Paine Hall

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.  

close-up of the house

Silver Bay Chapel

 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:

Playing with Light

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.  

Silver Bay Days

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.  

August Plans

 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.