Gouache Mandala 1 – First Color

One of my D.Min. colleagues did a project with a mandala he designed and then painted with gouache paint.  It’s really nice, and it inspired me to sit down and do some playing around with mandalas myself.  I’ve always used them for quilt designs before.  Here’s one I made up several years ago.  It’s somewhere between 50 and 60 inches in diameter.

The mandala I drew Saturday night is only 6 inches in diameter.  That’s a huge difference.  But then the medium is different, too.  What you can do with fabric is TOTALLY different from what you can do with paint.  But, the interesting thing is that they are equally intricate.

Using the gouache I’ve laid in the first color which is a very lovely primary blue.  I’m going to be using a palette of hues between yellow and blue on the color wheel.  And there will probably be a touch of red, as well.  Here’s the first layer:

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Retro Quilt Show Final

I do have a couple of other pieces that were completed in the 1990′s, but this is the last one I’m going to show in my Retro Quilt Show.  The other pieces are “liturgical” pieces that were designed specifically as biblical interpretation for use in worship or meditation.  I’ll show those pieces at another time.

This last piece is a hand appliqued and quilted piece that was made for a going away gift for the wife of one of my husband’s commanding officers–she’s picture to the left in the photo–in 1990.  I executed the quilt piece which was inspired by a design in Quilter’s Newsletter Magazine called “Techny Chimes”.  The piece was mounted with a round matte and another person did the calligraphy around it.

There have also been lots of small gift quilts and baby quilts that I’ve made and neglected to photograph.  It’s pretty amazing when I begin to compile a “show” like this and remember all of the things that were happening while I was quilting.  It’s also been interesting to document how I’ve  been challenged and grown over the years of quilt making.

Thanks for visiting my show.

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More Retro Quilt Show

One of the last pieces in my Retro Quilt Show is a small mariner’s compass wall hanging that I made for a silent auction when I was living in Iceland in 1990.

This piece is completely hand pieced and quilted.

I don’t remember how much it actually went for, but it was a good amount.  I’ve made several small quilts that, sadly I never took pictures of, but I’m glad to have one or two like this one to help me keep a record of my work.

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Switching Gears

I’m back from Washington and now have to get to work on some projects that will be due for my Doctor of Ministry classes over the next couple of months.  I have a few writing projects and one major art project.

The major project will be one for Creativity and Spirituality.  We’ve been challenged to complete an art project, preferably using a medium we’re not familiar with.  

Since I’ve been wanting to play with mixed media, that’s what I’ll be trying, but I’ll have a lot of learning to do first.  I’ll post my experimentation here.

First step is to figure out what supplies I’ll need and then to gather them.  I want to try making handmade paper.  I also want to use acrylics with different mediums and also some metal mesh I’ve seen in the art stores. All this on canvases, which I’ll have to stretch myself since they don’t seem to make pre-stretched canvas in the size and shape I want.   There’s going to be a huge learning curve here!

I’m hoping my ideas are not too ambitious to be able to complete something, but our professor encouraged us to take a risk that could potentially result even in failure.  We’ll see what happens.

There are a couple more small pieces I have to show in my Retro Quilt Show, so I’ll complete that showing over the next few days.

This is a quilt I made during Desert Storm, the first Gulf War, in 1991.  We were living in Iceland at the time and my husband was sent to the States, not the Gulf, for flying exercises there, AND a volcano erupted on the island, AND the war started, all on the same weekend–January 17.

I sat glued to CNN (that, incidentally, is when CNN became really big) and made this quilt.  It’s lap size and was machine pieced with a Quilt in a Day pattern and then hand quilted.  

I read somewhere that there was a time when women made war quilts and mourning quilts.  This is my war quilt, done in somber tones with a sand colored backing representative of the war.  It was completed in the same amount of time that Desert Storm was executed.  I think that was about two weeks.

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Retro Quilt Show – 12

The second assignment in the EGA Master Craftsman Program in Quilt Making was applique with lattices and border.  For colors, an analogous scheme was to be used.

I named this quilt “It’s Tulip Time” and purchased the fabric and completed the quilt while we were living in Iceland in 1989 to 1991.  This quilt was also chosen to be exhibited at the National Seminar in the year it was completed.

I did begin the third phase of the program which was a useable quilt other than a bed quilt in complementary colors with a variety of special techniques such as crazy quilting, string quilting, and trapunto.  That project, a tea cozy, is still a WIVSP (Work In Very Slow Progress) in my sewing closet.   I hope someday soon to pick it back up and finish it, although they no longer have the Master Craftsman Program.  

Going back to college after an 18 year “break” intervened in my quilt making, so I was unable to complete the program while they were still offering it.

I think I’m doing it right this time by incorporating the arts into my academic work.  I’m nearly through the first two classes, except for the project work, and I’m really happy to have chosen this doctoral program.

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Retro Quilt Show – 11

The quilt that passed the first step of the Master Craftsman in Quilt Making program was done all in greens, meeting the purely monochromatic stipulation.

Since this was the second iteration of this pattern I made it quite a bit simpler and slightly smaller.  

I was invited to exhibit this quilt as a sample for the program at the EGA National Seminar the year it was completed.  It was also printed as the sample in the EGA program book that year.

Comparing this quilt with the previous one shows how different a block can look with different borders.

I just returned back to my dorm room from going with my D.Min. class to see the Washington opening of a new play, The Seafarer, by Conor McPherson at Studio Theater here in DC.  It was very good and had a quite interesting plot. It will be fun to read the reviews in the papers and see what class members thought tomorrow when we discuss it.  The class this week is on Drama and we’ve been having a great time trying out all kinds of ways to introduce drama into worship and other areas of ministry.

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Retro Quilt Show – 10

Here is a quilt I made for the first step of the Master Craftsman Program in Quilt Making that the Embroiderer’s Guild of America used to have.  I started the program in the late 80′s, but only got through two steps before I had to stop to go back to college.

 

For this first step, participants were given the center block in a drawing that was about 1-1/2 inches square. It was to be carefully enlarged to 17″ square and surrounded by at least two borders of the quilt maker’s choice and design.  The quilt was to be made in a monochromatic color scheme and only a quarter of it was to be quilted so the judges could look at the back of the quilt top to check for perfect piecing.  

The judges loved my quilt, but were unable to pass it because I didn’t strictly follow a monochromatic scheme. I had hoped they might accept this since it was mostly reds, but they didn’t.  I’ll show the second version, which did pass, tomorrow.

I’m almost halfway through the second week of my Doctor of Ministry program and I’m having a great time, although I’m really getting tired.  We’ve been learning a lot of practical things about using Drama in ministry and have had to do both writing and performing.  Tonight I have to write a monologue to be performed tomorrow.  This class is really stretching me, but I’m enjoying the challenge.

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Retro Quilt Show – 9

This quilt is called “2 v 2″, which is terminology used by fighter pilots when two jets are in combat with two other jets.  I used blocks with arrangements of triangles that look somewhat like the F-15′s my husband used to fly in the US Air Force. Other blocks have pieces that I placed to look like contrails against the sky.

 

His only stipulation for this quilt for his office was that there be no floral prints in it.  I knew I wanted a lot of different prints and colors, so it was pretty hard to do, but there is not a single floral in this quilt.  Now there are a lot more fabrics that are not florals, but in the late 80′s that was not the case.  This quilt was completed around 1988.  It’s approximately four feet square.

The quilt is hand pieced and quilted, and much of the quilting is done with silver metallic thread.

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Retro Quilt Show – 7

Today’s quilt is a doll quilt I made for my daughter when she was young.  The pattern came from a book by Chris Wolf Edmonds that I don’t remember the name of.  I also don’t remember the name of this pattern, but it is hand pieced, appliqued, and quilted.  There’s also quite a lot of reverse applique on this quilt.

I spent a couple of hours this afternoon at G-Street Fabrics in Rockville, MD.  I haven’t been there in ages and I had a wonderful time looking at fabric and patterns.  I picked up a couple of clothes patterns and some fabric to work on. I’ve been wanting to get back to some clothes sewing so I picked out something that should be fairly easy.

G Street is almost always having some kind of quilt show and currently they are displaying quilts by Nancy Feve.  Some of them are really fantastic and I wish I had a link so my readers could see some of them.  I’m pretty sure the ones I liked the best are done with the whack n stack technique although the bio on G Street’s web site calls them “kaleidoscope.”  She uses some wonderful color combinations.

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Retro Quilt Show – 6

Today’s quilt is one I designed for teaching beginning quiltmaking.  It is hand pieced, appliqued, and quilted.  It’s called “Heart’s Delight.”  It was made in 1987 and is about 40″ square.

I wanted to use deep solid hues somewhat like those used in Amish quilts, but with a twist.  Thus the light pink hearts.  

I taught two sessions of the class to make this quilt and it was so fun to see all of the different color combinations people used.  The most fascinating was the quilt a Pakistani woman in one of the classes made.  When she came in with her fabrics I was unsure about the color choices:  what I would call Christmas reds and greens along with a mustard yellow.  But when she finished, with her cultural sense of color use, it was beautiful. She instinctively knew precisely how to put the colors together.  It was especially striking among the other quilts because it was during a time when the “country” blues, browns, and roses were so popular, and most people were using those.  

I wish I had taken pictures of the quilts my students made in those classes.

Today was the final day of my first Doctor of Ministry class and I’m still processing all of the images and material.  We spent a lot of time yesterday and today on the formal elements of art–things like color, balance, etc. most of which I already knew, but it was good to have a review.

We also went to see the magnificent reredos that was designed by my professor, Catherine Kapikian, for Metropolitan Memorial United Methodist Church just a couple of blocks from the Seminary about 20 years ago.

A reredos is the covering on the wall behind the altar in a church.  This is a 10′ x 30′ work made up of beautifully needlepointed panels that were stitched by congregation members and are held in place by a specially designed and constructed fretwork.  It is spectacular, especially because it was designed so well to fit with the entire space and architecture of the sanctuary.  Catherine took us through some of the process of how she designed and worked with the congregation on executing and installing this piece of “participatory aesthetics.”

Seeing this piece first from the distance of the balcony, and then up close, was amazing.

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