My latest piece

I have been so busy lately...  summer is family time and we spent all but 10 days in July on the road.  From my son-in-laws family lake house in Fiddle Lake, Pa, to Puerto Rico for my husband's fathers family reunion, with a little vacation time added on to the end, to a week in Vegas for work.  It is a wonder I found anytime to quilt, but I did.

I actually was able to finish a piece I started at the CQQ Retreat in April.  She doesn't have a name yet, but she is 95% complete.  I may add a few dimensional while flowers falling off the overpass and I still need to do a label (nut I need a name first)...  but other than that she is done.  I even did some tinting on her to add shadows and depth in her back and arms.

What do you think?

Oh...  looking at the picture I realized I never added her earring!..  ok, so maybe 94% complete :-).

Enjoy!

Life... why must it always get in the way...

So, I know most are probably thinking I stopped blogging, but honestly that is not my intention.  But it seems I have spent much of the first half of the year on the road and then heads down on deadlines for one show or another.

So I won't bore you with a long update, but I will share some of my work from the past few months.

just pics, no long verbiage for now... but I am hoping to do better going forward.  Yes, I WANT to blog more :-)...

 The result of all of my experimentation on my Silhouette cutter:

Currently on display at View's exhibit "For the Birds" in Old Forge, NY

I have two others that I've finished this year, but can't seem to find a picture of those.

Here is one that I started at retreat in April, but haven't touched since...  guess I need a deadline to get me moving on it :-)

Ok, lunch break is over :-)  Hope you enjoyed!

Art can be humbling...

I was in a business meeting for work last Thursday, when I received an email telling me I had won 'Best Innovative Style Quilt' for Let's Here it for the Girls at the Mancuso, NJ Quilt Fest.  As you can imagine I was ecstatic.  I was sitting in Chicago, but couldn't wait for the weekend, so that I could see my quilt hanging in all it's glory in New Jersey.

Well, I am happy I had those 3 days to bask in my glory.  As always, the show had some phenomenal quilts hanging.  My notification email for the award had said that the judges felt that the competition was extremely tough.  But as I walked the show floor, I was amazed at the talented quilts and the big name quilters who I had gone up against...  oh my.  I didn't even rush to find my quilt.  I decided to take my time and appreciate all the other work, because surely they had made a mistake and I had maybe received Honorable Mention.

One of the reasons I like this show is that the quilts are usually so varied, and this year was no different.  Artsy quilts hung next to traditional, big next to small, hand next to machine...  In all, the workmanship spoke for itself.  These artists put their heart and soul into these pieces... surely, mine won't look as good, or as professional.  I quilt at night, after work, after dinner, after all the other things have been taken care of.  I quilt for me, not for judges...  I experiment with all different types of techniques and yes, sometimes, I say to myself, it is 'good enough', knowing it isn't perfect.

It is funny how all these thoughts rushed through my mind as I walked the floor.  Almost as if I was preparing myself to be disappointed.  And then I saw it.  My quilt...  my ladies, on the dance floor for all to see.  And YES, there was my ribbon as well..  BLUE for first place in a particular category.  As always, I watched the people as they approached.  Almost as expected, their eyes seemed to gravitate to the other 2 pieces handing next to it....  see I was right, it didn't deserve that ribbon....  then all of a sudden, they turned around...  they stopped and looked and took out their cameras.  They noticed the finely tuned bodies of the dancers, the realistic effect of them in front of the back-drop as a result of the trapunto, the 3D flowers that had been scattered across the stage in accolades.  They chatted amongst themselves and read the description and the quilters name.  At that point, I felt it was alright to step forward, to comment that I was the quilter.  They congratulate me and ask questions about the piece. As they walk away, I breath.  Ok, that wasn't so bad.  I survived, I belong....

No this isn't the first time I have won a BLUE ribbon, and no it isn't the first time the competition was tough, but it always seems to amaze me, that others enjoy looking at something that I created, and for that I am humbled.  I quilt because I enjoy it.  It brings me peace.  I think it is wonderful that others get some joy from merely looking at it as well.

For that, I say Thank You!

Renee

Update on Visions of Paisley

I can finally say I am on the home stretch!  Visions of Paisley is all quilted and I have added a double piping.  This was my first time doing a double piping, so I had to do my research first.  I took out my Ricky Tims Grand Finale DVD, to review his method, then of course I went to Susan Cleaveland's YouTube page, because I use her Piping Hot Tool, so I wanted to see if she had any hints and techniques I could learn from.  I ended up watching a few other videos, before I jumped in.

I used my Bernina #32 Pintucking foot, because the grooves were a perfect size for my piping to slide through and it made it easy to keep the stitching tight.  I did use Ricky's technique of creating the piping with water soluble thread, so that if some of the stitching peaked out, I could just spritz it with some water.  Luckily for me, I don't see any yet :-).   I am pleased with the way it turned out.  Even with the binding sewn on the front, it is still nice and tight.

As always my pics taken in the studio are with my Blackberry phone, so the shot is a little fuzzy, but I hope you can see how tight the piping is.  I was worried, as I used the same Dupioni silk as the applique in the center of the quilt and you know Dupioni has those nubs on it, so I wasn't sure it it would behave.  But I think it did :-)

Once I got the binding on, (no it isn't stitched down in the back yet), I was anxious to get some of the swarovski cyrstals on.  I lost track of time, it was addictive, I just wanted to see the next shape outlined and the next.  In this picture I have about 600 crystals down and I still have quite a bit to go.

The problem???  If you look at the swirl of the large paisley shape.  it is a deep purple (although you probably can't tell that from this picture..  Blackberry...ugh), but I accidentally used the Cobalt Blue crystals vs the Purple Violet ones, so that means the next step is heating them each back up and taking all 50+ crystals off one at a time.  Sort of like un-sewing....  takes about 3x the time it took to get it on.  Oh well, it is what it is.

I am traveling on business now, so it will have to wait until I return, from Costa Rica.  Oh yeah, I know why they call it a rain forest!!

Until next time :-),
Renee

Pelham Quilters Round Robin 2013 - Here is Cheryl's piece

So in June we brought in our completed round robins for the year to guild meeting.  You can see some of the progress on this years top here.  This is the top after I added my round...

I can't seem to find my picture of it with the last round on it, but you will see it in the picture of the quilted piece. This top was worked on by Cheryl, Donna, myself and Doris, in that order, all from the Pelham Quilters.

Since Cheryl has been ill, I decided to take hers home and quilt it for her.  I hope she likes it...

I tried a new quilting design, which I saw at the Kutztown Folk Festival and Quilt Show.  The quilt was amazing and the swirling design was an all over pattern on that piece, but I used in only in the white sections here.

 I also added some red Swarovski hot fix crystals from Cheri's Cyrstals over the points, to bring out more of the red.  Red is Cheryl's favorite color :-).


The rest of the piece is quilted with designs that just seemed to fit...  a meander in the mosaic, since it wouldn't be noticeable anyway: waves in the white points, swirls in the red points, half feathers in the light blue batik and an outline of the flowers in the darker blue outer border.

I used Aurifil 50 wt cotton in white and 2 different blues for the entire quilt.  Besides being practically lint free, it is nice and fine so it gave the quilt the right amount of texture, without trying to steel the show from the quilt itself :-).




All in all, I think it came out pretty good. 

Cheryl is now doing some light sewing, so I left the binding to be done by her. 

Now I hope she likes it :-).

Cheers!

El Coqui!

In Puerto Rico there is a small frog with a huge sound.  Found only in PR, the coqui, mates by finding another coqui with the perfect pitch.  The male goes 'co' and the female responds 'qui', but it sounds like one frog making one contiguous sound

My husband has a cousin, who along with his wife live in Trujillo Alto, PR.  Their backyard, or outdoor living space is a wonderful, live in garden, that is a natural continuation of their indoor entertaining space.  At night you can hear what seems like millions of coqui's chatting away in the garden.  They sound almost musical.

Well this cousin and his wife are wonderful hosts.  Whenever we are in PR, they take such good care of us, that I wanted to bring them something special when we went down last month.  Last year as I worked on my Jungle Paradise quilt featuring the parrott I would frequently post progress on Facebook and she fell in love with the quilt.  While they were in NY for the Thanksgiving holiday, she saw it in person and she made my heart sing with her praise of my work.  So, I decided to make them a nature scene featuring the coqui.  I thread painted a coqui and created a natural garden scene incorporating some of the plants from her garden that I had taken pictures of on our last visit, along with some other nature inspired greens.  I printed the plants on fabric and along with the coqui, I appliqued them into the garden scene.

I added butterflies in both an applique and 3D effect, as well as ladybugs.

As always, all of my quilting is done free motion and I used a wide variety of threads...  Aurifil 50 wt Cotton; Superior SewFine! and Nature Colors; Metler Twists (to be honest I have used this thread in yrs, but I only needed a little) and some Sulky.  As I have mentioned before, I have 2 favorite brands of thread.....Aurifil for the perfect lint free cotton and Superior for their non-cotton specialty threads,...... but sometimes, you need to pull out something that is hidden in your stash, for either the right color or the right texture.  It is called finding the right tool for the job :-).

This was the first time I tried doing circles in an inner border, where they all had to be the same size.  Remember, I don't mark my quilt tops.  I love the end result, but I must say, it took a while to get the swing of it :-).  There was a lot of 'frogging' going on in that border...  LOL!

This is the end result.

As you can see it looks like she loved it!  And, she immediately recognized the plants from her garden on the bottom right and left hand corners of the wallhanging.  She has told me it will hang over her TV in the family room, so she will look at it everyday!

Here's to family and El Coqui!

Cheers!

You really have to be ready, even when you know it in your heart.

As per my last post, I really enjoyed spending some time at Quilt Odyssey Hershey 2013 last weekend.  The quilts were inspiring individually, but collectively, they reinforced something I had already known....  I have to step up my game.  Create more complex quilts, improve my accuracy, step up the type of quilting designs I undertake and focus on every single detail, from design to finishing techniques.

Funny thing the week before the show I pulled out a UFO, that had sat for a couple of years.  You can see an image of it here from my initial stages.  While on vacation in July I had a vision of the next step, something that had left me blank for quite some time.  So I had pulled it out and completed the top, and began planning the quilting.  I had even decided to mark the entire quilt top first, something as per my earlier posts I have never even thought of before.  I have never marked a thing!  But I had already made the decision that this piece needed to go to the next step.  I held out, but believe me, by the time I was 1/4 of the way through I was itching to start stitching :-)

I brought a backing while in Hershey, and so with the inspiration of all the gorgeous quilts in Quilt Odyssey, I completed the first phase of the quilting.  I have since added even more plans for this piece.  Funny, this is a paisley design and one of the inspirational quilts was also paisley by Lorilynn King.  (You can see it in my post from the show.)  It is amazing, but Lorilynn's piece is in another dimension.  I am not quite there yet. :-)

So I am now focused on using exactly the right thread to punch back the fabric around the paisley quilted designs, so that they will come forward in a semi/faux trapunto feeling.  I have quite a pit of purples in my stash, but only one is the right color, but it doesn't have the sheen needed for my vision.  You see the purple fabric is Radiance, a silk/cotton, blend and it has a fairly significant sheen.  Using just any thread, would dampen the allure of the Radiance fabric.  Even the white background area needs to shine, so I have ordered some Superior Magnifico, that should come in shortly.

In the meantime, I added some detail to my paisley applique components...  it gave me another opportunity to raise the level of the piece a little.

 So, I will keep you posted on my progress.  For now, I am liking where this is going, but it has at least two more steps to it before I can think of finishing :-).

Have you challenged yourself lately?  It really feels good, give it a try!

P.S....  forgive the quality of the pictures, they were taken on my blackberry vs on my camera :-(

Cheers!

I can't believe I haven't posted this yet...

Boy.... have I been delinquent.  You saw my last post was from something that happened in May and I just posted about in on July 19th!  So I will be in catch up mode for the next week or so. :-)

Here is the finished piece of Robert and me, in 'Can you see me?'.  I thought I had blogged about making it here, but it appears I never did!!!  I started the piece as part of a Craftsy class by Lola Jenkins, called Thread Art, using a picture of my son taken while on a family vacation last summer.  I made the piece at the end of 2012 and still can't believe I didn't blog about it, as I love my reflection in his eye glasses.  (Facebook friends have seen it, so sorry if you are seeing this twice.) 

You know how you have an idea of how to do something, but when it works out, you are like WOW, I like that!  :-).  This is a whole cloth quilt, with one exception.  The eye glasses are appliqued on top of his face.  They were made by enlarging the original picture and printing just the glasses on fabric, then appliqueing them down.  His profile, the hair, mustache and beard are all done via thread painting on the top only.  I then colored everything else in using Inktense pencils.  I had the top completed and quilted everything except his face back in the December/January time frame, because I couldn't get the courage to do so.  I was afraid of messing him up..  I finally got the inspiration and courage to quilt the face, then decided to make it 'not square'.  I looked at quite a few other portrait quilts online and I must say, studying them, really helped!

Anyway, here are some pics, I thought I would share..

I really love the quilting in the nose and chin area.

The face is quilted using YLI Silk thread that I had brought a few years ago when a local shop was closing.  So happy I had it on hand, as it worked perfectly for such dense quilting.  Lucky for me I have another 30 or so spools of it in various muted pastel colors!

I think I will do more portraits to get more practice on how to truly represent the faces natural contour.  :-)

Kimono Inspirations

So a couple of posts ago, I shared with you the piece I was making for my Fiber Arts group, FANE's, Kimono Inspiration Exhibit at the Northern Stars Quilt Guild Show, World of Quilts, held the first weekend in May.

Well, I want to share with you not only my finished piece, but some of the other works of art as well, but since we have an exhibit opening soon, I will tease you with mine....  (details on the exhibit can be found below).

This is Pathways....

This was my piece.  I must say I had so much fun with the piece, from design to adding the 'fringe' at the end.  I am really happy that I joined the group, because they are really encouraging and since most don't focus on the machine quilting, it has opened my eyes on how to add texture to a piece with embellishments.  So slowly but surely, I will be expanding past just crystals as surface embellishments :-).  It is quilted with both Aurifil 50wt cotton and Superior Sew Fine and Art Studios threads.

There were 26 Kimonos in all and they really looked good on the stands that Jane and the team built.  The quilts are designed to be hung on stands that allow you to see front and back of  both the center piece, as well as he 'sleeves'.  But they can also be hung on a wall, although you will only see one side of the Kimono.


Lucky for FANE, two different galleries are interested in hosting the exhibit of Kimonos.  One in August and one in October.  The first is a show at The Quilt Gallery at City Quilter.  The exhibit runs from August 13 - 31, 2013, on 25th St, between 6th and 7th Ave., NYC.  The Gallery is open Tuesday thru Saturday.  All Kimonos will be for sale via The Quilt Gallery.

As information for the second exhibit draws near, I will share it with you as well.

Hope you like my Kimono and stop by the exhibit in NYC to see all 26!

Poetic Fragments

On April 28th, my Fiber Arts group, FiberArts NorthEast (FANE), hosted an Artist Reception for the Poetic Fragments exhibit at the Gallery at the Mahopac Library.  The exhibit is hanging until the end of May, so if you are in the area, please stop by.  There is no admission and there are almost 30 unique pieces!

This post will just be a series of photos, as I share all the wonderful small works done by the group.  Each piece could be no more that 14" on any side, had to be made of more that one element and was to be inspired by a line in a poem or a song.  The finished pieces were attached to an 18" canvass and displayed on the wall.

My apologies to the few artists whose names I missed....

Summer Kiss by Vivien Zepf

NY State of Mind by Donna Chambers

 A Pest Sense of How Not to Fly by Jane Davila

 A Rally Cry Unites Us  by Christine Wilheim

Arrangement in Grey and Black by Andrea Shedletsky

 Blue Grass  by Nike Cutsumpas

 Butterflies by Maxine Oliver

Circles by Elaine Sullivan

 Enkindled Spring  by Carolyn Drillick

Enlightened by Natalyia Aikens ....  this piece amazed me, because except for the thread and the dark brown building on the left that was felted, the rest is made on recycled plastic bags!!  Yep, you read that right :-)

 Float and Dance by Artist Unknown

 Golden Bugs by Nancy Mirmen

I Hope You Dance by me, Renee Fleuranges-Valdes

I Have a Song to Sing by Fran Osinoff

Seasons  by Artist Unknown

Serenity by Claire Oehler

 The Taven by Linda Long

 Title and Artist Unkown

 To Time by Artist Unknown

Tree Study VI Forest Shadows  by Barbara Sferra

 Tree by Kathy Tahnke

 Variations in Red by Carolyn Spiegel

White Crane Spreads Its Wings by Martha

Zen Garden by Judy Gignesi

A view of the company my piece is in :-)

A New York State of Mind and Forest Shadows, have already sold.  Most of the others are available for purchase via the artists.