Looking forward to my October 19 gig at Paper City in Holyoke, MA. We'll spend the day doing raw edge applique flowers on a fabric collage background. Patterns provided for trillium (easy), lady's slipper orchid (medium), and iris (difficult). If you've taken this workshop before, you can bring a flower picture to work from and I'll help you make your own pattern. (If you bring your own photo, please print it as large as you will want the finished flower to be.) Sign up on their website.
My students at Silver Bay were real troopers this week! Not everyone is a night owl, but great progress was made in our evening class, and by the end of the next afternoon folks had designs and fabrics cut out and ready to quilt! Those doing flowers even found time to get some stitching done. I learned about some new techniques that I'm eager to try, and it was delightful to work with students who had a genuine interest in art and quilting. Many thanks to the Silver Bay staff who made the workshop possible and who also helped with my pop-up exhibit.
I even found time to reconnect with old friends, dip my toes in the lake, go for a paddle, and watch a hummingbird pluck gnats out of mid air for breakfast during the morning bird walk. I saw the milky way for the first time in years, including some of the Perseid meteor shower, and had a lovely midnight conversation with a staff member who assured me that the spirit and magic of Silver Bay are still present and meaningful to younger generations. Many things have changed since I worked there in the 80's, and I continue to be fascinated by how, when I'm there, I see both what's in front of me and my memories from the past several decades. It's a very unique form of time travel, and I hope to be able to go back to teach again next year.
This thread-painted quilt has been finished for a while, and I just realized that I posted it on facebook but never shared it here in the blog. It's the first in what I hope to be a series of peony quilts. With the dynamic edges, interesting negative space and subtle differences in monochromatic values, it's a continuation of my explorations into similar images of glass, water, and clouds.
In my twenties, I managed to climb a handful of high peaks in the Adirondacks. (A high peak is anything over 4000'.) I don't get above tree-line very often any more, but the views are burned into my memories and perhaps I can climb a few more after retirement, if my feet are up to it. However, a few years back my family stayed at Silver Bay and I was determined to try to climb something. Rather than go for a true high peak, we settled on Hopkins Mountain, where we hoped to actually find parking and keep the hike on the "short" side. Given that it turned out to be a humid 96 degree day, it was a good choice. I don't remember what our hiking time was, or the distance, but the view of the high peaks was stunning.
One of my goals after we moved back to the East Coast from the San Francisco Bay Area was to experiment with clouds. This is the first time I've gotten around to it, even though we've been back for quite a while. The Bay Area doesn't get clouds like we do here. Looking back at photos from that hike reminds me to play with clouds and mountains more often, both on foot and in fabric. I'm thrilled with the way this piece has turned out and can't wait to do a few more!
One week when my brother and I were at Silver Bay as kids, we discovered that the lawn in front of Paine Hall was full of large 4-leaf clovers! We collected as many as we could find and pressed them in an album. Later, when I was an EMP, I discovered that the 4-leaf clovers continue there. I picked some and laminated them to give to friends - a little piece of pocket-sized luck.
I've stayed in this building both as a guest and as staff. Paine Hall is full of odd twists and turns, hidden stairs, and strangely shaped rooms. Of course it's also rumored to be haunted, but the only strange noises I ever heard were raccoons courting in the woods outside my window the summer I had a room on the top floor under the eves. However, I do believe this building is directly responsible for the dreams that I sometimes have of exploring old buildings, finding hidden doorways, and ending up in musty attics. These dreams started as a child, but once in a while they come back to remind me that there is mystery in the world, and I've always loved exploring old houses and abandoned places, as well as wilderness.
Another year, while I was on the staff, the local feral cat had kittens under the porch of the Paine Hall rotunda, a space that was probably once a courtyard but which has been enclosed by windows to make a small indoor patio. Some of us would retrieve the unclaimed bag lunches from the Front Desk and feed the meat and cheese to the kittens at the end of the day. I'm sure there are similar stories for every building on the Silver Bay campus!
The blue cottons are painted and over-dyed in an attempt to get the right colors for the house. The sky is a piece of upholstery fabric that was the right color and reminiscent of the old fashioned wallpaper and curtains that used to hang here, and there's a touch of blue sateen peeking through as well. Some of the background foliage is hand-dyed too. With all the little angles and lines, this small quilt was rather time-consuming, but it finally seems to have come together.
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| close-up of the house |
Although most of my scenic quilts are of wild places, the buildings at Silver Bay are an integral part of its landscape. This is my second version of the Chapel. The original fabrics here were very busy and competed with each other, so in order to increase the contrast in some areas and take it down in others, I've added pearlized white paint to the sky and darkened some of the foliage. Heavy quilting also serves to change the value of some areas. It's a good example of how you can alter a quilt until you're happy with it. The starting fabrics were the equivalent of a base layer or under-painting. Heavy machine quilting, fabric paint, and subtle use of markers create the depth, highlights, and shadows that complete the piece. This little quilt is actually 95% finished, but I may add a touch of color inside the current border to tie everything together.
This is what I started with:
Not every day on Lake George is full of sunlight. This piece is an example of how using more muted colors can shift the mood of an image to tone it down. It's almost the same view as the last quilt, minus the Adirondack chair, but I like the softer palette better. Adding a bit of diluted Tsukineko fabric ink to the water makes a difference too, and you may noticed that I've scaled down the mountains a hair to add more depth and make the lake look larger. I'm struggling to shoot this series properly though, and am not happy with the photos my phone takes. It's picking up too much detail and giving a grainy appearance to the quilt surface. Time to dig out the real camera and see how it compares.
Spend enough time at Silver Bay and you can watch all the season’s pass by. For one year in the early 90’s the staff took pity on me and I was privileged to stay year round to help out, mostly at the front desk. Having time to myself and watching the light change on the water was a tremendous gift, and every day was different. My mother, who was also an EMP (a summer employee) for two years in the 60’s used to talk about the days when the mornings were clear and cool and the sky was a perfect blue. She called them “Silver Bay Days.” They were the ones that woke full of promise and sunlight, and they’re the ones that everyone remembers when they head home at the end of the summer.
This is the landscape pattern I’ll be teaching this summer, although workshop participants are welcome to design their own.
This summer I am delighted to be returning to the Silver Bay Association in early August to offer a couple of short workshops on landscape quilting.
To this end, I am working on a new series of small pieces inspired by my time there. Silver Bay is one of those places that changes people. Located in the Adirondacks, it is part resort and part YMCA. As a child, I vacationed there with my family. As a young adult, I worked there summers. Now I go back occasionally to vacation, as time permits, but always the Adirondacks have felt like a second home. The watercolor instructors at Silver Bay have influenced my artistic style. The vistas are directly responsible for the images in my landscape quilts, and the high peaks still whisper to me decades after hiking there. Silver Bay is where I had my first kiss, where I learned to drive stick shift, and where I did much of my growing up. It’s where I had some of my worst and best moments. It was where I had my first job at 16 and if I’m lucky it will be my last job, after I retire, when I can spend more than a few days there - dipping my toes in the lake and watching the stars come out.
