Renwick returns with Wonder

One of my favorite museums of American art has been the Smithsonian's Renwick across from the White House.  This past Dec. 5th my Modern Quilt Guild group took a field trip there for the reopening after two years closed for renovations. They returned with a block buster of a show! Nine artists each with a whole gallery space to do their thing and they really knock it out of the park. The exhibit is beautiful and does what the title says fills the viewer with wonder and questions. There are videos with each artist describing and answering some questions but the visual experience is a delight for anyone who takes the time to venture through. They encourage using your photography equipment for a change in this exhibition and I got home with about 65 iPhone photos. I am going to share a few with comments for my post. If you want to see more social media tag #RenwickGallery will bring up lots more if you scroll down on the home page link. Or go look at these sites using the hash tag

first room was full of stacks of little 4x4 sheets of note papers that look like a cave floor with these towering stalagmites 12 feet or more tall. 

Second room was an amazing thread art installation by Gabreil Dawe in colors of the rainbow.

 from the center looking up at the ceiling the view was like being inside a rainbow loom

The big gallery in the back was used by one of our favorite artists whom Keith got to study sapling bending with out in Colorado years ago. Patrick Dougherty also had an installation in Salem MA when we visited the Peabody Essex this past August. It's interactive and you can get inside these creations and look up close at all the woven saplings.

The next room was a viewing of videos to explain the artworks and introduce the artists to visitors next to the gift shop and book store. 

Also one tree construction installed that was made from a mold of an 140 year old tree in the extreme north country dwarfed by weather conditions it was only about 6 feet tall.

Bigger tree is yet to come when we climb the long staircase towards the formal grand salon.

 Lights above were by the same artist who transformed the underground passage at National Gallery of Art's east wing tunnel with thousands of LED lights programed to never repeat a performance of ever changing patterns. Leo Villareal did this modern rain like installation.

The grand salon held a ceiling full of woven strings and a floor covered with a new carpet that are both an interpretation of the Tsunami that hit in the Pacific when Japan had that huge earth quake a couple years ago. Janet Echelman also had an installation on a much bigger scale in Boston this past summer we were lucky to get to see suspended over the Greenway. This room was full of people laying on the floor to get a view of the ceiling string art as various colored lights played with the shapes. Lots of fun to visit this room.

 I want to go back and see it again and watch for a while and see what else it feels like. Music or sound might have enhanced this installation to add a wave experience or a whale song or two? From here we walked to the big tree room by John Grade with the 140 year old tree that he cast in the wilderness using plaster and brought back to a studio where a hundred odd assistants put together sections of wood about 1-2 inches long to build a tree section then they were all assembled and sanded to round them down and delivered and hung sideways in long narrow room. I love trees and this was a tribute that really felt good to experience. It was chosen because the Renwick is 140 years old too.

 it was fun to watch the sections sway ever so slightly as the people brushed against them coming in the narrow opening. Or maybe it was like a pendulum swaying with gravity?

Maya Lyn mapped the Chesapeake bay using special marbles that glass blowers use to mix colors. Her childhood memories of these special rough marbles were her inspiration and the wonder of the patterns of water working it's way through the landscape on a map. 

Then the room of history of the Renwick had a great ceiling install and a sculpture of the "greek slave girl" that opened the museum back in the 1800's by an American artist. 

This is a octaginal shaped room with doors on three sides and one window. Next a room full of rubber tire and inner tube sculpted dividers of space that had the smell to go with the look. 

 Finally the room we have heard so much about the bugs on the wall room. The background color is made from beetle wings crushed to give that red pink tone rubbed on the walls. The specimen bugs are bought from suppliers who do all the dirty work of collecting them for scientists and now artists!

This should be on everyones list of must see exhibits in my mind as it is really easy to wonder through and doesn't take much effort. SO happy to have the Renwick back in working order again. DC wasn't the same without them these past two years. Now we will loose the Freer for a couple years while they do remodeling there..... Still the free art galleries in Washington DC are amazing. Thank you America!

Photos of late in Oranges!

Thought I would share a few of my autumn photos from the iPhone that I carry everywhere and use liberally to collect oranges and things that catch my fancy. Quilting season and orange season are upon us! Happy Holidays. 

walking on the Highline elevated native plants park in NYC with John Kelly. 

free to view art installation at the Whitney in NYC October 2015

Posing with some of my friends from the 1980's nightclub Pyramid of the lower East Village  in front of my Log Cabin quilt exhibited in NYC as part of the 'what happened to those creative people from the good old days...

Now it's nearly time to go take a walk and see what new colors appear on the way. 

Quilt finish for charity

New finish Blue & White Wedges quilt 

 Recently I finished this new blue and white quilt of wedges sewn in long strips which were left over from a Dresden Plate quilt called Blue Diamonds I made almost three years ago.

Blue Diamonds quilt 2012-2013 a Dresden Plate set on point and hand quilted.

 I made too many wedges for my Dresden plates because I wanted lots to choose from when I was building them. I cut and cut six inch wedges and then put them together as I needed them to mix and match my dark and light plates. When I was done making two large bed sized tops I set the remaining wedges aside. At some point these wedges got sewn together into long alternating blue/white strips that laid in a pile of left over blocks for quite a long time. Opportunity this year to make a quilt for the homeless arose at the guild as it always does in Sept. We have 100 quilts for Kids as a challenge and I had a pal to help me assemble these into a quilt at our all day guild sewing day. Virgil, I met him over the summer, quilts but doesn't have much experience he says. We joined forces at the guild meeting and with his help we put it together in a top that measures about 40 x 64 inches. A nap quilt for a toddler or a throw for some one feeling the season chill. Our quilts this year are going to the Washington DC homeless family shelter at the old DC General Hospital I believe. Once the top was all sewn together and nicely pressed I was lucky to find a nice piece of blue and white tartan in a box of donated fabric large enough to cover the back. I brought the blue tartan yardage and our top home to finish with batting quilting and all the usual parts.

Since this quilt is going to be a donation, I did the straight line quilting on my featherweight Singer sewing machine so it was faster than by hand. I did a diagonal design to echo the wedges. Then on a visit to Manassas I whipped up a personalized label for the back and added the solid blue to bind the edges. 

front, back and label 

Long walks are part of my aspiration every day. It is good to get away from the sewing and in Manassas while I was working on the blue and white wedge's label this image of a local lake surrounded by white asters and blue sky and white clouds becomes a photo equivalent to the blue and white quilt. Guess I didn't get that far away from the project on my long walk seeing the same colors by the lake. 

Tea Leaf Quartet Quilt finish

Last year I got the idea that I wanted to try a quilt top design with curved piecing after focusing on log cabin blocks made with all long strips. I found a pattern for free from Tim Latimer the quilter who blogs about hand quilting in Michigan. Tim is really good and really fast at hand quilting and is always an inspiration for me. I follow his blog Tim Quilts ( link to the post I used as my guide for this quilt) he does all sorts of quilting projects and on his blog tells how and is very generous Tim Quilts has new posts about once a week.
I had a collection of fabrics I bought earlier shopping in Manassas at Hancock Fabrics and Joann's with my mom in a matched color way and then I added a little more from my stash. I decided to adjust the block pattern a little for my first repeat pattern curved piecing project. Tim used fat quarters and I had lots more fabric than he did so I added a quarter inch to my  the edges of the curves to allow a 1/4 inch along the seam at the edges of the finished blocks. That was the only design change I made. I even used his pattern of quilting stitches for my quilt. but I wasn't as fast as his fast quilting goes. As a matter of fact, I realized once I was into the quilting it was way too much for me. I struggled to get the quilting done all year but finally have it completed it, bound and washed and dried.... Ready to share. It's a throw size 46 x 61 inches. I used black pearl cotton #8 to do the leaf pattern and echo the leaf shapes in the design. 

The blocks finished up at 8 inches square for each leaf and took me one hour and 17 minutes to quilt completely using Tim's intricate design. The quilting shows up best in the salmon and sage green blocks and on the back solid salmon.  

There is one block I left without black quilting veins that I tried to label on the reverse by embroidering my title block right on the finished quilt. I don't recommend labeling this way but maybe with practice I could do better...

The entire back shows the great leaf and circle in squares design of the intricate quilting pattern. label at the left near the center. 

This was a fun quilt and I loved the resulting quilting patterns but the labor made it something I would simplify for future hand quilting projects. I am grateful to Tim for giving us a good pattern to begin me down the curved piecing pathway. More to come! It's not as hard as you might think if you never did a curve look for help and give it a try once you get the hang of it you won't look back. 

a new journal

Today I want to tell you about and show a new patchwork piecing project this month. It is a cover for a coptic bound journal. I use them to write in and sketch ideas for new quilting projects. Last year I made a pair of patchwork improvisation blocks using some of the scraps from my big Orange Explains It quilt scraps. Compared to the regular book cloth covered coptic bound journal this was clearly fun and interesting to do but extra time intensive. That is because to make a cover with fabric one has to add a paper backing to the cloth patchwork before gluing to the book cover boards. Double the glue work but doubly unique in the final book covers.

Orange Explains It scrappy Coptic bound book 

After I completed this first book I gave it to Keith for Christmas and figured I would make myself another one in the winter. It never happened until now but recently I finished up a big quilt top using two tones of orange and had scraps that were long strips and by adding them together and cutting them I got a new type of scrappy quilt block for my next book. See images below of the new cover...

Inside this new journal I added some wrapping paper we bought last year at that great paper source store in Georgetown with various feathers printed for my end pages. I like to use a heavy Strathmore paper for my fly pages in this case darker orange. I also had orange beeswax coated linen binder's thread to finish up the orange theme. While sewing I decided not to add glass beads to the spine but to use a soft paper and insert a little yellow-green or chartreuse over the two center folios for some colorful interest on the spine. 

In the back ground there you can see the big copy press I have on my studio desk. That is how I get the paper and glued fabric to stay pressed flat before and after I apply it to the book cover boards. It's a very heavy tool but a great one to have. 

A friend on Instagram asked about the needle I use. It is a bend binder's needle in this case one that I bent myself a trick I learned at my first class in Coptic book making with Daniel Essig years ago at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center when it used to be in Riverdale, MD. We plan to have a fabric block printing workshop for quilters at the current Pyramid Atlantic home in Silver Spring, MD next January 2016 for DC Modern Quilt Guild members. So here are a few images of my process as I built the book. 

detail of the first 6 signatures sewn in place with orange thread and chartreuse paper over the spines of two signatures. 

look closely to see the bent binders needle is tucked under the thread which is all that holds the coptic journal together. 

book assembly is one signature at a time added using a single tread and needle.