at my house.  My local quilt bee got started just as the skies darkened and thunder was rumbling above.  I lit some candles and we had a power flicker, but never lost power.

I only remembered to take one show-and-tell picture.  This stunning log cabin quilt was made by Irene Hardister, who was unable to attend.  She made the top and did all the stitch-in-the-ditch quilting, but she got Donna Sontag to quilt the outer borders for her.  This is the partially completed border that Donna quilted on her computer-guided machine.  Looks great!

We have spent the past two weekends at our cabin in the North Carolina mountains.  It is so much cooler and very relaxing to be in the hills.  It was my nephew's birthday on Saturday, so there were quite a few young people there to help him celebrate.  They brought their babies and their dogs. 

Two of these three little girls are my great nieces.  My sister, Katy, got a Little Tykes play set with a couple of slides and tables.  It was so cute to watch the little ones having fun.  This one is my niece Melinda's little girl, Ragen, who is getting way too grown!

My window boxes are doing pretty well, but the deer have discovered that they like red salvia, and have snipped off some from the left side.  I would love to look out a window and see a deer munching on my flowers!

We had some nice rides up to the top of the mountain, which is especially nice at sunset. 

I am putting the finishing touches on my art quilt of Maggy treeing the raccoon, and hope to post the final pics in a couple days. 

Japanese Garden- Finished!

Japanese Garden, 17.5" x 25.5" ,2010

There is nothing like a deadline to encourage me to finish a project!  I finished this piece last night by adding the binding, a hand-dyed fabric by Ricky Tims.

 

The quilt had languished for awhile as I contemplated adding borders to resemble a Japanese window frame.  Finally, I decided I did not really want to do that.  All I had to do was audition a binding fabric.  The hand-dye had all the teals, purples, and greens of the quilted batik.  This is a whole-cloth quilt that I free-motion quilted, painted with Shiva paint sticks, and beaded.

The gold areas were already part of the batik, but I added more shine with the gold paint, and heavily encrusted with beads.

My favorite part reminded me of a water feature, perhaps a cascade.  I added some sparkly beads and a few little fishies.

The reason for the deadline is that I entered this piece into the Carolina Longarm Association's quilt show in September, and need to turn it in by next Saturday. 

This will probably be the weirdest most unusual wholecloth quilt on exhibit, I'm guessing!

Work in Progress...Ready to Quilt

Back in February, I started this project in a Pamela Allen online class.  It kept growing and I kept stitching.  Finally it is all stitched down and ready to be quilted.

Yes!  One of my own quilts to put on the machine!

I put it aside from time to time as I got tired of doing the ladder stitch to surround all these raw-edge applique pieces.  Now I have to figure out what to quilt in all that negative space.

Today I was taking pictures of butterflies outside, especially the very large black and yellow swallowtail butterflies.  I can look out the window any time and see them swooping around, as high as the trees or low as the grass.

Then I noticed a very pretty insect that I have never seen before.  He had distinctive orange, black and white markings on his wings.  I thought it was a beetle.

After looking him up on the web, I discovered he is actually a moth!  This is what he looks like with wings out.  He is an Ailanthus Webworm moth.  Pretty...and a good pollinator.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ailanthus_webworm

Zentangle Doodles to Art Quilts

My art quilt bee met today at my house, so I got to choose the topic.  Several of us have been practicing doodling Zentangle designs.  We decided to make some kind of group challenge incorporating Zentangle doodles. 

Before the group arrived, I did a few experiments.  First, I wrote on PFD fabric with various black markers, then hand-washed the fabric and let them dry.  I decided not to use any Sharpies for lettering on fabric, since most of them bleed.

I have a set of the Pitt Shades of Gray markers, so I made another sample of each of them.

Then, it occurred to me that many fabrics already have prints that resemble the geometric or swirly designs of Zentangles.  Why not incorporate the fabrics into an art quilt, and not have to draw all the black backgrounds?

I quickly made this example of a heart on freezer paper, cut up the sections of freezer paper, and ironed the freezer paper to the front of fused fabric (with the backing paper still attached.)  Then I fused all the parts to a striped background fabric.  This could be fun when embellished with stitching,quilting, and who knows what else

Then I thought about just cutting some shapes out of fused fabric and ironing them onto a piece of PFD (Prepared For Dying) fabric. 

After I did that, I drew more doodles. 

I heat-set the doodles, then colored in with Neocolor water-soluble crayons.  Here I have colored some of the details, but not the background.

I used a wet paintbrush to blend the colors.  Some of the markings became blurred and the colored designs lost their crispness.  I think next time I will use the crayons for the background, and then Tsukineko inks for the details.

I could always go back over the lines with marker to darken them a bit.

I made another sample using just black fabric marker and Tsukineko inks. This piece remained crisp and clear.

When the ladies arrived, they saw this hand that I had doodled in one of my journals, so we decided to challenge ourselves to each designing our own hand doodle.  From there, we can choose to color, add photo transfers, text, or whatever.  This could be an interesting challenge!

Before the meeting was over, most of us had at least doodled inside the outlines of our hand on fabric. Mine looks very similar to my paper version.  I probably could have just printed it out from my computer onto fabric.

It will be interesting to see what the finished art quilts that begin with our hands.  Several members were on vacation, so I hope they will also join in the challenge.