February BAFA Meeting Design Exercise

The Beaumont Area Fiber Artists met Saturday past.  Our design exercise was on manipulating negative space with torn shapes, cut random shapes, folded image, and random same-shape paper.  Of note:  Kathy's and Christine's dimensional folded image (Fig. 5, top right, fabric and Fig. 10, second from left, paper) and Sylvia's examples in fabric - random shapes and "torn" (Fig. 7-8). Everyone loved Beth's cut random shapes in form of arrowhead (Fig. 9, 3rd from left), Dot's contemporary Gate (for lack of a better description) (Fig. 11, also third from left), Susan's waves of geese (Fig. 5, bottom right) and Liz's random shapes using both positive and negative image (Fig. 2).  I posted two sets of exercises, one from 2010 and one from 2016.  I thought the second set a bit more imaginative and communicated better (Fig. 12-13).

Liz B                                                          Fig. 1

 Liz B.                                                        Fig. 2

Liz B.                                                      Fig. 3

Liz B                                                      Fig. 4

Christine S.                                        Fig. 5

Susan C.                                        Fig. 6

Sylvia W                   Fig. 7

Sylvia W.                                                      Fig. 8

Dot C.                                                                                Fig.9

Kathy R.                                                                          Fig. 10

Beth M.                                                                            Fig. 11

Cmf                                                                                  Fig. 12

Cmf                                                                                  Fig. 13

                                                                          

Golden Triangle Quilt Guild Show 2016

Over 400 quilts were displayed at the Golden Triangle Quilt Guild Show in Beaumont last week.
My quilt, Age of Asparagus (Figure 1), was fortunate to win a blue ribbon in the Guild's color challenge, modern design, category.  My color was from Crayola's line and was called Asparagus.  All squares and rectangles were raw-edge, free-motion quilted directly onto the quilt top.  Quilting was the most massive quilting coverage I have ever done on a quilt.  Asparagus tips and stalks in body of quilt were from stencils I created using a live stalk as the model.  I drew out a larger version for the stalks in the border.  Stalks and words were painted with pigmented inks and black Gesso. When I finished it, I wanted to cut it up and re-work it into something smaller, probably, because I am not used to working large and it didn't seem like something I would create.  Even a friend who knew my work didn't recognize it as mine.  Since she liked it, and since it did win a ribbon, I took that as a compliment.

I received my critique back last week so I thought I would write a word about the judges.  Two of the judges were NQA certified judges and one was a 30-year veteran quilt appraiser.  They definitely knew what they were looking at (not all of them do and not all are NQA certified).  Her comment on Asparagus was spot on: "A study of value and its contrast is noted and appreciated".

Age of Asparagus        59" x 84"           Fig.1