Quilt National 2013 Opening

Here are some photos from this past weekend opening at Quilt National 2013 at The Dairy Barn in Athens, OH. Top photo is Kathy Weaver (Highland Park, IL) speaking about her piece followed by me talking about mine. The others are an assortment of photos of other wonderful pieces. 

Collage Project

Still working on the collage project with three friends.  We each made the paper collages and now we are recreating all of them in textiles.  Here is my response to Cynthia Catlin's.  They will all be matted and framed when we're done with the set.

Upcoming Exhibits

I will have a piece, Forest Floor, var. 3 at Quilt National, opening May 25, 2013 at The Dairy Barn Gallery in Athens, OH.

Also, Reflections, Venice, var. 20 is currently at Form Not Function at The Carnegie Center for History and Art in New Albany, IN until July 13, 2013.

Reflections, Venice, var. 18 will be at the International Quilt Festival - Long Beach, California in  July 2013 and also at the National Quilt Museum, Paducah, Kentucky, September 12 - December 2, 2013.

Screen Printing with Stencils

Screen printing is one of my favorite surface design techniques. It's fast when working on large pieces and it creates a beautifully rich surface when multiple images are layered with dyes. Lately I've been playing with a technique I learned from Jane Dunnewold. The basic idea is to apply acrylic paint to a piece of interfacing to block out a pattern.  Then the interfacing is taped to the back of a blank silkscreen. The paint or dye, when pulled through the screen, will not go through the areas that are painted. It is a convenient way to create a silkscreen without dedicating the screen to one image.

I also tried lutradur as an alternative to interfacing.  It is more open, so it doesn't work as well, although I did get some interesting patterns from it. Polyester window sheer fabric is another alternative. Below are some of the stencils I created and the corresponding print.

Acrylic paint brushed through lace

Acrylic paint brushed through lace

Acrylic paint brushed through lace on lutradur

Acrylic paint brushed onto sheer polyester fabric

See the slideshow of the GRAND OPENING

This free slideshow generated with Smilebox

24 x 80 at Fiber Forward - Palos Verdes Art Center

The Grand Opening was January 18, 2013, and the show will be up until March 17 open daily in the Peninsula Center (Southern California).  The opening was a fabulous success with well over 200 people in attendance!   There were praises and interesting questions for the duration. 

Interested in Joining Us?

The Art Cloth Network is now accepting applications for new members. Members of our group find that the opportunities for community, conversation, sharing of techniques, inspiration and resources have benefited our art and creativity. Applications are due by March 15, 2013. If you are interested, please read on for more information.

Our group is focused on art cloth and its specific surface design techniques and approaches.  This includes making lengths of cloth, rather than just small samples or fat quarters. While some of us also make art quilts or mixed media work,  as a group we focus on art cloth. Please read the information about art cloth on our website and look at examples, to make sure that you are interested in this field.  Only those artists who submit examples of art cloth that meet this description will be considered for membership.

We meet as a group every 9 to14 months in different regions of the United States, usually between August and October. Since these meetings are critical to our growth and vitality, we require attendance at two out of five consecutive meetings. Your membership will begin with the first meeting you attended. Members bring and discuss their work at these meetings, and share other professional concerns and opportunities. Previous meetings have been in Texas, Minnesota, Illinois, Florida, California, Georgia, Arizona, and New Jersey. The 2013 meeting will be held in Evanston, Illinois.

We also produce a new exhibit annually, with a call for entries each year. Since opportunities for showing art cloth are limited, this is an important membership benefit. Members are required to enter three of five calls for entry in order to maintain their membership status.

Only applicants who can and will attend the next meeting will be accepted into the Art Cloth Network during this membership call period. That meeting will be in Evanston, Illinois from September 19^th – 22^nd, 2013. Full details about the conference and this financial commitment will be mailed to those extended a membership invitation.

The current deadline for membership applications is March 15, 2013, and you can send in your application materials at any time prior to the deadline. You will be notified by April 15, 2013 whether your application has been approved. 

Send a request to jeanne@jeannesisson.com in order to receive detailed information and application instructions.

ACN (and more) Exhibition - Click to Enlarge

New Art Cloth Experiments

I can't see to leave well-enough alone. I am doing some giant printing these days, cutting large stencils from freezer paper and then screen-printing with a blank screen over the stencil using textile paint (and a mix of tempera and textile ink, go figure, I wanted the matt texture of tempera. I just hope the pigment holds up!). This started small and has evolved into something completely out of hand.

Art cloth article in Quilting Arts magazine

I have an article on digital design and printing using an online printer in the December/January issue of Quilting Arts. Please check it out. Available online at QuiltingArts.com or on the newstands.

I am excited to see the cloth and the words in print! This is my 3rd article with Quilting Arts. They also published my DVD - Three Dimensional Fiber Art: Shape and Texture, Light and Shadow, which has been doing well.

Having spent so much of my previous career in publishing from the publisher end, it is fun to be an author.

Art quilts at International Quilt Festival in Houston

Here are some photos from the SAQA Seasonal Palette exhibit that was at Houston a week ago. The show will be traveling to Cincinnati, Long Beach a a few other venues over the next 18 months, I hope to go see it in Cincinnati next April. My piece is the water reflection piece at the far right in the first photo. 38 artists were asked to make pieces for the show - each of us were given a particular season and color collection to work from. As well, we each created a notebook documenting our process and work along the way. There is a catalog ($20) available from the SAQA.com site. Photo credits: Gregory Case.

Another exhibit at Houston was A Sense of Scale. Very large pieces were interspersed with groupings of small pieces. This exhibit will also be traveling to other venues and also has a catalog available from SAQA.com. My piece in this exhibit was Mingled Waters - the very large piece shown in photo below.