Close Encounters

I love texture, and see a lot of it in nature. These images are from photos I've taken on my walks. The first one is blue jay feathers. A blue jay had been killed and left by a path on the golf course. The feathers were still brilliant with color.

This is the underside of a mushroom cap that had been growing in our backyard.

Not surprising, with as much time as I spend at the beach, that some of my images would be of seashells.

I'm not sure if this one would be considered a shell or a piece of coral.

Can you guess what this one is? It's a close-up of a pine cone. Not quite the original color - thank you, Photoshop - but a great show of texture.

A beautifully veined leaf.

And last, but not least, some berries on a tree at the golf course.

An Art Quilt That Keeps On Giving

In 2001, I made an art quilt I named Dunescape. Dunescape is 43" x 53" in size.

I entered this quilt in our local Crystal Coast Quilters Guild annual show, and it won Viewer's Choice that year. It now hangs on the wall in our bedroom, and it's the first thing I see every morning.

In March 2008, I started two online shops at Etsy. (There are links to my shops on the right side of this page.) Paper Press contains notecards made from my artwork, including my art quilts. Dunescape is featured in one of the notecards, full-sized (without the border), and in another card that features a detail of the quilt. Since I cropped the picture of the art quilt to get the detail image, I decided to "crop" the name of the quilt too, and the name went from "Dunescape" to "Dunes." I also included Dunes in a notecard set, By the Sea, with four other beach-related images.

My second Etsy shop features my art quilts, and a wide variety of colorful ACEOs (Art Cards, Editions & Originals) and prints with images from my fiber art, paintings, and photographs. Dunes is an ACEO in that shop.

One might think that would be enough exposure for the poor quilt, but I just drafted it for a Reader Challenge at one of my favorite magazines, Cloth, Paper, Scissors. The theme for the contest is "Life's a Beach"! How could I pass that up?

For the Reader Challenge, I had to actually create a new piece of work to submit. Since there are size limits for the challenge, I decided to make a small art quilt and mount it on a painted 8"x10" gallery-wrapped canvas. I started this project by printing out Dunes onto a piece of cotton fabric, using my inkjet printer. I made a quilt sandwich and added new nubby fabrics in the sand and dunes areas. After the piece was quilted, I mounted it on the painted canvas. Then I embellished it with lace, yarn, guinea fowl feathers and reindeer moss. Here's a picture of the final project. (Click on the image to see an enlarged version.)


If you compare it to the photos above, you'll see that the main differences are in the embellishments.

Now maybe Dunescape itself can take a break and just rest on my bedroom wall for a while!