Woo hoo, it’s Twelve by Twelve reveal day! This time around our theme colors were the bright green, orange, yellow and purply blue of the lorikeet. The blog is a riot of color now! Check it out and check out my lorikeet interpretations.

I missed the big reveal while I was away for the weekend attending Quilt Hawaii, but it’s never too late to check out the latest Twelve by Twelve quilts on our blog. Come on over with me to see what we have done with teh complimentary colors yellow and purple.

The Twelve by Twelve quilts are making their way around Australia, having debuted at the Australasian Quilt Convention and now about to be hung at Gosford Regional Gallery. Thanks to Brenda Gael Smith’s tireless work, we’ve also been featured in the upcoming issue of Australian Patchwork and Quilting (vol 19, #1), and, imagine my surprise when I opened up  the June/July 2010 issue of Quilter’s Newsletter Magazine and saw our tagline on page 10 — news about Australian quilt shows!

Our book is progressing. We’ve each written our chapters and submitted our photos. Now we anxiously await revisions from our editor. It’s a slow process, but hopefully well worth it.

For anyone who might not already know, I belong to a wonderful online group of 12 quilt artists who challenge each other every two months to create a 12″x12″ quilt interpreting a new theme each time. This time, it was my turn to choose the theme. I knew I wanted to do something that related to my being in Hawai’i, and with the current twelve challenges, we’re focusing on color. So I chose the volcano Kilauea and gave a few photos and a palette as a jumping off point.

I wasn’t exactly sure how I wanted to interpret the theme myself, though I did know I wanted to go abstract as opposed to literal, and I always strive to connect my interpretation to works in cloth, if not quilts specifically.

Serendipitously, about a third of the way into our 12×12 timeline, I taught a class to my quilt guild on how to marble fabric. Bam! There it was — the undulating lines of cooled lava in a classically textile media.

For my first attempt I used the red, orange, black and two greys from my palette (and snuck in a yellow). Although the patterning was fantastic — looking both like classic european book papers and swirling, oozing lava at the same time, it didn’t have the richness I was hoping for. In my mind the fabric should have been black and grey with veins of red and orange running through in cracks as if it was just below the surface. I also found that after washing, the painted surface looked scuffed and faded and I didn’t like that.

I realized that I should have started with hot lava colored fabric and then marbled the cooled lava blacks and greys over it. Rather than start from scratch, I decided to try over dying my marbled fabrics as I had nothing to loose (they were pretty, but not what I envisioned for my Kilauea quilt). Great! Here was the rich color I needed, but it was too bloody looking and not lava-like yet.

To get more variation in my color, I tried discharging it. With hand dyed fabric, discharge can often uncover surprising hues. Not this time. Now my fabrics looked tired and washed out.

Starting from scratch now, I changed tactics and experimented with marbling using discharge dyes. The long story is here and here; the short story is that I made interesting fabrics, but none were quite what I wanted to use.

In the end, I went back to traditional marbling and used red-orange fabric s my base. Nearly perfect. I’d still like to go back some day and experiment more with dyes and marbling, but for now I have just decided to rinse, but not wash my painted fabric.

For the quilt itself, I used a simple traditional squares and let the fabrics speak to the types of lava and hawaiian setting. Onto that base, I added chartreuse triangles edged with french knots to represent the uluhe (false staghorn) fern so predominant at the Kilauea Caldera, and a few beads around the edge to symbolize Pele’s Tears often found near eruptions.

To see the whole quilt, and everyone else’s interpretations of my color theme, Kilauea, check out the 12×12 blog!

Today is the opening day of the Twelve by Twelve exhibit at the Australasian Quilt Convention and Expo in Melbourne, Australia! My fellow Twelves Brenda and Kirsty will be there with our quilts on display and these delicious postcards to sell.

I did the design work on these, which wasn’t hard given the wonderful images we had to start with. Brenda chose a printer Down Under that did a very professional job. The cards have a lovely satin finish, a nice weight and show off our images beautifully. Right now the cards are only available at our exhibits in Australia, but who knows what the future will bring.

Don’t forget to check our blog on May first for our Kilauea reveal.

And, after May 2nd, our first 12 quilts move on to several more exhibits in Australia and New Zealand. Check the blog sidebar for dates and links.

Yesterday I discharged. I used Jaquard Discharge Paste, which works nearly as well as bleach on hand dyed fabrics and is a bit less toxic. I slopped it around on some of the dyed marbled fabrics I was dissatisfied with a week or two ago. It definitely lightened things up, but the results look more worn and scuffed to me than hot and molten. I think this photo shows better how the black paint has faded than the pre-discharge photos do. What it also shows is a few pieces of very hot orange fabric from my quilt mom Gerrie, which I think are great candidates for more marbling. I also have an interesting piece of orange flowered fabric from blog friend Mary that’s been twisted and dyed black, which has some lava potential as well.

This has been a great experiment. I may use a few tiny bits of these fabrics, but I am inspired to keep trying other things until I get the finished result I want. I’m pretty sure that marbling on orange will get me the colors I envision, but I’m not wild about how the marbling paint behaves after washing. I’m going to try marbling with fiber reactive dyes next. I’ve queried the dye and marbling source, Dharma Trading Company and though they had no formulas for me, they did think I was on the right track.

On the more successful side, I discharged some roots for another project. Since discharging on hand dyed fabrics can produce unexpected and wonderful colors, I tried three different fabrics just to see what happened.

The top fabric is a cotton duvet cover that I had previously tie dyed turquoise and then a reddish brown. I over-dyed it with a green mixed from blue and yellow dyes I had.

The center piece is an ochre/brown commercial print over-dyed with the same green as the piece above. I was kind of hoping that the discharge paste would only go through the dye and reveal the commercial print, but I got the same turquoise as above.

The bottom piece is a linen tablecloth I had previously dyed reddish brown and baby poop color. I over-dyed it a darker green made with a different yellow, the blue and some black and leftover mystery dye (I know, very scientific).

I quite like the tie dyed shapes on this one and the roots discharged to a nicely contrasty turquoise that intrigues me.

But I’m thinking I’m going to use this one because of the loamy, earthy, colors and texture.

It’s that time again — the Twelve by Twelve reveal date. This time we were to create something based on Blue and White with a touch of Black. Head on over to see all the great interpretations.

I’m not one to go out and buy the latest gadget. I believe I can make just as wonderful things with a rotary cutter, rectangular ruler, and home sewing machine, or a needle, thread, fabric scraps and junky paper, as I could with a long arm machine, pre-cut templates, specialty cutters, and colorful pins. However, my 44 year old, hyperopic eyes aren’t so good at threading needles anymore and the lovely lady at our local stitching shop, Fiddlesticks, suggested this little goody:

It has got to be the best thing since sliced bread! It’s too big for quilting betweens, but it will thread just about anything into just about any other needle. And it doesn’t pull apart after two uses like those needle threaders with the thin wire loop. I love it, love it, love it. And how do I know I love it so much? I’ve been using it every day for the last several weeks on my 12×12 “Blue and White with a Touch of Black” challenge.

Our reveal day is on 1 March. In the mean time, this is the back before I faced it.

Yet another bloggy connection has been made. Deborah and I have been following each other’s blogs for years. She’s the one who convinced me to join the Twelve by Twelve group, and we are now co-authors with the rest of the “Twelves” of a book about the project. Brenda has made a chart noting which of us have met in real life, and now we can add another line!

I often wonder when I meet someone whom I’ve gotten to know online if the real person is going to be like I imagined them, or if my imagination is way off base. Gerrie’s voice was different than the one in my head (I think I was expecting something huskier, though I don’t know why) and I had somehow expected Natalya to seem more Russian than New York even though I knew both are big influences. Deborah was exactly as I had imagined her to be — though she said I was shorter than what she imagined.

The fun part though is to find out that yes, through our blogs, we really have come to know each other and, at least from my side, we hit it off well. Lots of talking about our artwork, the book project, our Twelve by Twelve work, our kids, living in different places — all the good stuff friends talk about. I am so grateful to have met a community of like minded people online and to be able to extend that connection every now and then to my real life.

2009 was the year of the deployment. It was also the first full year in Hawaii for the kids and I. As I looked through my photos, I can see that we’ve settled in here pretty well. Counting all the places we’ve been and things we’ve seen would probably be worse than uncle George’s slide show from his summer vacation. And we made it through what seemed to be the longest year ever just fine.

At this point last year I was pretty angsty about my goals and accomplishments, but this year I’ve settled in to my lack of focus. I’m much more comfortable with it today. As for my conundrum of which path(s) to follow, I’ve started down each one. Perhaps 2010 will be the year in which one makes itself clear — through the fog I think I’m seeing art quilts.

The last month has been supremely unproductive for me in terms of my artistic life, so I made a mosaic of all the projects I’ve done in 2009 to reassure myself that I’m doing just fine. And a fine year it was:

In summation:

Twelve by Twelve: 8 pieces (and a book in progress)
Classes: 2 taught, one taken
Mushroom pin cushions: 4
Other crafty things: 16 (including designing my own fabric)
Clothing: 6
Yarn projects: 1
Crafting/Quilting for charity: 3
Quilts: 7 for beds (a personal record) 8 for the wall (16 if you include 12×12 quilts)
Pieces sold! 2

2009, you weren’t so bad after all.

2010, I’m going to keep on going, so I’m expecting you to be even better.