Erosion: Plight of Big Pine

There was an article in our local paper about a ponderosa pine tree that is over 200 years old. It lives on Fish Creek, Montana, and the bank it sits on is being badly eroded.

The tree in this piece is constructed of various couched yarns and painted, heated banner fabric. It curves out from the body of the piece with added cording stuffed underneath. The roots were made with various thicknesses of cording, wrapped with light-weight wire and various yarns, then tacked down to the body of the piece. The water is hand-painted and embellished with slivers of burned silver sheers. The background is a batik that I enhanced with painting and appliqued trees. Texture Magic was used to add interest to the leafy look around the tree base.

Come Hither

My intent for this piece was to use the beautiful piece of patterned silk as a background as I did not want to cut it up. The silk has Alphonse Mucha-style ladies on it so I wanted to attempt a dimensional figure. The background behind the girl is silk that I hand painted using Color Hue silk dyes. Her body was painted onto prepared for dyeing fabric using my regular watercolor paints (for lack of anything better at the time), cut out and fused onto the painted silk. Her dress is silk velvet that I painted using Color Hue silk dyes. Her hair is dyed silk, cut into tiny strips, twisted and curled as I tacked them down. The trim around the edge is ruched silk ribbon.

Since it was the first "portrait"-type thing that I had painted onto fabric, I was fairly pleased with the results. Feet are so hard to do as well as hands. The next time, if there is one, I will use a finer weave of prepared for dyeing fabric. This one was too coarse and the paint collected on the little nubs of fabric. And, yes, it did bleed but I was using just a tiny bit of paint on a very small brush.

I felt that she had a "come hither" look to her eyes....

Welcome to my Website

Using photographs that I took of spiderwebs, I designed this quilt in order to do open threadwork using rinse away stabilizer for the web and the "greenery". The rocks are various fabrics that have been textured with painted fusible web. There is a black beaded spider lurking in the web.

Snail Trail

I participated in a workshop with Barbara Olson, Billings MT, on sewing spirals using circular graph paper. I wanted to expand upon this concept with a nature theme I've been using as a series for about a year now. So the idea of the spiral shell of a snail inspired me to create this piece using several snail photographs as references and designing the spiral on circular graph paper. The fabric for the shell was first strip-pieced and then cut into wedge-shaped pieces and sewn. The solid spiral is appliqued down to the strip-pieced spiral. The background "grasses" are various fabrics, some covered with sheers and scrunched before being quilted. The shadow under the snail was created with paint and then overlaid with black tulle.

Judge's Award - Denver National Quiltfest

The Denver National Quilt Festival V was April 29 - May 2. I had entered 2 art quilts, which were both juried into the show. I received a Judge's Award from Linda Schmidt on my sunflower quilt, "Silky and Sunny". I know Linda's work very well and this is a high honor coming from such a great artist and teacher.

The center of the sunflower is hand-painted and stitched in a curved grid with shrinking thread. The petals are silk paper that I made and tore into petal and leaf shapes. The silk roving was already dyed and purchased off an internet site.

The quilt is faced, with curved corners and hangs on point.